The Trap quotes

Whenever during all her London years Miriam had passed the spot where it opened into the thoroughfare, the little byway had drawn her eyes; always stating its sequestered charm.

Entering it now for the first time she had a sense of arriving nowhere.

She found her number to the right, just beyond the opening, on a blistered door, whose knocker, a blurred, weatherworn iron face, gazed sadly downwards.

“Yes,” she said hastily. “

People run about because they wonder who they are.

”

Very gently she went down her stairs. In this clear upper light, angles and surfaces declared themselves intimately. The thing she loved was there.

Light falling upon the shapes of things, reflected back, moving through the day, a steadfast friend, silent and understanding.

She had loved it wherever she was, even in the midst of miseries; and always it had belonged to others. This time it was her own. The breath she held facing it was a cool stream, bringing strength; joy. Nothing could be better than this.

At Wimpole Street it was a familiar tone, common to upper middle-class dowdies of the better sort. Perhaps Henry James used it? In men, it was apt to be fluty; a contraction of the range of the voice to two or three fluty notes.

In women it was almost only one note, a little curved, breaking at some point of its passage into distress; solicitous.

She had already discovered the exact amount of constriction of the throat necessary to its production, and felt it draw the muscles of her nose and mouth into an expression of faintly humorous contempt.

They not only spoke as they thought, but thought as they spoke, guided and fashioned their thought, even to themselves, in forms of decorous speech. Anything that could not so be moulded was banished. Anything “unspeakable”—their strongest term of contempt.

Thus they were, even when alone, permanently at attention.

For herself, the coming of the curtain would be the moment of dropping the mask of attention, the moment of soaring freely within this new life. Things were going ahead too fast. Strong impressions succeeding and obliterating each other too swiftly to be absorbed.

tingling from head to foot. It was strange that one could recognise at sight an unknown thing; but far stranger that within a moment of pure shock there should be life, the keen sense of living that stood away outside the bounds of everyday life.

What a set of circumstances were these that brought only vermin to give her the pang of immortality.

Not a thing one could testify at a dinner-table. Why not?

Miriam watched her go away, with the dustpan at arm’s length, still gravely expostulating.

“It’s dreadful,” she said to her returning form, “but also fearfully funny, to find the ultimate horror sitting contentedly, poor little thing, on the end of your bed.”

She tinkled and tinkled at that, woefully crying out through her laughter, repudiating and agreeing and contradicting.

“Just so,” he said. “

Dignity is the privilege of the weak.

”

Miss Holland’s candle was the nightlight, keeping going the hot pressure of the evening. Yet most people probably disliked a rattling window, the sound that made a stillness in the room and in the street.

It was bad to be so different and to like being different.

How difficult to sleep in this consciously quiet enclosure. For it was not the quiet of a still night, the kind of night in which you listen to the expanse of space.

“The floor, the floor, I fear.”

“Heaven and earth! We must leave at once.”

“Well, I think perhaps with perchloride in the cracks …”

Miss Holland had been brought by her star. She was moving about on the upstair landing in her heavy, light-footed way, busy and intent. She coughed.

Her cough had exactly the sound of her voice.

Would it be possible to go through life in the state of permanent protest expressed by that eloquent cough? For a day perhaps. But a night’s sleep plays strange tricks.

Through philistinism lay perhaps one of the ways of salvation. No. In the midst of the happiness they brought there was always a lurking shadow. The shadow of incompatibility; of the impossibility of being at once bound and free.

The garden breeds a longing for the wild; the wild a homesickness for the garden.

Is there no way of life where the two can meet?

If you see all this, and Schopenhauer did, you grin and snort and stand aside. Women, he proves, don’t see it. And so they are obscenity, blind servants of obscenity, forever.”

“That doesn’t matter. It isn’t true. It’s words. Nothing can ever be expressed in words.”

But redeems everyone. … God can’t be worse than Mrs. Orly. And if she were on the judgment-seat, everyone would be recklessly forgiven. With a flushed little face and flashing eyes she would spank. Flare and scold. And then, pitiful helping hands. Unscrupulously covering.

Having no self, she brings everyone a rich sense of self.

Most people, all the time, in every relationship, seek only themselves. Past selves, if they are old. …

There comes a new way of thinking; a new world. But ultimately the changed world is the action of one’s own spirit. The only sureness in things is the action of one’s own spirit. Egoism. But egoism carried far enough. …

Whoso would save his life must lose it. But not for the sake of saving it.

And first he must have a life he loves well enough to make it worth losing. Perhaps all those big sayings of Christ are dangerous for small people. So the Catholics won’t trust them with the Bible.

“Dear, dear! An essentially pagan view.”

“It’s the view of a man who knows he would lose.”

“I trust you did not tell the poor thing that!”

And the men; the everlasting prizefight, the perfect unsociability underlying their cold ideas. Except for one or two. And they were idealists, blind with the illusion that humanity moves with one accord.

Each one moves singly. To join the movements of others is harmful until you have moved yourself.

Movement is with the whole of you. Ideas come afterwards.

Almost immediately on the heels of her own words and preceded by little sounds expressing the depth of impatient scorn, came Miss Holland’s most fastidious voice:

“Had it been made to a man, your promise would at once have been carried out.”

Miriam forgot her anger in amazement at the spectacle of a châtelaine with a volcanic temper and a spiteful tongue. She searched her memory in vain for anything to equal the venom of this attack.

Yet the kingdom within is a little grey and lonely. Marriage is no solution, only a postponement. A part solution for some people.

I am a greedy butterfly flitting in sunlight.

Enviable, despicable. But approval of my way of being speaks in me, a secret voice that knows no tribunals. The joy and ease of this evening-lit life is a presage because it is a fulfilment. Man never is, but always to be blest.

The happiness that came when they were even bleaker was a presage. Of what? Someone says there is nothing meaner than making the best of things.

But happiness is incurable. A thing you can’t help.

Perhaps it is the result of being a woman. One of Wells’ crawling cabs waiting to be hailed? Bosh. If I wait for anyone it is for one who will show himself to have been hailed by the same kind of happiness.

“Fare thee well, lassie,” she chanted in hillside voice and flung, as she went, a bunch of primroses on to the table. Miriam pursued her for a word of thanks. From halfway down the stairs she turned with a piercing smile, and sang out:

“It’s your life you are living here, lassie, and flowers are for all.”

Miriam turned back. The small bunch lying upon the scatter of charts and letters was there to brighten her life that was spending itself, had spent itself for the ten years since she left home, the years that are called “the best.” So Mrs.

Something very joyous.

The joy of a party is the newness of people to each other, renewed strikingness of humanity.

They love each other, to distraction. Really to distraction. Before they fall into conversation and separate.

And of those like Densley, who work consciously for the increase of human happiness, how many there are and how much kindlier than these people, most of whom seem so little kind, so much merely the jealous custodians of ideas. …

“Ideas are such chancy things. We not only can’t get along without them. There’s no escaping them, and they are all figures of speech.”

“Homo sapiens, eh? Well, so long as he has a good figure …” Kind imbecile, imbecile, but kind. “But ideas, my dear girl, are not the greatest thing in the world. And they easily take one too far away from life.”

Free-lovers seem all in some indefinable way shoddy. Born shoddy. Men as well as women.

Marriage is not an institution, it is an intuition.

Marriage, or sooner or later absurdity. Free-love is better than absurdity. …

Mean. Fear of losing small comforts and accustomed dreams. Like a timid elderly man of fixed habits settling comfortably in the autumn into his usual chair at the club. The peacefully noisy streets. Kept clean. Unconsciousness in the lulling song of the traffic.

Why should I wander in bliss while they toil in grime and darkness?

In the evening Sayce. Far away from the tumult; hidden, untroubled in his green room. Sitting in the window-space, not giving a thought to the rampant multitudes. Not minding, not giving a thought to them. Yet they threatened him as he sat there.