The Tunnel by Dorothy M. Richardson — Read

Miriam swung her legs from the table and brought her tilted chair to the ground. The leads sloped down as she got to her feet and the strip of sky disappeared. The sunlight made a broad strip of gold along the parapet and a dazzling plaque upon the slope of the leads. She lounged into the shadowy middle of the room and stood feeling tall and steady and easy and agile in the freedom of knickers. The clothes lying on the bed were transformed. "I say," she murmured, her cigarette end wobbling encouragingly from the corner of her lips as she spoke, "they're not bad. " She strolled about the room glancing at them from different points of view. They really made quite a good whole. It was the lilac that made them a good whole, the fresh heavy blunt cones of pure colour. In the distance the bunched ribbon looked almost all green. She drew the hat nearer to the light and the ribbon became mauve with green shadows and green with mauve shadows as it moved. The girl had been right about bunching the ribbon a little way up the sugar-loaf and over the wide brim. It broke the papery stiffness of the lilac and the harshness of the black straw. The straw looked very harsh and black in the clearer light. Out of doors it would look almost as if it had been done with that awful shiny hat polish. If the straw had been dull and silky and some shaded tone of mauve and green it would have been one of those hats that give you a sort of madness, taking your eyes in and in, with the effect of a misty distant woodland brought near and moving, depths of interwoven colour under your eyes. But it would not have gone with the black and white check. The black part of the hat was right for the tiny check. That is the idea of some smart woman. I did not think of it in the shop, but I got it right somehow, I can see now. It's right. Those might be someone else's things. The sight of the black suède gloves and the lace-edged handkerchief and the powder box laid out on the chest of drawers made her eager to begin. This was dressing. The way to feel you were dressing was to put everything out first and come back as another person and make a grand toilet. It makes you feel free and leisurely. There had been the long strange morning. In half an hour the adventure would begin and go on and be over. The room would not be in it. Something nice or horrible would come back. But the room would not be changed.

She found the dark green Atlas bus standing ready by the curb and waited until it was just about to start, looking impatiently up and down the long vistas of the empty Sunday street, and then jumped hurriedly in with the polite half-irritated resignation of the man about town who finds himself stranded in a godforsaken part of London, and steered herself carefully against the swaying of the vehicle along between the rows of seated forms, keeping her eyes carefully averted and fixed upon distant splendours. Securing an empty corner she sat down provisionally, on the edge of the seat, occupying the least possible space, clear of her neighbour, her eyes turned inwards on splendours still raking the street, her person ready to leap up at the sight of a crawling hansom -- telling herself in a drawl that she felt must somehow be audible to an observant listener how damnable it was that there were not hansoms in these remarkable backwoods -- so damned inconvenient when your own barrow is laid up at Windover's. But a hansom might possibly appear. She turned to the little corner window at her side and gazed with fierce abstraction down the oncoming street. Presently she would really be in a hansom. Miss Szigmondy had mentioned hansoms... supposing she should have to pay her share? Her heart beat rapidly and her face flushed as she thought of the fourpence in her purse. She would not be able even to offer. But if Miss Szigmondy were alone she would take cabs. There would be no need to mention it. The ambling trit-trot of the vehicle gradually prevailed over the mood in which she had dressed. She was becoming aware of her companions. Presently she would be taking them all in and getting into a world that had nothing to do with her afternoon. Turning aside so that her face could not be seen and her own vision might be restricted to the roadway rolling slowly upon her through the little end window she dreamed of contriving somehow or other to save money for hansoms. Hansoms were a necessary part of the worldly life. Floating about in a hansom in the west-end, in the season, was like nothing else in the world. It changed you, your feelings, manner, bearing, everything. It made you part of a wonderful exclusive difficult triumphant life, a streak of it, going in and out. It cut you off from all personal difficulties, made you drop your personality and lifted you right out into the freedom of a throng of happy people, a great sunlit tide singing, all the same laughing song, wave after wave, advancing, in open sunlight. It took you on to a great stage, lit and decked, where you were lost, everything was lost and forgotten in the masque. Nothing personal could matter so long as you were there and kept there, day and night. Everyone was invisible and visionless, united in the spectacle, gilding and hiding the underworld in a brilliant embroidery... continuously.