With each fresh attack on the text, the sense of guilt grew stronger; falling upon her the moment, having read the page of German, she set to work to apply the discoveries she had made. It was as if these discoveries were the winning, through some inborn trick of intelligence not her own by right of any process of application or of discipline, of an unfair advantage. She sought within her for a memory that might explain the acquisition of the right of escape into this life within, outside, securely away from, the life of everyday. The school memories that revived in her dealings with her sentences were the best, the most secret and the happiest, the strands where the struggle to acquire had been all a painless interested adventuring. The use of this strange faculty, so swift in discovery, so relentless in criticism, giving birth, as one by one the motley of truths urging its blind movements, camerecognizably into view, to such a fascinating game of acceptance and fresh trial, produced in the long run when the full balance was struck, an overweight of joy bought without price.
There was no longer unalleviated pain in the first attack on a fresh stretch of the text. The knowledge that it could by three stages, laborious but unchanging and certain in their operation, reach a life of its own, the same in its whole effect, and yet in each detail so different to the original, radiated joy through the whole slow process. It was such a glad adventure, to get down on the page with a blunt stump of pencil in quivering swift thrilled fingers the whole unwieldy literal presentation, to contemplate, plunging thus roughshod from language, to language, the strange lights shed in turn upon each, the revelation of mutually enclosed inexpandible meanings, insoluble antagonisms of thought and experience, flowing upon the surface of a stream where both were one; to see, through the shapeless mass the approaching miracle of shape and meaning.
The vast entertainment of this first headlong ramble down the page left an enlivenment with which to face the dark length of the second journey, its separate single efforts of concentration, the recurring conviction of the insuperability of barriers, the increasing list of discarded attempts, the intervals of hours of interruption, teased by problems that dissolved into meaninglessness, and emerged more than ever densely obstructive, the sudden almost ironically cheerful simultaneous arrival of several passable solutions; the temptation to use them, driven off by the wretchednessaccompanying the experiment of placing them even in imagination upon the page, and at last the snap of relinquishment, the plunge down into oblivion of everything but the object of contemplation, perhaps ill-sustained and fruitful only of a fury of irritated exhaustion, postponing further effort, or through the entertaining distraction of a sudden irrelevant play of light, turned to an outbranching series of mental escapades, leading, on emergence, to a hurried scribbling, on fresh pages, of statements which proved when read later with clues and links forgotten, unintelligible; but leading always, whether directly in one swift movement of seizure, or only at the end of protracted divings, to the return, with the shining fragment, whose safe placing within the text made the pages, gathered up in an energy flowing forward transformingly through the interval, towards the next opportunity of attack, electric within her hands.
The serene third passage, the original banished in the comforting certainty that the whole of it was represented, the freedom to handle until the jagged parts were wrought into a pliable whole, relieved the pressure of the haunting sense of trespass, and when all was complete it vanished into peace and a strange unimpatient curiosity and interest. She read from an immense distance. The story was turned away from her towards people who were waiting to read and share what she felt as she read. It was no longer even partly hers; yet the thing that held it together in its English dress was herself, it had her expression, as a portrait would have, so that by no one in her sight or within range of anychance meeting with herself might it ever be contemplated. And for herself it was changed. Coming between her and the immediate grasp of the text were stirring memories; the history of her labour was written between the lines; and strangely, moving within the whole, was the record of the months since Christmas. On every page a day or group of days. It was a diary.... Within it were incidents that for a while had dimmed the whole fabric to indifference. And passages stood out, recalling, together with the memory of overcoming their difficulty, the dissolution of annoyances, the surprised arrival on the far side of overwhelming angers....
The second story lay untouched, wrapt in its magic. Contemplating the way, with its difference, it enhanced the first and was enhanced by it, she longed to see the two side by side and found, while she hesitated before the slow scattering process of translation, a third that set her headlong at work towards the perfect finished group. There was no weariness in this second stretch of labour. Behind her lay the first story, a rampart, of achievement and promise, and ahead, calling her on, the one that was yet to be attempted, difficult and strange, a little thread of story upon a background of dark thoughts, like a voice heard through a storm. Even the heaviest parts of the afternoon could be used, in an engrossed forgetfulness of time and place. Time pressed. The year was widening and lifting too rapidly towards the heights of June when everything but the green world, fresh gleaming in parks and squares through the London swelter,sweeping with the tones of spring and summer mingled amongst the changing trees, towards September, would fade from her grasp and disappear.
“Well.What did he say?”
“Oh, nothing; he made a great opportunity. He didn’t like the stories.”
“Remarkable!”
“I did it all the wrong way. When I accepted their invitation I wrote that I was bringing down some translations of the loveliest short stories I had ever read.” I was suddenly proud, in Lyons, of remembering “short stories” and excited about having something written to show him at last. The sentence felt like an entry into their set.
“If he did not agree with this I pity him.”
“I don’t know how it would have been if I had said nothing at all.” He might have said look here this is good stuff. You must do something with this.
“I tell you again this man is superficial.”
“He said the sentiment was gross and that they were feeble in construction.” Waiting, in the window seat, with the large fresh light from the sea pouring in from behind across the soft clear buffs and greens of the room; weaving for Alma, with the wonder of keeping him arrested, alone in his study, with his eyes on her written sentences, a view of the London life as eventful, enviable leisure; the door opening at last, the swift compact entry of thelittle figure with the sheaf of manuscript, the sudden lifting jubilance of the light; the eager yielding to the temptation to enhance the achievement by a disclaiming explanation of the difficult circumstances, the silencing minatory finger—wait, wait, you’re taking it the wrong way—and at last the high-pitched, colourless, thinking voice in brief comprehensive judgment; the shattering of the bright scene, the end of the triumphant visit, with a day still to pass, going about branded as an admirer of poor stuff.
“That is noopinion. It is simply a literary finessing. I will tell youmore. This judgment indicates animmenseblindness. There is in Andrayeff a directness and simplicity of feeling towards life that is entirely lacking in this man.”
“Mm. Perhaps the Russians are more simple; less” ... civilised.
“Simplicity and directness of feeling does not necessarily indicate a less highly organised psychological temperament.”
“I know what he meant. Andrayeff does try deliberately to work on your feelings. I felt that when I was writing. But the pathos of those little boys and the man with the Chinese mask is hissubject. What he does is artistic exaggeration. That is Art. Light and shade;” ...... a ‘masterly study’ of a little boy ....?
“Very well then. What is the matter?”
“No, but I’m just thinking the whole trouble is that life is not pathetic. People don’t feel pathetic; or neveraltogetherpathetic. There is something else; that’s the worst of novels, something that hasto be left out. Tragedy; curtain. But there neverisa curtain and even if there were, the astounding thing is that there isanythingto let down a curtain on; soastoundingthat you can’t feel really, completely, things like “happiness” or “tragedy”; they are both the same, a half-statement. Everybody is the same really, inside, under all circumstances. There’s a dead-level of astounding ....something.”
