Honeycomb

By Dorothy M. Richardson.

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I

When Miriam got out of the train into the darkness she knew that there were woods all about her. The moist air was rich with the smell of trees—wet bark and branches—moss and lichen, damp dead leaves. She stood on the dark platform snuffing the rich air. It was the end of her journey. Anything that might follow would be unreal compared to that moment. Little bulbs of yellow light further up the platform told her where she must turn to find the things she must go to meet. “How lovely the air is here.” … The phrase repeated itself again and again, going with her up the platform towards the group of lights. It was all she could summon to meet the new situation. It satisfied her; it made her happy. It was enough; but no one would think it was enough.

But the house was two miles off. She was safe for the present. Throughout the journey from London the two-mile drive from the station had stood between her and the house. The journey was a long solitary adventure; endless; shielded from thoughts of the new life ahead and leaving the past winter in the Gunnersbury villa far away; vanquished, almost forgotten. She could only recall the hours she had spent shivering apathetically over small fires; a moment when she had brought a flush of tears to her mother’s eyes by suddenly telling her she was maddeningly unreasonable, and another moment alone with her father when she had stood in the middle of the hearthrug with her hands behind her and ordered him to abstain from argument with her in the presence of her mother—“because it gives her pain when I have to show you that I am at least as right as you are”—and he had stood cowed and silent. … Then the moment of accepting the new post, the last days of fear and isolation and helplessness in hard winter weather and the setting off in the main line train that had carried her away from everything—into the spring. Sitting in the shabbily upholstered unexpectedly warm and comfortable main line train she had seen through the mild muggy air bare woods on the horizon, warm and tawny, and on the near copses a ruddy purpling bloom. Surprise had kept her thoughtless and rapt. Spring—a sudden pang of tender green seen in suburban roadways in April … one day in the Easter holidays, bringing back the forgotten summer and showing you the whole picture of summer and autumn in one moment … but evidently there was another spring, much more real and wonderful that she had not known—not a clear green thing, surprising and somehow disappointing you, giving you one moment and then rushing your thoughts on through vistas of leafage, but tawny and purple gleamings through soft mist, promising … a vision of spring in dim rich faint colours, with the noisy real rushing spring still to come … a thing you could look at and forget; go back into winter, and see again and again, something to remember when the green spring came, and to think of in the autumn … spring; coming; perhaps spring was coming all the year round. … She looked back, wondering. This was not the first time that she had been in the country in March. Two years ago, when she had first gone out into the world it had been March … the night journey from Barnes to London, and on down to Harwich, the crossing in a snowstorm, the afternoon journey across Holland—grey sky, flat bright green fields, long rows of skeleton poplars. But it was dark before they reached the wooded German country—the spring must have been there, in the darkness. And now coming to Newlands she had seen it. The awful blind cold effort of coming to Newlands had brought a new month of spring; there for always. … And this was the actual breath of it; here, going through her in the darkness. … Someone was at her side, murmuring her name, a footman. She moved with him towards a near patch of light which they reached without going through the station building, and in a moment the door of a little brougham closed upon her with a soft thud. She sat in the softly lit interior, holding her umbrella and her undelivered railway ticket in careful fingers. The footman and a porter were hoisting her Saratoga trunk. Their movements sounded muffled and far-off. The brougham bowled away through the darkness softly. The lights of the station flickered by and disappeared. The brougham windows were black. No sound but the faint rumble of the wheels along the smooth road. Miriam relaxed and sat back, smiling. For a moment she was conscious of nothing but the soft-toned, softly lit interior, the softness at her back, the warmth under her feet and her happy smile; then she felt a sudden strength; the smile coming straight up so unexpectedly from some deep where it had been waiting, was new and strong and exhilarating. It would not allow itself to dimple; it carried her forward, tiding her over the passage into new experience and held her back, at the same time; it lifted her and held her suspended over the new circumstances in rapid contemplation. She pressed back more steadily into the elastic softness and sat with bent head, eagerly watching her thoughts … this is me; this is right; I’m used to dainty broughams; I can take everything for granted. … I must take everything absolutely for granted. … The moments passed, carrying her rapidly on. There was a life ahead that was going to enrich and change her as she had been enriched and changed by Hanover, but much more swiftly and intimately. She was changed already. Poverty and discomfort had been shut out of her life when the brougham door closed upon her. For as long as she could endure and achieve any sort of dealing with the new situation, they had gone, the worry and pain of them could not touch her. Things that rose warm and laughing and expanding within her now, that had risen to the beauty and music and happiness of Germany and been crushed because she was the despised pupil teacher, that had dried up and seemed to die in the English boarding school, were going to be met and satisfied … she looked down at the hands clasped on her knees, the same hands and knees that had ached with cold through long winter days in the basement schoolroom … chilblains … the everlasting unforgettable aching of her sore throat … things that had made her face yellow and stiff or flushed with fever … gone away forever. Her old self had gone, her governess self. It had really gone weeks ago, got up and left her in that moment when she had read Mrs. Corrie’s letter in Bennett’s villa in the middle of a bleak February afternoon. A voice had seemed to come from the large handwriting scrawling across the faint blue page under the thick neat small address in raised gilt. The same voice, begging her to come for a few weeks and try seemed to resound gently in the brougham. She had not accepted the situation; she had accepted something in Mrs. Corrie’s imagined voice coming to her confidently from the big wealthy house.

