Such an expression of unhappiness
was enough by itself to make one’s eyes slide
above the paper’s edge to the poor woman’s
face insignificant without that look, almost
a symbol of human destiny with it. Life’s
what you see in people’s eyes; life’s what
they learn, and, having learnt it, never, though they
seek to hide it, cease to be aware of what?
That life’s like that, it seems. Five faces
opposite five mature faces and
the knowledge in each face. Strange, though,
how people want to conceal it! Marks of reticence
are on all those faces: lips shut, eyes shaded,
each one of the five doing something to hide or stultify
his knowledge. One smokes; another reads; a third
checks entries in a pocket book; a fourth stares at
the map of the line framed opposite; and the fifth the
terrible thing about the fifth is that she does nothing
at all. She looks at life. Ah, but my poor,
unfortunate woman, do play the game do,
for all our sakes, conceal it!
As if she heard me, she looked up,
shifted slightly in her seat and sighed. She
seemed to apologise and at the same time to say to
me, “If only you knew!” Then she looked
at life again. “But I do know,” I
answered silently, glancing at the Times for
manners’ sake. “I know the whole
business. ’Peace between Germany and the
Allied Powers was yesterday officially ushered in
at Paris Signor Nitti, the Italian Prime
Minister a passenger train at Doncaster
was in collision with a goods train....’
We all know the Times knows but
we pretend we don’t.” My eyes had
once more crept over the paper’s rim. She
shuddered, twitched her arm queerly to the middle
of her back and shook her head. Again I dipped
into my great reservoir of life. “Take what
you like,” I continued, “births, deaths,
marriages, Court Circular, the habits of birds, Leonardo
da Vinci, the Sandhills murder, high wages
and the cost of living oh, take what you
like,” I repeated, “it’s all in the
Times!” Again with infinite weariness
she moved her head from side to side until, like a
top exhausted with spinning, it settled on her neck.
The Times was no protection
against such sorrow as hers. But other human
beings forbade intercourse. The best thing to
do against life was to fold the paper so that it made
a perfect square, crisp, thick, impervious even to
life. This done, I glanced up quickly, armed with
a shield of my own. She pierced through my shield;
she gazed into my eyes as if searching any sediment
of courage at the depths of them and damping it to
clay. Her twitch alone denied all hope, discounted
all illusion.
So we rattled through Surrey and across
the border into Sussex. But with my eyes upon
life I did not see that the other travellers had left,
one by one, till, save for the man who read, we were
alone together. Here was Three Bridges station.
We drew slowly down the platform and stopped.
Was he going to leave us? I prayed both ways I
prayed last that he might stay. At that instant
he roused himself, crumpled his paper contemptuously,
like a thing done with, burst open the door, and left
us alone.
The unhappy woman, leaning a little
forward, palely and colourlessly addressed me talked
of stations and holidays, of brothers at Eastbourne,
and the time of year, which was, I forget now, early
or late. But at last looking from the window
and seeing, I knew, only life, she breathed, “Staying
away that’s the drawback of it ”
Ah, now we approached the catastrophe, “My sister-in-law” the
bitterness of her tone was like lemon on cold steel,
and speaking, not to me, but to herself, she muttered,
“nonsense, she would say that’s
what they all say,” and while she spoke she
fidgeted as though the skin on her back were as a
plucked fowl’s in a poulterer’s shop-window.
“Oh, that cow!” she broke
off nervously, as though the great wooden cow in the
meadow had shocked her and saved her from some indiscretion.
Then she shuddered, and then she made the awkward
angular movement that I had seen before, as if, after
the spasm, some spot between the shoulders burnt or
itched. Then again she looked the most unhappy
woman in the world, and I once more reproached her,
though not with the same conviction, for if there
were a reason, and if I knew the reason, the stigma
was removed from life.
