Gilbert Clandon let the book slide to the floor. He could see her in front of him. She was standing on the kerb in Piccadilly. Her eyes stared; her fists were clenched. Here came the car. . . .
He could not bear it. He must know the truth. He strode to the telephone.
"Miss Miller!" There was silence. Then he heard someone moving in the room.
"Sissy Miller speaking"-her voice at last answered him.
"Who," he thundered, "is B. M.?"
He could hear the cheap clock ticking on her mantelpiece; then a long drawn sigh. Then at last she said:
"He was my brother."
He WAS her brother; her brother who had killed himself. "Is there," he heard Sissy Miller asking, "anything that I can explain?"
"Nothing!" he cried. "Nothing!"
He had received his legacy. She had told him the truth. She had stepped off the kerb to rejoin her lover. She had stepped off the kerb to escape from him.
1944
TOGETHER AND APART
Mrs. Dalloway introduced them, saying you will like him. The conversation began some minutes before anything was said, for both Mr. Serle and Miss Arming looked at the sky and in both of their minds the sky went on pouring its meaning though very differently, until the presence of Mr. Serle by her side became so distinct to Miss Anning that she could not see the sky, simply, itself, any more, but the sky shored up by the tall body, dark eyes, grey hair, clasped hands, the stern melancholy (but she had been told "falsely melancholy") face of Roderick Serle, and, knowing how foolish it was, she yet felt impelled to say:
"What a beautiful night!"
Foolish! Idiotically foolish! But if one mayn't be foolish at the age of forty in the presence of the sky, which makes the wisest imbecile-mere wisps of straw-she and Mr. Serle atoms, motes, standing there at Mrs. Dalloway's window, and their lives, seen by moonlight, as long as an insect's and no more important.
"Well!" said Miss Anning, patting the sofa cushion emphatically. And down he sat beside her. Was he "falsely melancholy," as they said? Prompted by the sky, which seemed to make it all a little futile-what they said, what they did-she said something perfectly commonplace again:
"There was a Miss Serle who lived at Canterbury when I was a girl there."
With the sky in his mind, all the tombs of his ancestors immediately appeared to Mr. Serle in a blue romantic light, and his eyes expanding and darkening, he said: "Yes.
"We are originally a Norman family, who came over with the Conqueror. That is a Richard Serle buried in the Cathedral. He was a knight of the garter."
Miss Arming felt that she had struck accidentally the true man, upon whom the false man was built. Under the influence of the moon (the moon which symbolized man to her, she could see it through a chink of the curtain, and she took dips of the moon) she was capable of saying almost anything and she settled in to disinter the true man who was buried under the false, saying to herself: "On, Stanley, on"-which was a watchword of hers, a secret spur, or scourge such as middle-aged people often make to flagellate some inveterate vice, hers being a deplorable timidity, or rather indolence, for it was not so much that she lacked courage, but lacked energy, especially in talking to men, who frightened her rather, and so often her talks petered out into dull commonplaces, and she had very few men friends-very few intimate friends at all, she thought, but after all, did she want them? No. She had Sarah, Arthur, the cottage, the chow and, of course THAT, she thought, dipping herself, sousing herself, even as she sat on the sofa beside Mr. Serle, in THAT, in the sense she had coming home of something collected there, a cluster of miracles, which she could not believe other people had (since it was she only who had Arthur, Sarah, the cottage, and the chow), but she soused herself again in the deep satisfactory possession, feeling that what with this and the moon (music that was, the moon), she could afford to leave this man and that pride of his in the Serles buried. No! That was the danger-she must not sink into torpidity-not at her age. "On, Stanley, on," she said to herself, and asked him: