It was--Style ... or something. Le style c’est l’homme. That meant
something. It was the same with clothes.... Suburban people could be
fashionable, never stylish. And manners.... They were fussily kind and
nice to each other; as if life were pitiful ... _life_ ... pitiful. They
all pitied, and despised each other.
25
The night was vast with all the other things. No need to sleep. To lie
happy and strong in the sense of them was better than sleep. In a few
hours the little suburban day would come ... everything gleaming with
the light of the big things beyond. One could go through it in a drowse
of strength, full of laughter ... laughter to the brim, all one’s limbs
strong and heavy with laughter.
Bob Greville had gone jingling down the road in a hansom--grey holland
blinds and a pink rosebud in the driver’s buttonhole. Why had he come?
Going in and out of the weddings a pale grey white-spatted guest,
talking to everyone ... a preoccupied piece of the West End. Large club
windows looking out on sunlit Piccadilly; a glimpse of the haze of the
Green Park. Weddings must be laughable to him with his “Mrs. Caudle’s
Curtain Lectures” ideas. His wife was dead. She had been fearfully ill
suddenly on their wedding tour ... at “Law_zanne_.” That was the wrong
way to pronounce Lausanne. And that wrong way of pronouncing was somehow
part of his way of thinking about her. He seemed to remember nothing but
her getting ill and spoke with a sort of laughing, contemptuous _fear_.
Men.
But in some way he was connected with that strange thing outside the
everyday things.
26
How stupid of Eve to be vexed because she was told there was no need to
scrawl the addresses of the little cake boxes right across the labels.
Impossible now to ask her to come and play song accompaniments. Besides,
she was tired. Eve was tired because she did not really know how
glorious life was. In her life with the Greens in Wiltshire there was
nothing besides the Greens but the beautiful landscape. And the
landscape seen from the Greens’ windows must look commercial, in the
end. Eve was evidently beginning to tire of it. And they had worked so
hard all the morning cutting up the cake. Eve did not know that towards
the end of the morning she had thought of singing after lunch ...
feeling so strong and wanting to make a noise. Bohm’s songs. It was
better really to sing to one’s own accompaniment; only there was no one
to listen....
“Und wenn i dann mal wie-ie-d-er _komm_.”