“Sisters-in-law,” I said
Her lips pursed as if to spit venom
at the word; pursed they remained. All she did
was to take her glove and rub hard at a spot on the
window-pane. She rubbed as if she would rub something
out for ever some stain, some indelible
contamination. Indeed, the spot remained for all
her rubbing, and back she sank with the shudder and
the clutch of the arm I had come to expect. Something
impelled me to take my glove and rub my window.
There, too, was a little speck on the glass. For
all my rubbing it remained. And then the spasm
went through me; I crooked my arm and plucked at the
middle of my back. My skin, too, felt like the
damp chicken’s skin in the poulterer’s
shop-window; one spot between the shoulders itched
and irritated, felt clammy, felt raw. Could I
reach it? Surreptitiously I tried. She saw
me. A smile of infinite irony, infinite sorrow,
flitted and faded from her face. But she had communicated,
shared her secret, passed her poison; she would speak
no more. Leaning back in my corner, shielding
my eyes from her eyes, seeing only the slopes and
hollows, greys and purples, of the winter’s landscape,
I read her message, deciphered her secret, reading
it beneath her gaze.
Hilda’s the sister-in-law.
Hilda? Hilda? Hilda Marsh Hilda
the blooming, the full bosomed, the matronly.
Hilda stands at the door as the cab draws up, holding
a coin. “Poor Minnie, more of a grasshopper
than ever old cloak she had last year.
Well, well, with two children these days one can’t
do more. No, Minnie, I’ve got it; here you
are, cabby none of your ways with me.
Come in, Minnie. Oh, I could carry you,
let alone your basket!” So they go into the dining-room.
“Aunt Minnie, children.”
Slowly the knives and forks sink from
the upright. Down they get (Bob and Barbara),
hold out hands stiffly; back again to their chairs,
staring between the resumed mouthfuls. [But this we’ll
skip; ornaments, curtains, trefoil china plate, yellow
oblongs of cheese, white squares of biscuit skip oh,
but wait! Halfway through luncheon one of those
shivers; Bob stares at her, spoon in mouth. “Get
on with your pudding, Bob;” but Hilda disapproves.
“Why should she twitch?” Skip, skip,
till we reach the landing on the upper floor; stairs
brass-bound; linoleum worn; oh, yes! little bedroom
looking out over the roofs of Eastbourne zigzagging
roofs like the spines of caterpillars, this way, that
way, striped red and yellow, with blue-black slating].
Now, Minnie, the door’s shut; Hilda heavily
descends to the basement; you unstrap the straps of
your basket, lay on the bed a meagre nightgown, stand
side by side furred felt slippers. The looking-glass no,
you avoid the looking-glass. Some methodical
disposition of hat-pins. Perhaps the shell box
has something in it? You shake it; it’s
the pearl stud there was last year that’s
all. And then the sniff, the sigh, the sitting
by the window. Three o’clock on a December
afternoon; the rain drizzling; one light low in the
skylight of a drapery emporium; another high in a
servant’s bedroom this one goes out.
That gives her nothing to look at. A moment’s
blankness then, what are you thinking? (Let
me peep across at her opposite; she’s asleep
or pretending it; so what would she think about sitting
at the window at three o’clock in the afternoon?
Health, money, hills, her God?) Yes, sitting on the
very edge of the chair looking over the roofs of Eastbourne,
Minnie Marsh prays to God. That’s all very
well; and she may rub the pane too, as though to see
God better; but what God does she see? Who’s
the God of Minnie Marsh, the God of the back streets
of Eastbourne, the God of three o’clock in the
afternoon? I, too, see roofs, I see sky; but,
oh, dear this seeing of Gods! More
like President Kruger than Prince Albert that’s
the best I can do for him; and I see him on a chair,
in a black frock-coat, not so very high up either;
I can manage a cloud or two for him to sit on; and
then his hand trailing in the cloud holds a rod, a
truncheon is it? black, thick, thorned a
brutal old bully Minnie’s God!
Did he send the itch and the patch and the twitch?