“I cannot follow you in all this. But you may not thus lightly deny tragedy.”
“He also said that the translation was as good as it could be.” ..... You’ve brought it off. That’s the way a translation ought to be done. It’s slick and clean and extraordinarily well Englished......
“Well? Well? Are you not satisfied?”
“Then he said in a contemptuous sort of way, ‘you could make from two to three hundred a year at this sort of thing.’”
“But that is most excellent. You should most certainly try this.”
“I don’t believe it. Hesaysthat kind of thing.”
“He ought to know.”
“I don’t know. He said in a large easy way you’d get seven or eight guineas apiece for these things, and then do ’em in a book.”
“Well?”
“Everybody would be doing it if it were so easy.”
“You are really remarkable. A good translation is most rare; and particularly a good English translation. You have seen these Tolstoys. I have notmet in German or French anything so vile. It is a whole base trade.”
“The public does not know. And if these things sell why should publishers pay for good translations? It’s like machine and hand-made embroidery. It does not pay to do good work. I’ve often heard translations are badly paid and I can quite understand it. It could be done in a factory at an immense pace.”
“You are right. I have known a group of poor Russian students translate a whole book in a single night. But you will not find cynical vulgarisation of literature anywhere but in England and America. It is indeed remarkable to the foreigner the way in this country the profession of letters has become a speculation. Never before I came here did I meet this idea of writing for a living, in this naïve widespread form. There is something very bad in it.” Miriam surveyed the green vista, thinking guiltily of her envy and admiration of the many young men she had met at the Wilsons’ who were mysteriously “writing” or “going to write,” of her surprise and disappointment in meeting here and there things they had written ...... don’t, Miss Henderson ....don’ttake up .... a journalisticcareeron the strength of being able to write; as badly as Jenkins. Editors—poor dears—arebeleaguered, by aspiring relatives. She thought out now, untrammelled by the distraction of listening to the way he formed his sentences, the meaning of these last words ..... it spread a chill over the wide stretch of sunlit grass; in the very moments that were passing, the writing world was goingactively on, the clever people who had ideas and style and those others, determined, besieging, gradually making themselves into writers, indistinguishable by most readers, from the others, sharing, even during their dreadful beginnings, in the social distinctions and privileges of “writers,” and all of them, the clever ones and the others, quite untroubled by any sense of guilt, and making, when they were all together, a social atmosphere that was, in spite of its scepticism, and its scorn of everyday life, easier to breathe than any other. But being burdened with a hesitating sense of guilt, unable to be really interested in the things clever people wrote about, being beguiled by gross sentimentality because of its foreign dress and the fascination of transforming it, meant belonging outside the world of clever writers, tried in their balance and found wanting; and cut off from the world of innocent unconscious determined aspirants by a mysterious fear.
It was mean to sit waiting for life to throw up things that would distract one for a while from the sense of emptiness. Sitting moving about from place to place, in the dress of the period. Being nowhere, one had no right even to the dress of the period. In the bottom of the lake .... hidden, and forgotten. Round the far-off lake were feathery green trees, not minding. She sat imagining their trunks, filmed over with the murk of London winters, but all the more beautiful now, standing out black amongst the clouds of green. There were trees in the distance ahead, trees, forgotten. She was here to look at them. It was urgent, important.All this long time and she had never once looked. She lifted her eyes cautiously, without moving, to take in the wide belt beyond the stretch of grass. It was perfect. Full spring complete, prepared and set there, ungrudgingly, demanding nothing but love; embanked between the sky and the grass, a dense perfect shape of various pure colour, an effect, that would pass; but she had seen it. The sharp angle of its edge stood out against a farther, far-off belt of misty green, with here and there a dark maroon blot of copper beech.
“Whatever happens, as long as one lives, there is the spring.”
“Do not be too sure of this.”
“Of course, if the world suddenly came to an end.”
“This appreciation of spring is merely a question of youth.”
“You can’t be sure.”
“On the contrary. Do you imagine for instance that this old woman on the next seat feels the spring as you do?”
Miriam rose unable to look; wishing she had come alone; or had not spoken. The green vistas moved all about her, dazzling under the height of sky. “I’m perfectly sure I shall always feel the spring; perhaps more and more.” She escaped into irrelevant speech, hurrying along so that he should hear incompletely until she had firm hold of some far-off topic; dreading the sound of his voice.
The flower-beds were in sight, gleaming in the gaps between the tree trunks along the broad walk .... ragged children were shouting and chasingeach other round the fountain. “I must always here think” he said as they passed through the wicket gate “of this man who preaches for the conversion of infidels, Jews, Christians, and other unbelievers.”
She hurried on preparing to face the rows of Saturday afternoon people on the chairs and seats along the avenue, their suspicious English eyes on her scrappy, dowdy, out-of-date English self and her extraordinary looking foreigner. Her spirits lifted. But they must be walking quickly and talking. The staring self-revealing faces must see that it was a privilege to have converse with anyone so utterly strange and far away from their English life.
“I’m not interested in him” she said as they got into their stride.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know why. I can’t fix my thoughts on him; or any of these people who yell at crowds.” Not quite that; but it made a sentence and fitted with their walk.
“It is perhaps that you are too individualistic,” panted Mr. Shatov. There was no opening in this for an appearance of easy conversation; the words were leaping and barking round her like dogs.
But she turned swiftly leading the way down a winding side path and demanding angrily as soon as they were alone how it was possible to be too individualistic.
“I agree to a certain extent that it is impossible. A man is first himself. But the peril is of being cut off from his fellow creatures.”
“Whyperil? Men descend to meet. Are you a socialist? Do you believe in the opinions of mediocre majorities?”
“Why this adjective? Why mediocre? No, I would call myself rather one who believes in therace.”
“Whatrace? The race is nothing without individuals.”
“What is an individual without the race?”
“An individual, with a consciousness; or a soul, whatever you like to call it. The race, apart from individuals is nothing at all.”
“You have introduced here several immense questions. There is the question as to whether a human being isolated from his fellows would retain any human characteristics. Your great Buckle has considered this in relation to the problem of heredity. But aside of this, has the race not a soul and an individuality? Greater than that of its single parts?”
“Certainly not. The biggest thing a race does is to produce a few big individualities.”
“The biggest thing that the race does is that itgoes on. Individuals perish.”
“You don’t know that they do.”
“That is speculation; without evidence. I have the most complete evidence that the race survives.”
“It may die, according to science.”
“That also is a speculation. But what is certain is—that the greatest individual is great only as he gives much to the race; to his fellow creatures. Without this, individuality is pure-negative.”
