ToF. E. W.
ToF. E. W.
REVOLVING LIGHTSCHAPTER I
REVOLVING LIGHTS
Thebuilding of the large hall had been brought about by people who gave no thought to the wonder of moving from one space to another and up and down stairs. Yet this wonder was more to them than all the things on which their thoughts were fixed. If they would take time to realise it. No one takes time. No one knows it.... But I know it.... These seconds of knowing, of being told, afresh, by things speaking silently, make up for the pain of failing to find out what I ought to be doing....
Away behind, in the flatly echoing hall, was the busy planning world of socialism, intent on the poor. Far away in to-morrow, stood the established, unchanging world of Wimpole Street, linked helpfully to the lives of the prosperous classes. Just ahead, at the end of the walk home, the small isolated Tansley Street world, full of secretive people drifting about on the edge of catastrophe, that would leave, when it engulfed them, no ripple on the surface of the tide of London life. In the space between thesesurrounding worlds was the everlasting solitude; ringing as she moved to cross the landing, with voices demanding an explanation of her presence in any one of them.
“Nowthat,” she quoted, to counter the foremost attack, “is a man who can be trusted to say what he thinks.”
That cloaked her before the clamorous silence. She was an observant intelligent woman; approved.Hewould never imagine that the hurriedly borrowed words meant, to her, nothing but a shadow of doubt cast across the earnest little socialist. But they carried her across the landing. And here, at the head of the stairs, was the show case of cold Unitarian literature. Yet another world. Bright, when she had first become aware of it, with freedom from the problem of Christ, offering, until she had met its inhabitants face to face, a congenial home. Sending her away, at a run, from cold humorous intellectuality. She paused in front of the case, avoiding the sight of the well-known, chilly titles of the books, to read what had gathered in her mind during the evening.
A group of people who had come out just behind her were going down the stairs arguing in high-pitched, public platform voices from the surfaces of their associated minds. Not saying what they thought. Not thinking. Strong and controlled enough to keep within pattern of clever words. Most of them had been born to it. Born on the stage of clever words, which yet meant nothing to them. But to one ortwo people in the society these wordsdidmean something....
Nothing came after they had passed but the refrain that had been the mental accompaniment of her listening throughout the evening, stepping forth now as part of a high-pitched argumentative to and fro. Her part, if she could join in and shout them all down. Sounding irrelevant and yet coming right down to earth, one small part of a picture puzzle set in place ... a clue.
“Any number of barristers,” she vociferated in her mind, going on down the shallow stair, “take upjournalism. Get into Parliament. On thestrengthof being both educated andarticulate. Weapons, giving an unfair advantage. The easy touch of prominence. Only a good nervous system wanted. They are psychologists. Up to a point. Enough to convince nice busy people, rushing through life without time to bethink themselves. Enough to alarm and threaten and cajole. They can raise storms; in newspapers. And brandish about byname, at their centres, like windmills, kept going by the wind of their psychological cheap-jackery. Yes, sir. Psychological cheap-jackery.... Purple-faced John Bull paterfamilias. Paterfamiliarity. Avenging his state by hitting out.... With an eye for a pretty face....
The little man had noaxeto grind. That was the only test. An Englishman, and a barrister, and yet awake to foreign art. His opaque English temperament not weakened by it; but worn a little transparent. He wouldbe silent in an instant before a superior testimony.
He did not count on anything. When Socialism came, he would be placed in an administrative post, and would fill it quietly, working harder than ever.
He brought the future nearer because he already moved within it; by being aware of things most men did not consider; aware ofrelationships: possibly believing in God, certainly in the soul.
Modern man, individually, is in many respects less capable than primitive man. Evolution is related development. Progress towards social efficiency. Benjamin Kidd.
“These large speculations are most-fatiguing.”
“No. When you see truth in them they are refreshing. They are all there is. All I live for now, is the arrival in my mind, of fresh generalisations.”
“That is good. But remember also that these things cost life.”
“What does it matter what they cost? A shape of truth makes you at the moment want to die, full of gratitude and happiness. It fills everything with a music to which youcoulddie. The next piece of life comes as a superfluity.”
“Le superflu; chose nécessaire.”
At the foot of the stairs stood the yellow street-light, framed in the oblong of the doorway. She went out into its shelter. The large grey legalbuildings that stood by day a solid, dignified pile against the sky, a whole remaining region of the pride of London, showed only their lower façades, near, gentle frontages of mellow golden light and soft rectangular shadow, just above the brightly gilded surface of the deserted roadway. For a moment she stood listening to the reflection of the fostering light and breathing in the dry warm freshness of the London night air.
The illuminated future faded. The street lights of that coming time might throw their rays more liberally, over more beautiful streets. But something would be lost. In a world consciously arranged for the good of everybody there would be something personal ... without foundation ... like a nonconformist preacher’s smile. The pavements of these streets that had grown of themselves, flooded by the light of lamps rooted like trees in the soil of London, were more surely pavements of gold than those pavements of the future?