Is that why she prays? What she rubs on the window
is the stain of sin. Oh, she committed some crime!
I have my choice of crimes. The
woods flit and fly in summer there are
bluebells; in the opening there, when Spring comes,
primroses. A parting, was it, twenty years ago?
Vows broken? Not Minnie’s!... She
was faithful. How she nursed her mother!
All her savings on the tombstone wreaths
under glass daffodils in jars. But
I’m off the track. A crime.... They
would say she kept her sorrow, suppressed her secret her
sex, they’d say the scientific people.
But what flummery to saddle her with sex!
No more like this. Passing down the
streets of Croydon twenty years ago, the violet loops
of ribbon in the draper’s window spangled in
the electric light catch her eye. She lingers past
six. Still by running she can reach home.
She pushes through the glass swing door. It’s
sale-time. Shallow trays brim with ribbons.
She pauses, pulls this, fingers that with the raised
roses on it no need to choose, no need
to buy, and each tray with its surprises. “We
don’t shut till seven,” and then it is
seven. She runs, she rushes, home she reaches,
but too late. Neighbours the doctor baby
brother the kettle scalded hospital dead or
only the shock of it, the blame? Ah, but the
detail matters nothing! It’s what she carries
with her; the spot, the crime, the thing to expiate,
always there between her shoulders. “Yes,”
she seems to nod to me, “it’s the thing
I did.”
Whether you did, or what you did,
I don’t mind; it’s not the thing I want.
The draper’s window looped with violet that’ll
do; a little cheap perhaps, a little commonplace since
one has a choice of crimes, but then so many (let
me peep across again still sleeping, or
pretending sleep! white, worn, the mouth closed a
touch of obstinacy, more than one would think no
hint of sex) so many crimes aren’t
your crime; your crime was cheap; only the
retribution solemn; for now the church door opens,
the hard wooden pew receives her; on the brown tiles
she kneels; every day, winter, summer, dusk, dawn
(here she’s at it) prays. All her sins
fall, fall, for ever fall. The spot receives them.
It’s raised, it’s red, it’s burning.
Next she twitches. Small boys point. “Bob
at lunch to-day” But elderly women
are the worst.
Indeed now you can’t sit praying
any longer. Kruger’s sunk beneath the clouds washed
over as with a painter’s brush of liquid grey,
to which he adds a tinge of black even
the tip of the truncheon gone now. That’s
what always happens! Just as you’ve seen
him, felt him, someone interrupts. It’s
Hilda now.
How you hate her! She’ll
even lock the bathroom door overnight, too, though
it’s only cold water you want, and sometimes
when the night’s been bad it seems as if washing
helped. And John at breakfast the
children meals are worst, and sometimes
there are friends ferns don’t altogether
hide ’em they guess, too; so out you
go along the front, where the waves are grey, and
the papers blow, and the glass shelters green and
draughty, and the chairs cost tuppence too
much for there must be preachers along
the sands. Ah, that’s a nigger that’s
a funny man that’s a man with parakeets poor
little creatures! Is there no one here who thinks
of God? just up there, over the pier, with
his rod but no there’s
nothing but grey in the sky or if it’s blue the
white clouds hide him, and the music it’s
military music and what they are fishing
for? Do they catch them? How the children
stare! Well, then home a back way “Home
a back way!” The words have meaning; might have
been spoken by the old man with whiskers no,
no, he didn’t really speak; but everything has
meaning placards leaning against doorways names
above shop-windows red fruit in baskets women’s
heads in the hairdresser’s all say
“Minnie Marsh!” But here’s a jerk.
“Eggs are cheaper!” That’s what
always happens! I was heading her over the waterfall,
straight for madness, when, like a flock of dream sheep,
she turns t’other way and runs between my fingers.
Eggs are cheaper. Tethered to the shores of the
world, none of the crimes, sorrows, rhapsodies,
or insanities for poor Minnie Marsh; never late for
luncheon; never caught in a storm without a mackintosh;
never utterly unconscious of the cheapness of eggs.