“Individualitycannotbe negative.”
“There speaks the Englishwoman. It is certainly England’s highest attainment that the rights of the individual are sacred here. But even this is not complete. It is still impeded by class prejudice.”
“Ihaven’t any class prejudice.”
“You are wrong; believe me you have immensely these prejudices. I could quite easily prove this to you. You are in many ways most exceptionally for an Englishwoman emancipated. But you are still pure-Tory.”
“That is only my stamp. I can’t help that. But I myself have no prejudices.”
“They are so far in you unconscious.” He spoke with extreme gentleness, and Miriam looked uneasily ahead, wondering whether with this strange knowledge at her side she might be passing forward to some fresh sense of things that would change the English world for her. English prejudices. He saw them as clearly as he saw that she was not beautiful. And gently, as if they were charming as well as funny to him. Their removal would come; through a painless association. For a while she would remain as she was. But even seeing England from his point of view, was being changed; a little. The past, up to the last few moments, was a life she had lived without knowing that it was a life lived in special circumstances and from certain points of view. Now, perhaps moving away from it, these circumstances and points of view suddenly became a possession, full of fascinating interest. But she had lived blissfully. Something here and there in his talkthreatenedhappiness.
He seemed to see people only as members ofnations, grouped together with all their circumstances. Perhaps everything could be explained in this way.... All her meaning for him was her English heredity, a thing he seemed to think the finest luck in the world, and her free English environment, the result of it; things she had known nothing about till he came, smiling at her ignorance of them, and declaring the ignorance to be the best testimony .... that was it; he gave her her nationality and surroundings, the fact of being England to him made everything easy. There was no need to do or be anything, individual. It was too easy. It must be demoralising .... just sitting there basking in being English.... Everything she did, everything that came to her in the outside world turned out to be demoralising .... too easy ... somefraudin it..... But the pity she found herself suddenly feeling for all English people who had not intelligent foreign friends gave her courage to go on. Meanwhile there was an unsettled troublesome point. Something that could not be left.
“Perhaps,” she said, “I daresay. But at any rate, I have an open mind. Do you think that the race issacred, and has purposes, super-man you know what I mean, Nietzsche, and that individuals are fitted up with the instincts that keep them going, just to blind them to the fact that they don’t matter?”
“If one must use these terms, the race iscertainlymore sacred than the individual.”
“Very well then; I know what I think. If the sacred race plays tricks on conscious human beings,using them for its own sacred purposes and giving them an unreal sense of mattering, I don’t care a button for the race and I’d rather kill myself than serve its purposes. Besides, the instincts of self preservation, and reproduction arenotthe only human motives .... they are not human at all....”
Thepicturesque building had been there, just round the corner, all these years, without once attracting her interested notice. The question she directed towards it, crossing the road for a nearer view, went forth, not from herself, but from the presence, close at her side, of Michael Shatov. During the hour spent in her room, facing the empty evening, she had been aware of nothing, outside the startling disturbance of her own movements, but the immense silence he had left. Driven forth to walk away its hours out of doors, she found, accompanying her through the green-lit evening squares, the tones and gestures of his voice, the certainty, that so long as she should frequent the neighbourhood, she would retain the sense of his companionship. The regions within her, of unexpressed thought and feeling, to which he had not reached, were at once all about her as she made her old, familiar, unimpeded escape through the front door, towards the blur of feathery green standing in the bright twilight at the end of the grey street; but beyond these inner zones, restored in a tumult of triumphant assertion of their indestructibility, the outer difficult life of expression and association was changed. If, as she feared, he should finally disappear into the new world towards which, withsuch urgent irritated determination, she had driven him, she would, for life, have reaped a small fund of his Russian courage and indifference.... It was with his impulse and interest, almost it seemed, actually in his person, that she drew up in front of the placard at the side of the strange low ecclesiastical looking porch. But as she read its contents, he left her, sped into forgetfulness by the swift course of her amazement. She had come, leaving her room at exactly the right moment, directly, by appointment, to this spot. Glancing once more for perfect assurance, at the liberal invitation printed in large letters at the foot of the heavenly announcement, she went boldly into the porch.
At the top of the shallow flight of grey stone steps up which she passed almost directly from the ecclesiastical doorway, a large black-draped figure, surmounted by the sweeping curves of an immense black hat voluminously swathed in a gauze veil of pale grey, stood bent towards a small woman standing on the step below her in dingy indoor black. The large outline, standing generously out below the broad low stone archway curving above the steps, against the further grey stone of what appeared to be part of a low ceiled corridor, was in extraordinary contrast to the graciously bending, surrendered attitude of the figure. Passing close to the group, Miriam caught a glimpse of large plump features, bold eyebrows, and firm dark eyes. The whole face, imagined as unscreened, was rounded, simple and undistinguished; blurred by the veil, it swam, without edges, a misty full moon. Through the veil came a voice that thrilled her as she movedon, led by a card bearing an arrowed instruction, down the grey stone corridor, with the desire for immediate audible mimicry. The behaviour of the voice was a perfect confirmation of deliberate intentional blurring of the large face. The little scanty frugally upstanding woman who had appeared to be of the artisan class, was either a humorous brick, or a toady, or of the old-fashioned respectful servant type, to stand it. The superfluous statement might, at least, even if the voice had become second nature, she might be thirty, have been delivered at an ordinary conversational pace. But to make the unimportant comment in the deliberately refined distressed ladylike voice, with pauses, as if every word were a precious gift .... She was waiting for some occasion, keeping her manner going, and the little woman had to stand out the performance.
