'Penn, she said softly. The silence that followed began to coil and accumulate into a great white shell of eloquence and understanding. Penn lifted his eyes at last to her face.
But all was changed again. She was looking over his shoulder at something with fascination, with twisted anxiety, almost with fear. As Penn moved and rose to his feet, towering over her now again, turning to see what she saw, she said sharply 'What's that?
Penn followed her gaze to the German dagger. He stepped quickly back and picked it up. 'I brought this for you. I found it. I hope you don't mind. I think you wanted it and I brought it. He held out the hilt with the enamelled swastika towards her.
Miranda took it. 'But that's Steve's dagger. His special dagger. The one that Felix Meecham gave him.
'Yes. I brought it to you. I hope you don't mind.
'But where did you get it? Why did you have it? She moved away from the door, putting the table between them, glaring at him and clasping the dagger to her breast. Its bright point pierced the blue woollen stuff of the dressing-gown.
'I found it in Steve's room. I'm sorry. I hope you don't mind. I brought it —
'Oh, shut up! said Miranda. She gave a little cry and her face grew suddenly red and her eyes filled with tears. She stamped her foot and gave a wailing cry. 'Go away! Get out of here!
'I'm terribly sorry, said Penn. 'I just wanted to please you by bringing it because Ann said you liked it.
'You stupid, horrible fool, said Miranda, and the tears were coming so fast now she could hardly speak, 'I hate you. I'd like to kill you. Putting your horrible hands on me. Stupid Australian fool. Everyone knows you're stupid, with your beastly common accent. Nobody likes you here, they just put up with you because they have to. You're boring and ugly and stupid and we all want you to go away. Go back to beastly boring Australia. Go back to your low common father and your vulgar home. Go away. Get out of my room. Steve would have killed you with one hand. Go away, you horrible thing, go away, go away! Her voice rose and she drew the dagger back in her hand as if she would have flown at him.
Penn had a last vision of her, the dagger raised, her face crimson and wet with tears and saliva and twisted with spitting fury. He got himself out of the door and half fell down the spiral staircase. He heard the door bang behind him. He ran along the black gallery and gained his own staircase where the light from his room showed him the white metal steps. He got into his room and shut himself in.
He leaned back against the door panting. Pain and fear made his breath come in long shrieking gasps for several minutes. He felt ready to be overwhelmed by a storm of hysteria. He braced himself back against the door, digging in his heels, trying to quiet himself The room heaved before him.
A little while later his breathing became less violent and his body went limp and he sank on to the bed. He looked about. All was quiet, orderly, waiting for him. All was as it had been — how long ago? — before he went to see Miranda. The Swedish knife, the veteran car book, his battered copy of Such is Life, said to him: hello. But it was like the voices of thoughtless children to a ruined man. Between imagined violence and real violence there is a dimension of difference. Some innocent thing was broken forever, frightened and killed. A blackness in the heart of his world was even now spreading outward. He fell on his knees beside the bed with a groan.
He looked dully at his hand. It was aching and some blood was congealed on the knuckles. His dressing-gown was covered with little bits of coloured glass. As he shook it out he touched something under the bed. He turned to look and saw that it was Steve's box of soldiers. He stared at it and then pulled it close to him. After a moment he opened it and looked at the red and blue jumble of innumerable lead figures. Scarcely able to focus his eyes, he took one out and stood it upon the floor. Then he took out another and another. As the file lengthened his wild tears came at last.
Chapter Thirty
'BE nicer to poor Penny when he comes back, said Ann.
Penn had now been in London with Humphrey for nearly a week. 'He won't come back, said Miranda. She was sitting up in bed.
The uncurtained window was wide open to the hot summer night. Miranda had been unwell for two days and had retired to her room. The doctor said there was nothing wrong with her, but Ann was sure it was the German measles coming on at last.
'Why ever not? said Ann.
'He won't come back, said Miranda. 'He'll stay in London till the last moment and then ask you to send his things.
'But he said he'd come back. He must come back to say a proper good-bye.
Miranda shrugged her shoulders. 'He's a rude boy, she said. 'What can you expect, considering what his father is?
'Miranda!
Ann frowned at her daughter across the table littered with dolls, comics, Tintins, women's magazines, chocolate, newspapers, tins of orange juice, and the remains of a cherry cake. Then she resumed her restless pacing. She was very sorry that Penn had gone. She had not, till his departure, realized the extent to which he had, as it were, blessedly kept Miranda off her. She was frightened and a little shocked to find herself thinking in this way. But since she had been alone in the house with Miranda there had been a tension, an excessive mutual consciousness, a hostile magnetism. They were continually watching each other and seeking each other out, and making each other's activities' seem pointless. The situation had been only partially resolved by Miranda's becoming ill.
Ann was still undecided about Felix. At least she told herself that she was undecided, although the comparative steadiness with which she endured the interval which she had imposed upon them both sometimes suggested to her that she must have decided in his favour, that she must by now, without noticing it, have crossed the line. Yet she went on from moment to moment without doing or saying anything decisive. The great dazzling void which had, at the end of her talk with Douglas Swann, so authoritatively contained her, was shrunken now and darkened and crossed with the old cares. She felt, about Randall, a little less mad. But she did not really feel free or like a person who decides things. She was, after all, the same timid conscientious worrying Ann. She had not achieved, after all, a new personality.
Ann had never really had the conception of doing what she wanted.
The idea of doing what she ought, early and deeply implanted in her soul, and sedulously ever since cultivated, had by now almost removed from her the possibility, even as something prima jacie, of a pure self-regarding movement of will. She felt, at the moment, the lack of this strong uncomplicated machinery. The clamorous needs which devoured her were hideously unpractical, and she envied those for whom the want and the grasping movement were one and the same thing. She was prepared, moreover, and especially when she considered the wreck of her: marriage with Randall and what she had somehow done to Randall, to see in her absence of straightforward operative desires something corrupting, something deadening. There was, in her open formless life, some dreadful lack of vigour, some lack of any hard surface to grasp or to brace oneself against; and as she thus accused herself, ready almost to call her good and evil, she found herself again echoing some of Randall's words. She had not got a new personality. But the old one was certainly cracked.
She had not succeeded, either, with Miranda; and it sometimes seemed to her that both Randall and Miranda shrank away from her for the same reason. They needed about them the invigorating presence of shapely human wills; and they could not but see Ann's absence, in this sense, of personality as something mean and spiritless and almost insincere. The idea had sometimes occurred to Ann, and she hated it, that quite involuntarily and unreasonably she made them both feel guilty. But now it seemed to her more likely that their reaction to her was a sort of aesthetic one. They found something messy, something depressing, in her mode of existence. And now it was she who felt the guilt.