The brougham passed a lamp and swerved in through a gate, bowling along over softly crunching gravel. She pressed reluctantly against the cushioned back. The drive had been too short. … Bennett’s friends had given the Corries wrong ideas about her. They wanted a governess. She was not a governess. There were governesses … the kind of person they wanted. It was a mistake; another mistake … the brougham made a beautiful dull humming, going along a tree-lined tunnel. … What did the Corries want of her, arriving in their brougham? What did they expect her to do? …

As the footman opened the door of the brougham, a door far back in the dim porch was flung back, letting out a flood of light, and the swift figure of a parlourmaid who seized Miriam’s Gladstone bag and the silver-mounted Banbury Park umbrella and led the way across the porch into the soft golden blaze. The Saratoga trunk had gone away with the brougham, and in a moment the door was closed and Miriam was standing, frightened and alone, in a firelit, lamplit, thickly carpeted enclosure within sound of a thin chalky voice saying “Ello, ello.” It seemed to come from above her. “Ello—ello—ello—ello,” it said busily, hurrying about somewhere above as she gazed about the terrifying hall. It was somehow like the box office of a large theatre, only much better; the lamplight, there seemed to be several lamps shaded with low-hanging old gold silk, and the rosy light from the huge clear fire in a deep grate fell upon a thick pale greeny yellow carpet, the little settees with their huge cushions, and the strange-looking pictures set low on dull gold walls. In two directions the hall went dimly away towards low archways screened by silently hanging bead curtains. “Ello—ello—ello—ello,” said the voice coming quickly downstairs. Half raising her eyes Miriam saw a pale turquoise blue silk dress, long and slender with deep frills of black chiffon round the short sleeves and a large frill draping the low-cut bodice, a head and face, sheeny bronze and dead white, coming across the hall.

“Ow-de-do; so glad you’ve come,” said the voice, and two thin fingers and a small thin crushed handkerchief were pressed against her half-raised hand.

“Are you famished? Deadly awful journey! I’m glad you’re tall. Wiggerson’ll take up your things. You must be starvin’. Don’t change. There’s only me. Don’t be long. I shall tell them to put on the soup.”

Gently propelled towards the staircase Miriam went mechanically up the wide shallow stairs towards the parlourmaid waiting at the top. Behind her she heard the swift fuffle of Mrs. Corrie’s dress, the swish of a bead curtain and the thin tuneless voice inaccurately humming in some large near room, “Jack’s the boy for work; Jack’s the boy for play.” She followed the maid across the landing, walking swiftly, as Mrs. Corrie had done—the same greeny carpet, but white walls up here and again strange pictures hung low, on a level with your eyes, strange soft tones … crayons? … pastels?—what was the word—she was going to live with them, she would be able to look at them—and everything up here, in the soft pink light. There were large lamps with rose-pink shades. The maid held back a pink silk curtain hanging across an alcove, and Miriam went through to the open door of her room. “Harris will bring up your trunk later, miss—if you like to leave your keys with me,” said the maid behind her. “Oh yes,” said Miriam carelessly, going on into the room. “Oh, I don’t know where they are. Oh, it doesn’t matter, I’ll manage.”

“Very good, miss,” said Wiggerson politely, and came forward to close the bedroom door.

Miriam flung off her outer things and faced herself in the mirror in her plain black hopsack dress with the apple green velveteen pipings about the tight bodice and the square box sleeves which filled the square mirror from side to side as she stood. “This dress is a nightmare in this room,” she thought, puffing up her hair under her fringe-net with a hatpin. “Never mind, I mustn’t think about it,” she added hurriedly, disconcerted for a moment by the frightened look in her eyes. The distant soft flat silvery swell of a little gong sent her hurrying to the mound of soft bath towel in the wide pale blue wash-hand basin. She found a bulging copper hot-water jug, brilliantly polished, with a wicker-covered handle. The water hissed gently into the wide shallow basin, sending up a great cloud of comforting steam. Dare’s soap … extraordinary. People like this being taken in by advertisements … awful stuff, full of free soda, any transparent soap is bad for the skin, must be, in the nature of things … makes your skin feel tight. Perhaps they only use it for their hands. … Advertisement will do anything, Pater said. … Perhaps in houses like this—plonk, it certainly made a lovely hard ring falling into the basin—where everything was warm and clean and fragrant even Dare’s soap could not hurt you. The room behind her seemed to encourage the idea. But surely it couldn’t be her room. It was a spare room. They had put her into it for her month on trial. Could it possibly be hers, just her room, if she stayed … the strange, beautiful, beautiful long wide hang of the faintly patterny faintly blue curtains covering the whole of the window space; the firelight on them as she came into the room with Wiggerson, the table with a blotter, there had been a table by the door with a blotter, as Wiggerson spoke. She looked round, there it was … the blue covered bed, the frilled pillows, high silky-looking bed curtains with some sort of little pattern on them, the huge clear fire, the big wicker chair.

Miriam laughed over her strange hot wine-clear wine-flavoured soup … two things about soup besides taking it from the side of your spoon, which everybody knows—you eat soup, and you tilt your plate away, not towards you (chum along, chum along and eat your nice hot soup). … Her secure, shy, contented laugh was all right as a response to Mrs. Corrie, sitting at the head of the long table, a tall graceful bird, thin broad shoulders, with the broad black frill slipping from them, rather broad thin oval white face, wiry auburn Princess of Wales fringe coming down into a peak with hollow beaten-in temples each side of it, auburn coils shining as she moved her head and the chalky lisping voice that said little things and laughed at them and went on without waiting for answers. But to herself the laugh meant much more than liking Mrs. Corrie and holding her up and begging her to go on. It meant the large dark room, the dark invisible picture, the big pieces of strange dark furniture in gloomy corners, the huge screen near the door where the parlourmaid came in and out; the table like an island under the dome of the low-hanging rose-shaded lamp, the table-centre thickly embroidered with beetles’ wings, the little dishes stuck about, sweets, curiously crusted brown almonds, sheeny grey-green olives; the misty beaded glass of the finger bowls—Venetian glass from that shop in Regent Street—the four various wine glasses at each right hand, one on a high thin stem, curved and fluted like a shallow tulip, filled with hock; and floating in the warmth amongst all these things the strange, exciting, dry sweet fragrance coming from the mass of mimosa, a forest of little powdery blossoms, little stiff grey—the arms of railway signals at junctions—Japanese looking leaves—standing as if it were growing, in a shallow bowl under the rose-shaded lamp.

“Mélie’s coming on Friday.”

The parlourmaid set before Miriam a small shapely fish, with scales like mother-of-pearl and pink fins, lying in a curl of paper. “Red mullet,” she exclaimed to herself; “how on earth do I know that it’s red mullet? And those are olives, of course.” Mrs. Corrie was humming to herself about Mélie as the fork in her thin little fingers plucked fitfully at the papered fish. “Do you know planchette?” she asked, in a faint singsong, turning with a little bold pounce to the saltcellar close at Miriam’s left hand. “Oh-h-h” said Miriam intelligently. … “Planchette … Planchette … Cloches de Corneville. Planquette. Is planchette a part of all this? … Planchette, a French dressmaker, perhaps.” She turned fully round to Mrs. Corrie and waited, smiling sympathetically. “It’s deadly uncanny,” Mrs. Corrie went on, “I can tell you. Deadly.” Her delicate voice stopped fearfully and she glanced at Miriam with a laugh. “I don’t believe I know what it is,” said Miriam, sniffing in the scent of the mimosa and savouring the delicate flavour of the fish. These things would go on after planchette was disposed of, she thought, and took a sip of hock.

“It’s deadly. I hope Mélie’ll bring one. She’s a fairy; real Devonshire fairy. She’ll make it work. We’ll have such fun.”

“What is it?” said Miriam a little uneasily. … A fairy and a planchette and fun—silly laughter, some tiresome sort of game; a hoax.

“I tell you all about it, all, all …” intoned Mrs. Corrie provisionally, whilst the maid handed the tiny ready-cut saddle of lamb. “Spinnich? Ah, nicey spinnich; you can leave us that, Stokes. … Oh, you must have Burgundy—spin-spin and Burgundy; awful good; a thimble-full, half a glass; that’s right.”

The clear dry hock had leapt to Miriam’s brain and opened her eyes, the Burgundy spread through her limbs, a warm silky tide. The green flavour of the spinach, tasting of earth, and yet as smooth as cream intoxicated her. Surely nothing could so delicately build up your strength as these small stubby slices of meat so tender that it seemed to crumble under your teeth. … “It’s an awful thing. It whirls about and writes with a pencil. Writes. All sorts of things,” said Mrs. Corrie, with a little frightened laugh. “Really. No nonsense. Names. Anythin’. Whatever you’re thinkin’ about. It’s uncanny, I can tell you.”

“It sounds most extraordinary,” said Miriam, with a firm touch of scepticism.

“You wait. Oh—you wait,” sang Mrs. Corrie in a whisper. “I shall find out, I shall find out, if you’re not careful, I shall find out his name.”

Miriam blushed violently. “Ah-ha,” beamed Mrs. Corrie in a soft high monotone. “I shall find out. We’ll have such fun.”

“Do you believe in it?” said Miriam, half irritably.