On her way down the corridor she met a young man with a long neck above a low collar, walking like an undergraduate, with a rapid lope and a forward hen-like jerk of the head, but with kind religious looking eyes. Underneath his conforming manner and his English book and talk-found thoughts, he was acutely miserable, but never alone long enough to find it out; never even long enough to feel his own impulses. Two girls came swiftly by, bare-headed, in reform dresses, talking eagerly in high-pitched out-turned cultured voices, their uncommunicating selves watchfully entrenched behind the polite Norman idiom. She carried on their manner of speech at lightning speed in her mind, watching its effect upon everything it handled, of damming up, shaping, excluding all but ready-madethought and opinion. Just ahead was an arched doorway and a young man with a sheaf of pamphlets standing within it. “It may” she announced in character to an imaginary companion, “prove necessary to have some sort of conversational interchange with this individual.” Certainly it left one better prepared for the interview than saying Good Lord shall we have tosaysomething to this creature? She got safely through the doorway, exchanging a slight bow with the young man as he provided her with a syllabus, and entered a large lofty quietly-lit room, where a considerable audience sat facing a raised platform more brightly illuminated, and from which they were confronted by a row of seated forms. She went down the central gangway, bold in her desire for a perfect hearing and slipped into a seat in the second row of chairs. The chairman was taking his place and in the dying down of conversation she heard a quiet flurry of draperies approaching with delicate apologetic rhythm up the gangway. It was the tall young woman. She passed, a veiled figure with bent head and floating scarf, along the little passage between the front row of the audience and the fern-edged platform, upon which she presently emerged, taking her place next to a lady who now rose and came forward, tall and black robed, and whose face, sharply pointing beneath the shadow of a plumy hat, had the expression of an eagle searching the distance with calm piercing eyes. In rousing ringing grievous tones she begged to be allowed to precede the chairman with an important announcement. Miriam inwardly groaned as the voice chidtragically on, demanding a realisation on the part of all, of the meaning for London of the promised arrival in its midst of a world-famed authority in Greek letters. She felt the audience behind her quelled into absolute stillness, and took angry refuge in the cover of her syllabus. “The Furthermore Settlement” she read, printed boldly at the head of the page. It was one of those missions; to bring culture amongst the London poor ..... “devoted young men from the Universities.” Those girls in the corridor, wrapped in their code, were doing “settlement work.” They did not look philanthropic. What they loved most was the building, the grey stone corridors and archways, and being away from home on a prolonged adventure, free to weave bright colours along the invisible edges of life. She could not imagine them ever becoming in the least like the elderly philanthropists on the platform. But they were not free. The place was a sort of monastery of culture. If they wore habits they would be free and deeply inspiring. But they went about dressed longingly in the colours of sunlit landscapes, and lived their social life with ideas. There was something monastic about the lofty hall, with its neutral tinted walls and high-placed windows. But the place was modern and well-ventilated, even sternly chilly. Turning on her shoulder to examine the dutiful audience, she was startled by its effect of massed intellectuality. These people were certainly not the poor of the neighbourhood. By far the larger number were men, and wherever she looked she met faces from which she turned quickly away lest sheshould smile her pleasure. Even those that were heavy with stoutness and beards had the same lit moving look of kindly adventurous thought. They were a picked gathering; like the Royal Institution; but more glowing. She turned back to the platform in high hope amidst the outburst of applause greeting the retirement of the distressful lady and deepening to enthusiasm as there emerged timidly from behind one of the large platform screens a tall figure in evening dress, a great grown-up boy, with a large fresh face and helpless straight hanging arms and hands. He sat big and fixed, like an idol, whilst the chairman standing bowing over his table hurriedly remarked that an introduction was superfluous, and gazed at the audience with large moist blue eyes that seemed permanently open and expressionless and yet to pray for protection, or permission to retreat once more behind his screen. Miriam pitied him from the bottom of her heart and saw with relief when he rose that he produced a roll of papers for which a little one-legged ecclesiastical reading desk was conveniently waiting. He was going to read. But he placed his papers with large incapable fingers and she feared they would flutter to the ground, till he turned and took one fumbling expressionless step clear of the little desk and standing just as he was, his arms hanging once more heavy and helpless at his side, his eyes motionlessly fixed neither on the distance nor on any part of the audience, as if sightlessly focussing everything before him, began, without movement, or warning gesture, to speak. With the first sound of his voice, Miriam surrendered herselfto breathless listening. It sounded out, at conversational pitch, with a colourless serenity that instantly explained his bearing, revealing him beyond the region either of diffidence or temerity. It was a voice speaking to no one, in a world emptied of everything that had gone before.
“The progress of philosophy” went the words, in letters of gold across the dark void “is by a series of systems; that of science by the constant addition of small facts to accumulated knowledge.” In the slight pause Miriam held back from the thoughts flying out in all directions round the glowing words, they would come again, if she could memorise the words from which they were born, coolly, registering the shape and length of the phrases and the leading terms. Before the voice began again she had read and re-read many times; driving back an exciting intruder trying, from the depths of her mind to engage her on the subject of the time-expanding swiftness of thought.
“A system” pursued the voice “very generally corrects the fallacy of the preceding system, and leans perhaps in the opposite direction.” She flushed warm beneath the pressure of her longing to remain cool...... “Thus the movements of philosophic thought may be compared to the efforts of a drunken man to reach his home.” The blue eyes remained unaltered, while the large fresh face expanded with a smiling radiance. He was a darling. “He reels against the wall to his right and gains an impetus which sends him staggering to the left and so on; his progress being a series of zigzags. But in the end he gets home.And we may hope that philosophy will do the same, though the road seems at times unnecessarily broad.”
He turned back to his papers, leaving his sentence on the air in an intense silence through which Miriam felt the eager expectancy of the audience flow and hang waiting, gathered towards the fresh centre whence, unless he suddenly vanished, would come, through the perfect medium of the unobstructive voice, his utmost presentation of reasons for the tantalising hope.
At the end of the lecture she sat hurriedly sorting and re-sorting what she had gleaned; aware that her attention had again and again wandered off with single statements that had appealed to her, longing to communicate with other members of the audience in the hope of filling up the gaps. Perhaps the questions would bring back some of the things she had missed. But no one seemed to have anything to ask. The relaxation of the hearty and prolonged applause, had given way to the sort of silence that falls in a room after vociferous greetings, when the anticipated occasion vanishes and the gathered friends become suddenly unrecognisably small and dense. She looked at the woman at her side and caught a swift responsive glance that shocked her, clear blue and white and remote in limpid freshness though it was, with its chill understanding familiarity. Something had gone irrevocably from the evening and from herself. The strange woman was exactly like somebody .... a disguise of somebody. Shattering the silence came a voice from the back of the hall. “Ifthe lecturerthinks, and seems to deprecate the fact, that theology deals with metaphysical problems in anunmetaphysicalway, that is, from the point of view of metaphysic, in anunscientificway ....” compared to Dr. McHibbert’s his voice was like the voice of an intoxicated man arguing to himself in a railway carriage ..... “may we notsaythat when metaphysic takes upon itself to criticise the validity ofscientificconceptions, it does so, from the point of view ofsciencein an unscientific way?”
This Miriam felt, was terribly unanswerable. But the hushed platform was alive with the standing figure almost before the muffling of the last emphatic word told that the assailant had re-assumed his seat.
“I think I have said” his face beaming with the repressed radiance of an invading smile, was lifted towards the audience, but the blue eyes modestly addressed the frill of green along the platform edge, “that metaphysic, with respect to some of the conceptions of science, while admitting that they have their uses for practical purposes, denies that they are exactly true. Theology does not deny the problems of metaphysic, but answers them in a way metaphysic cannot accept.”
“In that caseTheology” began a rich, reverberating clerical voice .....
“This is veggy boring” said the woman.
He was going to claim, thought Miriam, noting the evidence of foreign intelligence in her neighbour’s pronunciation, that religion, like metaphysic and science, had a right to its premises and denied that metaphysic was adequate for the studyof the ultimate nature of reality, exactly as metaphysic denied that science was adequate.
“Yes, isn’t it” she murmured, a little late, through the deep caressing thunder of the clerical voice, wondering how far she had admitted her willingness to be at the disposal of anyone who found, in these tremendous onslaughts, nothing but irrelevance.
“If one could peacefully fall asleep until the summing up.”
She spoke out quite clearly, moving so that she was half turned towards Miriam, and completely exposed to her, as she sat with an elbow on the back of her chair and her knees comfortably crossed, in all her slender grey-clad length, still set towards the centre of the platform. Miriam unwillingly searched her curious effect of making in the atmosphere about her, a cold, delicate, blue and white glare. She had seemed, all the evening, a well-dressed presence. But her little oval hat, entirely covered with a much washed piece of cream coloured lace and set back from her forehead at the angle of an old-fashioned flat lace cap, had not been bought at a shop, and the light grey garment so delicate in tone and expression, open at the neck, where creamy lace continued the effect of the hat, was nothing but a cheap rain-cloak. Either she was poor, and triumphing over her poverty with a laborious depressing ingenuity, or she was one of those people who deliberately do everything cheaply. There was something faintly horrible, Miriam felt, about the narrowness of her escape from dowdiness to distinction.... Washable lace was the simplestpossible solution of the London hat problem. No untravelled Englishwoman would have thought of it...... Behind the serenity of her smooth white brow, behind her cold wide clearly ringed sea-blue eyes, was the dominant intelligence of it all, the secret of the strange atmosphere, that enveloped her whole effect; so strong and secure that it infected her words and movements with a faint robust delicate levity. In most women the sum of the tangible items would have produced the eye-wearying, eye-estranging pathos of the spectacle of patience fighting a lost battle, supplied so numerously all over London by women who were no longer young; or at least a consciously resigned cheerfulness. But she sat there with the enviable cool clear radiant eyes of a child that is held still and unsmiling by the deep entrancement of its mirth.
The chairman had risen and suddenly quelled the vast voice in the midst of its rising tide of tone, with the reminder that there would be opportunity for discussion a little later. A question rang out, short and sharp, exploding, as if released automatically by the renewal of stillness, so abruptly that Miriam missed its significance. The woman laughed instantly, a little clear tinkling gleeful sound, hesitatingly supported here and there amongst the forward rows of chairs by stirrings and small sounds of amusement. Miriam glowed with shame. It had been a common voice; perhaps some lonely uninstructed man, struggling with problems that were as terrible to him as to anyone; in the end desperately getting round them, by logical somersaults,so funny, that these habitually cultured minds could see only the absurdity. Her heart beat with gratitude as the lecturer, with gentle respectful gravity, paraphrased at some length an extract from the earlier part of his address. She was once more recalled by the voice at her side. Turning she found the unchanged face still set towards the platform. She answered the question in a low toneless voice that yet sounded more disturbing than the easy smooth conversational tone of her neighbour. She talked on, questioning and commenting, in neat inclusive phrases, and Miriam, turned towards her, reading the history of the duel of audience and lecturer in the flickerings across her face, of amusement or of scorn, responded freely, delighting in a converse that was more wonderful, with its background of cosmic discussion, than even the untrammelled exchange of confidences with a stranger on a bus. Presently there was a complete stillness.
“If there are no more questions” said the chairman, rising.
“I should justlike” broke in a ringing cheerful voice quite near at hand, “to ask Dr. McHibbertwhyif he considers that metaphysic is of no use in a man’s life, he finds it worthwhile, topursuesuch a fruitless study?”
“Don’t answer” said the woman in clear penetrating tones.
“Don’t answer; don’t answer,” repeated in the immediate neighbourhood two or three masculine voices. The lecturer, sitting bent forward, his friendly open brow yielded up to the invadingaudience, his big hands clasped capaciously between his knees, sent a blue glance swiftly in her direction, hesitated a moment, and then sat silent, smiling broadly down at his clasped hands.
“Isn’t he a perfectdarling,” murmured Miriam while the chairman declared the lecture open for discussion and she gathered herself together for close attention.
“There will be nothing worth heahghing till he sums up” said her companion and went on to ask her if she meant to attend the next lecture. Miriam perceived that unless she chose to escape forcibly, her companion had her in a close net of conversation. She glanced and saw that her face was already that of a familiar associate, no longer spurring her to trace to its source the strange impression that at first it had given her of being a forgotten face, whose sudden return, unrecognisably disguised, and yet so recognisable, filled her with a remembered sentiment of dislike.
“Rather” she said and then, watching the opening prospect of the long series of speeches, and protected by the monotonous booming of a pessimistic male voice “I’m so awfully relieved to find that science is only half true. But Ican’tsee why he says that metaphysic is no practical use. It would makeallthe difference every moment, to know for certain that mind is more real than matter.”
“Pahghfaitement.”
Dr. McHibbert’s voice interrupted her, damming up the urgent flow of communications. She watched him, listening without attention.
“He’s like a marvellously intelligent bolster” she said tonelessly “but with a heart and a soul. He certainly has a soul.”
Flattered by a soft chuckle of amusement, she added in a low murmuring man’s voice “the objectors are like candle-lit turnip ghosts,” and was rewarded by the first direct glance from the blue eyes, smiling, assuring her that she was acceptable. The ghost of the remembered face was laid. Whoever it was, if in reality it were to reappear in her life, she would be able to overcome her aversion by bold flirtation.
When the lecturer at last rose to reply, the guiding phrases of his discourse were the worn familiar keys of a past experience. Used for the second time at the doors of the chambers they had opened within the background of life, they grated, hesitating, and the heavy sound threw the bright spaces into shadow and spread a film of doubt over Miriam’s eagerness to escape and share her illumination with people waiting outside in the surrounding gloom. The light would return and remain for her. But it was something accomplished unaccountably. The mere reproduction of the magic phrases, even when after solitary peaceful contemplation she should have reassembled them in their right relations and their marvellously advancing sequence, would not carry her hearers along the road she had travelled. The something that held them together, lively and enlivening, was incommunicable.
“Don’t huggy away. The audience will take a considerable time to disperse.”
Miriam desired only to escape into the night.Just outside, in the darkness, was the balm that would disperse her disquietude. The grey-clad woman held it suspended in the hot room, piling mountainously up. But they sat enclosed, a closely locked party of two. Conversation was going on all over the room. This woman with her little deprecating frown at the idea of immediate departure, had the secret of the congregational aspect of audiences. Miriam sat still, passively surrendering to the forcible initiation into the new role of lingerer, to the extent of floundering through absent-minded responses.
“What?” she said suddenly, turning full round. Something had thrilled upon the air about her, bringing the whole evening to a head.
“Haldane’s Pathway to Reality” repeated the woman as their eyes met. Miriam was held by the intense radiance of the blue eyes. Light, strangely cool and pure, flowed from the still face. She was beautiful, with a curious impersonal glowless beauty. The light that came from her was the light of something she saw, habitually.
“But I ought not to recommend you to read. You ought to spend all your free time in the open air. Moreover, it’s very stiff reading.”
Miriam rose, beleaguered and flinching. How did people find out about books? Where did they get them from? This woman could not afford to buy big expensive volumes...... Why did her quick mind assume that the difficulty of the book would be a barrier, and not see that it was the one book she was waiting for, even if it were the stiffest and dryest in the world?...... But the titlewas unforgettable; one day she would come across the book somewhere and get at its meaning in her own way.
“Well; we may meet next week, if we are both early; I shall be early.” She rose enlivening her grey cloak with the swift grace of her movements and together they proceeded down the rapidly emptying room.
“My name is Lucie Duclaux.”
The shock of this unexpected advance arrested Miriam’s rapid flight towards the harbour of solitude. She smiled a formal acknowledgment, unable and entirely unwilling to identify herself with a name. Her companion, remaining close in her neighbourhood as they threaded their way amongst talking groups along the corridor, said nothing more, and when they reached the doorway Miriam’s determination to be free, kept her blind and dumb. She was aware of an exclamation about the rain. That was enough. She would not risk a parting intimate enough to suggest another meeting, with anyone who at the sight of rain, belaboured the air and the people about her, with an exclamation that was, however gracious and elegant, a deliberate assault, condemning her moreover of the possession of two voices...... Gathering up herLucie Duclaux cloak, the woman bowed swiftly and disappeared into the night.
The girls had understood that the evening had been a vital experience. But they had sat far away, seeming to be more than ever enclosed in their attitude of tolerant amusement at her doings; more than ever supporting each other in a manner thattold, with regard to herself, of some final unanimous conclusion reached and decision taken, after much discussion, once for all. In the old days they would have thought nothing of her dropping in at eleven o’clock at night, with no reason but that of just dropping in. But now, their armoury of detached expectancy demanded always that she should supply some pretext. To-night, feeling that the pretext was theirs, everyone’s, news too pressing to wait, she had rushed in unprepared, with something of her old certainty of welcome. It was so simple. Itmustbe important to Jan that what Hegel meant was only just beginning to be understood. If Jan’s acceptance of Haeckel made her sad, here was what she wanted; even though McHibbert said that we have no right to believe a theory because we could not be happy unless it were true...... All the same a theory that makes you miserable can’t be altogether true ......Miserable; not sorry. Everything depends upon the kind of man who sets up the theory ..... Pessimists can find as good reasons as optimists ..... but if the optimist is cheerful because he is healthy and the pessimist gloomy because ... everything is a matter of temperament. Neither of themsees that the fact of there being anything anywhere is more wonderful than any theory about the fact ...... making optimists and pessimists look exactly alike ...... then why was philosophy so fascinating?
“You will lose your colour, my child, and get protuberances on your brow.”
“What then?”
St. Pancras clock struck midnight as she reachedhome. The house was in darkness. She went noiselessly up the first two flights and forward, welcomed, towards the blue glimmer of street lamps showing through the open drawing-room door. It was long since she had seen the room empty. His absence had restored it to her in its old shadowy character; deep black shadows, and spaces of faint blue light that came in through the lace curtains, painting their patterned mesh on the sheen of the opposite walls. The old familiar presence was there in the hush of the night, dissolving the echoes of the day and promising, if she stayed long enough within it, the emergence of to-morrow, a picture, with long perspectives, seen suddenly in the distance, alone upon a bare wall. She stood still, moving rapidly into the neutral zone between the two days, further and further into the spaces of the darkness, until everything disappeared, and all days were far-off strident irrelevances, for ever unable to come between her and the sound of the stillness and its touch, a cool breath, passing through her unimpeded.
She could not remember whether she had first seen him rise or heard the deep tones coming out of the velvety darkness.
“No, you did not startle me. I’ve been to a lecture,” she said sinking in a sleep-like stupor into a chair drawn up beyond the light of the window, opposite his own, across which there struck a shaft of light falling, now that he was again seated, only on his face. Miriam gazed at him from within the sheltering darkness, fumbling sleepily for the way back to some lucid recovery of the event of her evening.
“Ah. It is a pity I could not be there.” His words broke into the stillness, an immensity of communication, thrown forward through their unrestricted sitting, in the darkness, where, to bridge, before to-morrow, the gap made by his evening’s absence, he had waited for her. She sat silent, her days once more wound closely about her, an endless hospitable chain.
“Tell me of this lecture.”
“Philosophy.”
“Tsa. It isindeeda pity.”
“It is a series” ... are you sitting there already involved in engagements ... cut off; changed ...
“Excellent. I shall most certainly come.” He was looking freely ahead. His evening had not interested him .... he had gone and come back, his horizons unenlarged .... but not seeing the impression he had made on those people; the steps they would take.
“It would be splendid for you. The lecturer’s Englishwonderful. The way the close thought made his sentences, fascinated me so much, that I often missed the meaning in listening to the rhythm; like a fugue.” Aren’t yougladyou’ve enlarged your horizons? Don’t you know what people are ... what you, a person, are to people? Are you a person? In a blankness, life streamed up in spirals, vanishing, leaving nothing ....
“That is not bad. Ah I should not have paid this visit. It was also in some respects most painful to me.” Poor little man, poor little lonely man white-faced and sensitive, in a world without individuals; grown and formed and wise withoutrealising an individual; never to realise. Audible within the darkness was a singing, hovering on spaces of warm rosy light.
“You must not regret your visit.”
“Regret no; it was much as I anticipated. But it is disheartening, this actual witnessing.” They were disposed of in some way; in one piece; he would have a formula.
“What are they like?”
“Quite as I expected; good simple people, kind and hospitable. I have been the whole evening there. Ah but it is sad for me this first meeting with English Jews.”
“Perhaps you can make Zionists of them.”
“That is absolutely impossible.”
“Did you talk to them about Zionism?”
“It is useless to talk to these people whose first pride is that they areBritish.”
“But they’renot.”
“You should tell them so. They will tell you they are British of the Jewish persuasion. Ah it has revolted me to hear them talk of this war, the British Empire, and the subject races.”
“I know; disgusting; but very British. But the British Empire has done a good deal for the Jews and I suppose the Jews feel loyal.”
“That is true. But what they do not see is that they are not, and never can be, British; that the British do not accept them as such.”
“That’s true I know; the general attitude; but there are no disabilities. The Jews are free in England.”
“They are free; to the honour of England in allhistory. But they are nevertheless Jews and not Englishmen. Those Jews who deny, or try to ignore this have ceased to be Jews without becoming Englishmen. The toleration for Jews, moreover, will last only so long as the English remain in ignorance of the immense and increasing power and influence of the Jew in this country. Once that is generally recognised, even England will have its antisemitic movement.”
“Never.England can assimilate anything. Look at the races that have been built into us in the past.”
“No nation can assimilate the Jew.”
“What about inter-marriages?”
“That is the minority.”
“If it was right to make a refuge for the Jews here it is still right and England will never regret it.”
“Believe me it is not so simple. Remember that British Jewry is perpetually and increasingly reinforced by immigration from those countries where Jews are segregated and ever more terribly persecuted. At present there is England, both for the Jewish speculator and the refugee pauper. But for those who look atfacts, the end of this possibility is in sight. The time for the closing of this last door is approaching.”
“I don’t believe England will ever do it. How can they? Where will the Jews go? It’s impossible to think of. It will be the end of England if we begin that sort of thing.”
“It may be the beginning of Jewish nationality. Ah at least this visit has reawakened all the Zionist in me.”
“It is a glorious idea.” His eveninghadbeen eventful; sending him back to the freshness of the days at Basel. It was then, she thought, at the moment he was bathed in the unceasing beauty of the surroundings, and immersed within it, in inextinguishable association with the students of the photographs, poised blissfully irresponsible in a permanent boundless beguilement, himself the most untouched of all, the most smoothly rounded, and elastically surrendered with his deep-singing, child-like confident face, that he had been touched and shaped and sent forth; his future set towards a single separate thing, the narrowest, strangest, most unknown of movements, far away from the wide European life that had flowed through his mind.
“It is a dream, far-off. In England hardly even that.” There was a blankness before him. Unconscious of his youth, and his radiating charm, distilled from the modern world; Frenchman, Russian, philosophical German-brained, he sat there white-faced, an old old Jew, immeasurably old, cut off, alone with his conviction, facing the blank spaces of the future. Why could he not be content to be a European? She swayed, dragging at the knot. In his deeply saturated intelligence there still was a balance on the side from which he had declared to his father, that he was first a man; then a Jew. By the accidents of living, this might be cherished. The voices of the night cried out against the treachery. She glanced remorsefully across at him and recognised with a sharp pang of pity, in his own eyes, the well-known eyes wide open towards the darkness where she sat invisible, the look he haddescribed ... wehmütig; in spite of his sheltered happy prosperous youth it was there; hebelongedto those millions whose sufferings he had revealed to her, a shadow lying for ever across the bright unseeing confidence of Europe, hopeless. And now, at this moment, standing out from their midst the strange beautiful Old Testament figure in modern clothes; the fine beautifully moulded Hebrew head, so like his own.....
“But itisextraordinary; that just when everything is at its worst, this idea should have arisen...... It’s all very well for people to laugh at Micawber.”
“Who is this man?”
“The man who is always waiting for something to turn up. Thingsdoturn up, exactly at the right moment. It doesn’t mean fatalism. I don’t believe in laisser-aller as a principle; but there is somethinginthings, something the people who make plans and think they are thinking out everything in advance, don’t know; their oblivion of it, while they go busily on knowing exactly what they are going to do and why, even at picnics, is a terrible thing. And somehow they always fail.”
“They do not by any means always fail. In all concerted action there must be a plan. Herzl is certainly a man with a plan.”
“Yes but it’s different; his ideaishis plan. It isn’tclever. And now that it is here it seems so simple. Why was it never put forward before?”
“The greatest ideas are always simple; though not in their resultants. This dream however, has always been present with Jews.”
“Of course. The Zionist Movement, coming now, when it is most wanted, is not altogether Herzl. It’s that strange thing, the thing that makes you stare, in history. A sort of shape ......”
“It is the collective pressure of life; an unseen movement. But if you feel this what now becomes of your individualism? Eh?” He chuckled his delight .... passing so easily and leisurely to personal things.
“Oh the shape doesn’t affect theindividual, in himself. There’s something behind all those outside things that goes on independently of them, something much more wonderful.”
“You are wrong. What you call the shape, affects most profoundly every individual in spite of himself.”
“But he must be an individual to be affected at all, and no two people are affected in the same way ...... after this evening I’m more of an individualist than before. It isreliefto know that science is a smaller kind of truth than philosophy. The real difficulty is not between science and religion at all, but between religion andphilosophy. Philosophy seems to think science assumes too much to begin with and can never get any further than usefulness.”
“Science can afford to smile at this.”
“And that religion is philosophically unsound, though modern religious controversy is metaphysical.”
“Allcontroversy depends from differences in estimation of term significations.”
“That’s why arguments are so maddening; evensmall discussions; people go rushing on, getting angrier and angrier, talking about quite different things, especially men, because they never want to get at the truth, only to score a point.”
“You are unjust; many men put truth before any other consideration whatsoever. It is not only unjust, it is most bad for you to hold this cynical estimation.”
“Well, men arguing always look like that to women. That’s why women always go off at a tangent; because they reply not to what mensaybut to what theymean, which is toscore a point, whichanybodycan do, with practice, and while they hold on to the point they mean to score, they are revealed, under all sorts of circumstances, all sorts of things about them are as plain as a pike-staff, to a woman, and the results of these things; so that she suddenly finds herself saying something that sounds quite irrelevant, but isn’t.”
“Nevertheless there is honourable controversy, and most fruitful.”
“There are people here and there with open minds. Very few.”
“The point is not the few, but that theyare.”
“The few just men, who save the city.”
“Exactly.”
“But even existence is not quite certain.”
“Whatis this?”
“Descartessaid, my existence is certain; that is a fallacy.”
“If this is a fallacy for metaphysic, so much the worse for metaphysic.”
“That is argumentum ad hominem.”
“I am not afraid of it.”
“But what can you put in place of metaphysic?”
“Life is larger.”
“I know. I know. I know. Something exists. Metaphysic admits that. I nearly shouted when Dr. McHibbert said that. It’s enough. It answers everything. Even to have seen it for a moment is enough. The first time I thought of it I nearly died of joy. Descartes should have said “I am aware that thereissomething, therefore I am.” If I am, other people are; but that does not seem to matter. That is their own affair.”
“Beware of solipsism.”
“I don’t care what it is called. It is certainty. Youmustbegin with the individual. There we are again.” There was an end to the conversation that could not be shared. The words of it already formed, intangibly, waited, ready to disappear, until she should be alone and could read them on a clear background. If she stayed they would disappear irrevocably. She rose, bidding him a hurried good-night, suddenly aware of the busily sleeping household, friendly guardian of this wide leisurely night-life. He too was aware and grateful, picking his way cautiously through the shadows of the large room, sheltered from his loneliness, invisibly enclosed by the waiting incommunicable statement that yet left him, accusing him of wilful blindness, so cruelly outside.
“Materialism” scribbled Miriam eagerly “has the recommendation of being a Monism, and therefore a more perfect explanation of the universe thana Dualism can be...... And Matter forms one great whole, persisting through many ages. Mind appears in the form of separate individuals, isolated from each other by Matter, and each ceasing, so far as observation goes, after a very few years. Also the changes which we can observe Mind to make in Matter are comparatively insignificant, while a very slight change in Matter will either destroy mind, or, at least, remove it from the only circumstances in which we can observe its existence. All these characteristics make matter appear much more powerful and important than mind.”
“I consider this a very strong reasoning” muttered Mr. Shatov.
“Ssh. Wait.” He was sitting intent, with an awakened youthful student’s face, meeting, through her agency, in England, a first-class intelligence. He would hear the beautiful building up, strophe and antistrophe, of the apparently unassailable argument, the pause, and then, in the same shapely cadences, its complete destruction, for ever, the pleasant face smiling at the audience above the ruins, like a child who has just shattered a castle of bricks.
“Idealism was weakened by being supposed to be bound up with certain theological doctrines which became discredited. All these things account for the great strength of materialism some years ago. There has been a reaction against this, but the extent of the reaction has been exaggerated.”
“Quite so.”
“Wait, wait.”
“It still remains the belief to which most peopletend on first leaving an unreflecting position. Andmany remain there. Science is a large element in our lives now, and if we try to make science serve as metaphysic, we get materialism. Nor is it to be wished—even by idealists—that materialism should become too weak. For idealism is seldom really vigorous except in those who have had a serious struggle with materialism...... It would be very difficult to disprove materialism, if we once accepted the reality of matter as a thing in itself. But, as we saw when considering dualism, such a reality of matter is untenable. And this conclusion is obviously more fatal to materialism than it was to dualism. And again, if materialism is true, all our thoughts are produced by purely material antecedents. These are quite blind, and are just as likely to produce falsehood as truth. We have thus no reason for believing any of our conclusions—including the truth of materialism, which is therefore a self-contradictory hypothesis.”
“I find this too easily stated.”
Then God isproved.....
“You weren’t herebefore. Philosophy is not difficult. It is common sense systematised and clarified.” .... wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein. It is not what people think but what they know. Thought is words. Philosophy will never find words to express life; the philosopher is the same as the criminal?
“He seems to say spirit when he meanslife.”
“Whatislife?”
“Moreover presentationism is incompatible with the truth of general propositions—and thereforewith itself, since it can only be expressed by a general proposition. And closer analysis shows that it is incompatible even with particular propositions, since these involve both the union of two terms and the use of general ideas.” People know this faintly when they say things; notwhy; but faintly everyone knows that nothing can be said. Then why listen any more? Because if you know, exactly, that nothing can be said and the expert reasons for it, you know for certain in times of weakness, how much there is that might be expressed if there were any way of expressing it ...... But there was no need to listen any more since God was proved by the impossibility of his absence, like an invisible star. No one seemed at all disturbed; the lecturer least of all. Perhaps he felt that the effects of real realisation would be so tremendous that he could not face them. The thought of no God made life simply silly. The thought of God made it embarrassing. If a hand suddenly appeared writing on the wall, what would he do? He would blush; standing there as a competitor, fighting for his theories, amongst the theories of other men. Yet if there were no philosophers, if the world were imagined without philosophy, there would be nothing but theology, getting more and more superstitious.
Everybody was socalm. The calmness of insanity. Nobody quite all there. Yet intelligent.Whatwere they all thinking about, wreathed in films of intelligent insanity; watching the performance in the intervals of lives filled with words that meant nothing ...... breath was more than words;the fact of breathing ... but everyone was in such a hurry.
“I would ask” ... one horrified glance revealed his profile quivering as he hesitated. A louder, confident, dictatorial English voice had rung out simultaneously from the other side of the hall. He would have to sit down, shaken by his brave attempt. But to the whole evening, the deep gentle tones had been added, welling through and beyond the Englishman’s strident, neat proclamation, and containing, surely everyone must hear it, so much of the answer to the essential question. The chairman hesitated, turned decisively and the other man sat down.
“What the lecturer makes of the psycho-physical parallelism?”
He drove home his question on a note of reproachful expostulation and sat down drawn together, with bent head and eye downcast, but listening intently with his serenely singing child’s brow. Miriam was instantly sorry that his words had got through, their naked definiteness changing the eloquent tone, sharpening it to a weapon, a borrowed weapon.
“That’s it” she breathed, hoping the lecturer’s answer would throw some light on the meaning of the fascinating phrase, floating before her, fresh from far-off philosophical battle-fields, bright from centuries of contemplation, flashing out now, to-day, in Europe triumphantly, in desperate encounters. The lecturer was on his feet, gleaming towards their centre of the audience his recognition of the clean thrust.
“The correlation between physical and mental gives an empirical support to materialism.” Thatcouldn’tbe spirited away. The scientistssworethere was no break; so convincingly; perhaps they would yet win and prove it. “But it is necessary to distinguish between metaphysic and psychology. Psychology, like physical science, is to be put to the score of our knowledge of matter.”
“In which he doesn’t believe” scoffed Miriam, distractedly poised between Mr. Shatov’s drama and the prospect opening within her mind.
“I find this a most arbitrary statement.”
“Yes,rather” murmured Miriam emphatically, and waited for a moment as if travelling with him along his line of thought. But he was recovering, had recovered, did not seem to be dwelling or moving in any relation to what he had said, appeared to be disinterestedly listening to the next question.
“Besides” she said, “the empirical method is a most important method, and jolly” .....
“Poor chap; what a stupidity is this question.” Miriam smiled solicitously, but she had travelled back enraptured across nine years to the day, now only yesterday, of her first meeting with her newly recovered word. Jevons. From the first the sienna brown volume had been wonderful, the only one of the English books that had any connection with life; and that day, Sunday afternoon prep in the dining-room, with the laburnum and pink may outside the window changing as she read from a tantalising reproach to a vivid encirclement of her being by all the spring scenes she had lived through,coming and going, the sight and scent and shimmering movement of them, as if she moved, bodiless and expanded, about in their midst. Something about the singing, lifting word appearing suddenly on the page, even before she had grasped its meaning, intensified the relation to life of the little hard motionless book, leaving it, when she had read on, centred round the one statement; the rest remaining in shadow, interesting but in some strange way ill-gotten.