So she reaches home scrapes her boots.
Have I read you right? But the
human face the human face at the top of
the fullest sheet of print holds more, withholds more.
Now, eyes open, she looks out; and in the human eye how
d’you define it? there’s a
break a division so that when
you’ve grasped the stem the butterfly’s
off the moth that hangs in the evening over
the yellow flower move, raise your hand,
off, high, away. I won’t raise my hand.
Hang still, then, quiver, life, soul, spirit, whatever
you are of Minnie Marsh I, too, on my flower the
hawk over the down alone, or what were the
worth of life? To rise; hang still in the evening,
in the midday; hang still over the down. The
flicker of a hand off, up! then poised again.
Alone, unseen; seeing all so still down there, all
so lovely. None seeing, none caring. The
eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
Air above, air below. And the moon and immortality....
Oh, but I drop to the turf! Are you down too,
you in the corner, what’s your name woman Minnie
Marsh; some such name as that? There she is, tight
to her blossom; opening her hand-bag, from which she
takes a hollow shell an egg who
was saying that eggs were cheaper? You or I?
Oh, it was you who said it on the way home, you remember,
when the old gentleman, suddenly opening his umbrella or
sneezing was it? Anyhow, Kruger went, and you
came “home a back way,” and scraped your
boots. Yes. And now you lay across your
knees a pocket-handkerchief into which drop little
angular fragments of eggshell fragments
of a map a puzzle. I wish I could
piece them together! If you would only sit still.
She’s moved her knees the map’s
in bits again. Down the slopes of the Andes the
white blocks of marble go bounding and hurtling, crushing
to death a whole troop of Spanish muleteers, with
their convoy Drake’s booty, gold
and silver. But to return
To what, to where? She opened
the door, and, putting her umbrella in the stand that
goes without saying; so, too, the whiff of beef from
the basement; dot, dot, dot. But what I cannot
thus eliminate, what I must, head down, eyes shut,
with the courage of a battalion and the blindness
of a bull, charge and disperse are, indubitably, the
figures behind the ferns, commercial travellers.
There I’ve hidden them all this time in the
hope that somehow they’d disappear, or better
still emerge, as indeed they must, if the story’s
to go on gathering richness and rotundity, destiny
and tragedy, as stories should, rolling along with
it two, if not three, commercial travellers and a
whole grove of aspidistra. “The fronds
of the aspidistra only partly concealed the commercial
traveller ” Rhododendrons would conceal
him utterly, and into the bargain give me my fling
of red and white, for which I starve and strive; but
rhododendrons in Eastbourne in December on
the Marshes’ table no, no, I dare
not; it’s all a matter of crusts and cruets,
frills and ferns. Perhaps there’ll be a
moment later by the sea. Moreover, I feel, pleasantly
pricking through the green fretwork and over the glacis
of cut glass, a desire to peer and peep at the man
opposite one’s as much as I can manage.
James Moggridge is it, whom the Marshes call Jimmy?
[Minnie, you must promise not to twitch till I’ve
got this straight]. James Moggridge travels in shall
we say buttons? but the time’s not
come for bringing them in the big
and the little on the long cards, some peacock-eyed,
others dull gold; cairngorms some, and others coral
sprays but I say the time’s not come.
He travels, and on Thursdays, his Eastbourne day, takes
his meals with the Marshes. His red face, his
little steady eyes by no means altogether
commonplace his enormous appetite (that’s
safe; he won’t look at Minnie till the bread’s
swamped the gravy dry), napkin tucked diamond-wise but
this is primitive, and, whatever it may do the reader,
don’t take me in. Let’s dodge to the
Moggridge household, set that in motion. Well,
the family boots are mended on Sundays by James himself.
