until she returned to her seat that the desert seized her. Looking back later in the full grip of its blank sadness, she could hardly believe that a false introduction – the interposition of an unwanted personality-could have prevented her in that first sight from being possessed by it. It was true that the beauty of its subtle range of colours – the endless varieties of brown and grey and white – had been lost to her in the conventional and expectedly ‘startling dawn’, but even so its frightening sadness must have been there. Or perhaps not; the possession was a gradual one; it was only as it went on hour after hour of rock and of meaningless plateaux and of shelves marked by equally meaningless windblown tracks, of great white lakes that deceptively promised water but were only saltpans, that she found herselflost in it, completely and absolutely bereft of all that made sense of her life, forsaken, and ready for annihilation. She had tried every offer of escape. She talked to Bill about Paris – how incredible that Madame Royaut’s mother at their usual little hotel should actually be a hundred years old; how good all the same Carmen could be when as at the Opéra no attempt was made to tone down the vulgarity; how incredible that he should have remembered exactly the bookshop in the Rue Saint-Jacques after all these years. She felt only as though she must be appearing to mock his little surprise visit to Paris by the inattention of her words. She attended to the American lady: how her name was Fairclough; her late husband a hardware millionaire; her widowed years devoted to travel; her favourite corner of favourite England Broadway, Worcestershire, in springtime, so unlike their own noisy Broadway – she was more of a stranger in New York than in London, Rome, or Tokio; her home town, in fact, Denver; her married daughter devoted to the violin, making that instrument indeed add to God’s harmony; her own life wholly changed by Christian Science, particularly by the banishing of a foolish, old, false claim of bronchial asthma.
But Mrs Fairclough’s story evoked neither sympathy nor amusement from Meg. She was only a distracting insect buzzing in her ear far away in the confines of the desert. Yet Mrs Fairclough was hardly a test of the force of humanity’s pull against the spell of dead nature. Meg recalled with self-mockery how much their circle exclaimed about her passionate curiosity in people and how much she liked the reputation.
She tried the ‘passionate curiosity’ out on Miss Vines bringing iced orange juice, fried eggs, and marmalade. Twenty-six, she decided, sexually attractive, but a disappointed mouth – could it be a long, dragging affair with a married man, or an innate frigidity that kept men short of proposing marriage? But she felt suddenly dissatisfied with all this feminine instinct for understanding; it was nothing but women’s magazine advice-to-readers stuff. She tried again with Miss Vines, more sociologically: suburban – Bromley perhaps, or Epsom, or no, maybe nearer London Airport – Windsor. Certainly, to use a phrase and, in describing people, a phrase was everything – ‘she had become as neat and cellophane-covered as the forks and knives she dispensed to the passengers’. But the phrase didn’t work – she didn’t care a damn about Miss Vines, who was less than a handful of sand from the desert. And as to the fat, smooth businessman and his youngwife, pale skinned and gently attentive, whether they were Siamese, Burmese, Chinese, or any other ‘ese’ she neither knew nor cared. Her eye had to follow these strange grey-brown patterns to the end of their desolation, to where she herself was utterly lost.
In desperation she turned to her last hope of escape. She opened The Mill on the Floss and began to read of Maggie Tulliver’s visit to Aunt Pullet. The humours of the book she knew by heart, so that they could do no more than revive laughter that echoed back to
But Mrs Fairclough’s story evoked neither sympathy nor amusement from Meg. She was only a distracting insect buzzing in her ear far away in the confines of the desert. Yet Mrs Fairclough was hardly a test of the force of humanity’s pull against the spell of dead nature. Meg recalled with self-mockery how much their circle exclaimed about her passionate curiosity in people and how much she liked the reputation.
She tried the ‘passionate curiosity’ out on Miss Vines bringing iced orange juice, fried eggs, and marmalade. Twenty-six, she decided, sexually attractive, but a disappointed mouth – could it be a long, dragging affair with a married man, or an innate frigidity that kept men short of proposing marriage? But she felt suddenly dissatisfied with all this feminine instinct for understanding; it was nothing but women’s magazine advice-to-readers stuff. She tried again with Miss Vines, more sociologically: suburban – Bromley perhaps, or Epsom, or no, maybe nearer London Airport – Windsor. Certainly, to use a phrase and, in describing people, a phrase was everything – ‘she had become as neat and cellophane-covered as the forks and knives she dispensed to the passengers’. But the phrase didn’t work – she didn’t care a damn about Miss Vines, who was less than a handful of sand from the desert. And as to the fat, smooth businessman and his youngwife, pale skinned and gently attentive, whether they were Siamese, Burmese, Chinese, or any other ‘ese’ she neither knew nor cared. Her eye had to follow these strange grey-brown patterns to the end of their desolation, to where she herself was utterly lost.
In desperation she turned to her last hope of escape. She opened The Mill on the Floss and began to read of Maggie Tulliver’s visit to Aunt Pullet. The humours of the book she knew by heart, so that they could do no more than revive laughter that echoed back to
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