The Tunnel

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.

When she came to herself she was in the Strand. She walked on a little and turned aside to look at a jeweller’s window and consider being in the Strand at night. Most of the shops were still open. The traffic was still in full tide. The jeweller’s window repelled her. It was very yellow with gold, all the objects close together and each one bearing a tiny label with the price. There was a sort of commonness about the Strand, not like the cheerful commonness of Oxford Street, more like the City with its many sudden restaurants. She walked on. But there were theatres also, linking it up with the west-end and streets leading off it where people like Bob Greville had chambers. It was the tailing off of the west-end and the beginning of a deep dark richness that began about Holywell. Mysterious important churches crowded in amongst little brown lanes⁠ ⁠… the little dark brown lane.⁠ ⁠… She wondered what she had been thinking since she left Wimpole Street and whether she had come across Trafalgar Square without seeing it or round by some other way. They were fighting; sending out suffocation and misery into the surrounding air⁠ ⁠… she stopped close to the two upright balanced threatening bodies, almost touching them. The men looked at her. “Don’t,” she said imploringly and hurried on trembling.⁠ ⁠… It occurred to her that she had not seen fighting since a day in her childhood when she had wondered at the swaying bodies and sickened at the thud of a fist against a cheek. The feeling was the same today, the longing to explain somehow to the men that they could not fight.⁠ ⁠… Half-past seven. Perhaps there would not be an A.B.C. so far down. It would be impossible to get a meal.

“Is that the Henderson?”

“It’s me,” said Miriam emerging on a tiny landing and going through the open door of a low-ceiled lamplit room. “It’s me, it’s me,” she repeated from the middle of the floor. An eager face was turned towards her from a thicket of soft dull wavy hair. She gazed vaguely. The small slippered feet planted firmly high up against the lintel the sweep of the red dressing-gown, the black patch of the Mudie book with its yellow label, the small ringed hand upon it, the outflung arm and hand, the little wreath of smoke about the end of the freshly lit cigarette, the cup of coffee on the little table under the lamp, the dim shapes about the room lit by the flickering blaze.⁠ ⁠…

Miriam smiled into the smiling steel blue of the eyes turned towards her and waited smiling for the silver reed of tone to break again. “I’m so glad you’ve come. I wanted you. Sit down and shut the door my child.⁠ ⁠… I don’t mind which you do first, but⁠—do⁠—them⁠—both,” she tinkled, stretching luxuriously and bringing her feet to the ground with a swing. Miriam closed the door. “Can I take off my things?”

“Of course child⁠ ⁠… take them all off; you know I admire you most draped in a towel.”

“I’ve got such awful feet,” said Miriam hugging the compliment as she dropped her things in a distant armchair.

“It’s not your feet, it’s your extraordinary shoes.”

“M.”

“How beautiful you look. You put on ties better than anyone I know. I wish I could wear things draped round my neck.”

Miriam sat on a damp wooden seat at the station. Shivering with exhaustion, she looked across at the early morning distance, misty black and faint misty green.⁠ ⁠… Something had happened to it. It was not beautiful; or anything. It was not anything.⁠ ⁠… That was the punishment.⁠ ⁠… The landscape was dead. All that had come to an end. Her nimble lifeless mind noted the fact. There was dismay in it. Staring at the landscape she felt the lifelessness of her face; as if something had brushed across it and swept the life away, leaving her only sight. She could never feel any more.

Behind her fixed eyes something new seemed moving forward with a strange indifference. Suddenly the landscape unrolled. The rim of the horizon was no longer the edge of the world. She lost sight of it in the rolling out of the landscape in her mind, out and out, in a light easy stretch, showing towns and open country and towns again, seas and continents on and on; empty and still. Nothing. Everywhere in the world nothing. She drifted back to herself and clung, bracing herself. She was somebody. If she was somebody who was going to do something⁠ ⁠… not roll trolleys along a platform. The train swept busily into the landscape; the black engine, the brown, white-panelled carriages, warm and alive in the empty landscape. Her strained nerves relaxed. In a moment she would be inside it, being carried back into her own world. She felt eagerly forward towards it. Heartsease was there. She would be able to breathe again. But not in the same way; unless she could forget. There were other eyes looking at it.

She recognised the figure the instant she saw it. It was as if she had been riding the whole day to meet it. Completely forgotten it had been all the time at the edge of the zest of her ride. It had been everywhere all the time and there it was at last dim and distant and unmistakable⁠ ⁠… coming horribly along, a murk in the long empty road. She slowed up looking furtively about. The road had been empty for so long. It stretched invisibly away behind, empty. There was no sound of anything coming along; nothing but the squeak squeak of her gear-case; bitter empty fields on either side, greying away to the twilight, the hedges sharp and dark, enemies; nothing ahead but the bare road, carrying the murky figure; there all the time; and bound to come. She rode on at her usual pace struggling for an absorption so complete as to make her invisible, but was held back by her hatred of herself for having wondered whether he had seen her. The figure was growing more distinct. Murky. Murk from head to foot. Wearing openly like a coat the expression that could be seen hidden inside everybody. She had made an enemy of him. It was too late. The voice in her declaring sympathy, claiming kinship faded faint and far away within her⁠ ⁠… hullo old boy, isn’t it a bloody world⁠ ⁠… he would know it had come too late. He came walking along, slowly walking like someone in a procession or a quickly moving funeral; like someone in a procession, who must go on.