He reads Truth. But his passion? Roses and
his wife a retired hospital nurse interesting for
God’s sake let me have one woman with a name
I like! But no; she’s of the unborn children
of the mind, illicit, none the less loved, like my
rhododendrons. How many die in every novel that’s
written the best, the dearest, while Moggridge
lives. It’s life’s fault. Here’s
Minnie eating her egg at the moment opposite and at
t’other end of the line are we past
Lewes? there must be Jimmy or
what’s her twitch for?
There must be Moggridge life’s
fault. Life imposes her laws; life blocks the
way; life’s behind the fern; life’s the
tyrant; oh, but not the bully! No, for I assure
you I come willingly; I come wooed by Heaven knows
what compulsion across ferns and cruets, table splashed
and bottles smeared. I come irresistibly to lodge
myself somewhere on the firm flesh, in the robust
spine, wherever I can penetrate or find foothold on
the person, in the soul, of Moggridge the man.
The enormous stability of the fabric; the spine tough
as whalebone, straight as oak-tree; the ribs radiating
branches; the flesh taut tarpaulin; the red hollows;
the suck and regurgitation of the heart; while from
above meat falls in brown cubes and beer gushes to
be churned to blood again and so we reach
the eyes. Behind the aspidistra they see something:
black, white, dismal; now the plate again; behind
the aspidistra they see elderly woman; “Marsh’s
sister, Hilda’s more my sort;” the tablecloth
now. “Marsh would know what’s wrong
with Morrises ...” talk that over; cheese has
come; the plate again; turn it round the
enormous fingers; now the woman opposite. “Marsh’s
sister not a bit like Marsh; wretched,
elderly female.... You should feed your hens....
God’s truth, what’s set her twitching?
Not what I said? Dear, dear, dear! these
elderly women. Dear, dear!”
[Yes, Minnie; I know you’ve
twitched, but one moment James Moggridge].
“Dear, dear, dear!” How
beautiful the sound is! like the knock of a mallet
on seasoned timber, like the throb of the heart of
an ancient whaler when the seas press thick and the
green is clouded. “Dear, dear!” what
a passing bell for the souls of the fretful to soothe
them and solace them, lap them in linen, saying, “So
long. Good luck to you!” and then, “What’s
your pleasure?” for though Moggridge would pluck
his rose for her, that’s done, that’s
over. Now what’s the next thing? “Madam,
you’ll miss your train,” for they don’t
linger.
That’s the man’s way;
that’s the sound that reverberates; that’s
St. Paul’s and the motor-omnibuses. But
we’re brushing the crumbs off. Oh, Moggridge,
you won’t stay? You must be off? Are
you driving through Eastbourne this afternoon in one
of those little carriages? Are you the man who’s
walled up in green cardboard boxes, and sometimes has
the blinds down, and sometimes sits so solemn staring
like a sphinx, and always there’s a look of
the sepulchral, something of the undertaker, the coffin,
and the dusk about horse and driver? Do tell me but
the doors slammed. We shall never meet again.
Moggridge, farewell!
Yes, yes, I’m coming. Right
up to the top of the house. One moment I’ll
linger. How the mud goes round in the mind what
a swirl these monsters leave, the waters rocking,
the weeds waving and green here, black there, striking
to the sand, till by degrees the atoms reassemble,
the deposit sifts itself, and again through the eyes
one sees clear and still, and there comes to the lips
some prayer for the departed, some obsequy for the
souls of those one nods to, the people one never meets
again.
James Moggridge is dead now, gone
for ever. Well, Minnie “I can
face it no longer.” If she said that (Let
me look at her. She is brushing the eggshell
into deep declivities). She said it certainly,
leaning against the wall of the bedroom, and plucking
at the little balls which edge the claret-coloured
curtain. But when the self speaks to the self,
who is speaking? the entombed soul, the
spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb;
the self that took the veil and left the world a
coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits
with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.
“I can bear it no longer,” her spirit
says. “That man at lunch Hilda the
children.” Oh, heavens, her sob! It’s
the spirit wailing its destiny, the spirit driven hither,
thither, lodging on the diminishing carpets meagre
footholds shrunken shreds of all the vanishing
universe love, life, faith, husband, children,
I know not what splendours and pageantries glimpsed
in girlhood. “Not for me not
for me.”
But then the muffins, the
bald elderly dog? Bead mats I should fancy and
the consolation of underlinen. If Minnie Marsh
were run over and taken to hospital, nurses and doctors
themselves would exclaim.... There’s the
vista and the vision there’s the distance the
blue blot at the end of the avenue, while, after all,
the tea is rich, the muffin hot, and the dog “Benny,
to your basket, sir, and see what mother’s brought
you!” So, taking the glove with the worn thumb,
defying once more the encroaching demon of what’s
called going in holes, you renew the fortifications,
threading the grey wool, running it in and out.
Running it in and out, across and
over, spinning a web through which God himself hush,
don’t think of God! How firm the stitches
are! You must be proud of your darning.
Let nothing disturb her. Let the light fall gently,
and the clouds show an inner vest of the first green
leaf. Let the sparrow perch on the twig and shake
the raindrop hanging to the twig’s elbow....
Why look up? Was it a sound, a thought? Oh,
heavens! Back again to the thing you did, the
plate glass with the violet loops? But Hilda
will come. Ignominies, humiliations,
oh! Close the breach.
Having mended her glove, Minnie Marsh
lays it in the drawer. She shuts the drawer with
decision. I catch sight of her face in the glass.
Lips are pursed. Chin held high. Next she
laces her shoes. Then she touches her throat.
What’s your brooch? Mistletoe or merry-thought?
And what is happening? Unless I’m much
mistaken, the pulse’s quickened, the moment’s
coming, the threads are racing, Niagara’s ahead.
Here’s the crisis! Heaven be with you!
Down she goes. Courage, courage! Face it,
be it! For God’s sake don’t wait
on the mat now! There’s the door! I’m
on your side. Speak! Confront her, confound
her soul!
“Oh, I beg your pardon!
Yes, this is Eastbourne. I’ll reach it down
for you. Let me try the handle.” [But,
Minnie, though we keep up pretences, I’ve read
you right I’m with you now].
“That’s all your luggage?”
“Much obliged, I’m sure.”
(But why do you look about you?
Hilda won’t come to the station, nor John; and
Moggridge is driving at the far side of Eastbourne).
“I’ll wait by my bag,
ma’am, that’s safest. He said he’d
meet me.... Oh, there he is! That’s
my son.”
So they walk off together.
Well, but I’m confounded....
Surely, Minnie, you know better! A strange young
man.... Stop! I’ll tell him Minnie! Miss
Marsh! I don’t know though.
There’s something queer in her cloak as it blows.
Oh, but it’s untrue, it’s indecent....
Look how he bends as they reach the gateway.
She finds her ticket. What’s the joke?
Off they go, down the road, side by side....
Well, my world’s done for! What do I stand
on? What do I know? That’s not Minnie.
There never was Moggridge. Who am I? Life’s
bare as bone.
And yet the last look of them he
stepping from the kerb and she following him round
the edge of the big building brims me with wonder floods
me anew. Mysterious figures! Mother and son.
Who are you? Why do you walk down the street?
Where to-night will you sleep, and then, to-morrow?
Oh, how it whirls and surges floats me afresh!
I start after them. People drive this way and
that. The white light splutters and pours.
Plate-glass windows. Carnations; chrysanthemums.
Ivy in dark gardens. Milk carts at the door.
Wherever I go, mysterious figures, I see you, turning
the corner, mothers and sons; you, you, you. I
hasten, I follow. This, I fancy, must be the
sea. Grey is the landscape; dim as ashes; the
water murmurs and moves. If I fall on my knees,
if I go through the ritual, the ancient antics, it’s
you, unknown figures, you I adore; if I open my arms,
it’s you I embrace, you I draw to me adorable
world!