They offered themselves freely; the unfailing magic that would give its life to the swing of her long walk home, letting her leave without regret the earlier hidden magic of the evening, the thoughts that had gathered in her mind whilst she listened, and that had now slipped away unpondered, leaving uppermost the outlines of the lecture to compete with the homeward walk. The surrounding golden glow through which she could always escape into the recovery of certainty, warned her not to return upon thelecture. But she could not let all she had heard disappear unnoted, and postponed her onward rush, apologising for the moments about to be spent in conning over the store of ideas. In an instant the glow had gone, miscarried like her private impressions of the evening. The objects about her grew clear; full of current associations; and she wondered as her mind moved back across the linked statements of the lecture, whether these were her proper concern, or yet another step upon a long pathway of transgression. She was grasping at incompatible things, sacrificing the bliss of her own uninfluenced life to the temptation of gathering things that had been offered by another mind. Things to which she had no right?
But all the things of the mind that had come her way had come unsought; yet finding her prepared; so that they seemed not only her rightful property, but also in some way, herself. The proof was that they had passed her sisters by, finding no response; but herself they had drawn, often reluctant, perpetually escaping and forgetting; out on to a path that it sometimes seemed she must explore to the exclusion of everything else in life, exhaustively, the long way round, the masculine way. It was clearly not her fault that she had a masculine mind. If she must pay the penalties, why should she not also reap the entertainments?
Still, it wasstrange, she reflected, with a consulting glance at the returning brilliance, that without any effort of her own, so very manydifferent kinds of people and thoughts should have come, one after the other, as if in an ordered sequence, into the little backwater of her life. What for? To what end was her life working by some sort of inner arrangement? To turn, into a beautiful distance outspread behind her as she moved on? What then?
For instance, the sudden appearance of the revolutionaries just at this moment, seemed so apt. She had always wanted to meet revolutionaries, yet had never gone forth to seek them. Since her contact with socialists, she had been more curious about them than ever. And here they were, on their way to her, just as the meaning and some of the limitations of socialism were growing distinct. Yet it was absurd to suppose that their visit to England, in the midst of their exciting career, should have been timed to meet her need. Nor would they convince her. The light that shone about them was the anticipation of a momentary intense interest that would leave her a step farther on the lonely wandering that so distracted her from the day’s work, and kept her family and the old known life at such an immeasurable distance. It was her ruling devil who had just handed her, punctually on the eve of their arrival, material for conversation with revolutionaries.
But it also seemed to be the mysterious friend, her star, the queer strangeluckthat dogged her path always reviving happiness, bringing a sudden joy when there was nothing to account for it,plunging her into some new unexpected thing at the very moment of perfect hopelessness. It was like a game ... something was having a game of hide and seek with her. She winked, smiling, at the returned surrounding glow, and turned back to run up and down the steps of the neglected argument.
It was clear in her mind. Freed from the fascinating distraction of the little man’s mannerisms, it spread fresh light, in all directions, tempering the golden light of the street; showing, beyond the outer darkness of the night, the white radiance of the distant future. Within the radiance, troops of people marched ahead, with springing footsteps; the sound of song in their ceaselessly talking voices; the forward march of a unanimous, light-hearted humanity along a pathway of white morning light.... The land of promise that she would never see; not through being born too soon, but by being incapable of unanimity. All these people had one mind. They approved of each other and were gay in unity.
The spectacle of their escape from the shadows lessened the pain of being left behind. Perhaps even a moment’s contemplation of the future helped to bring it about? Every thought vibrates through the universe. Then there was absolution in thought, even from the anger of everlastingly talking people, contemptuous of silence and aloofness. And there was unity with the future.
The surrounding light glowed with a richerintensity. Flooded through her, thrilling her feet to swiftness.
If the revolutionaries could be with her now, they would find in her something of the state towards which they were violently straining? They would pause and hover for a moment, with half envious indulgence. But sooner or later they would say things about robust English health; its unconsciousness of its surroundings.
Themysteryof being English. Mocked at for stupidity and envied for having something that concerned the mocking people of the two continents and challenged them to discover its secret.
But by to-morrow night she would have nothing but the little set of remembered facts, dulled by the fatigue of her day’s work. These would save her, for the one evening, from appearing as the unintelligent Englishwoman of foreigner’s experience. But they would also keep out the possibility of expressing anything.
Even the bare outlines of socialism, presented suddenly to unprepared English people, were unfailing as a contribution to social occasions. They forced everyone to look at the things they had taken for granted in a new light, and to remember, together with the startling picture, the person who first drew it for them. But to appear before these Russians talking English socialism was to be nothing more than a useful person in uniform.
Whatwasthe immediate truth that shone,independent of speculation, all about her in the English light; the only thing worth telling to enquiring foreigners?
It was there at once when she was alone, or watching other people as an audience, or as an uncommitted guest, expressing in a great variety of places different sets of opinions. It was there radiant, obliterating her sense of existence, whenever she was in the midst of things kept going by other people. It could be given her by a beggar, purposefully crossing a street ... not ‘pitiful,’ as he was so carelessly called—but something that shook her with gratitude to the roots of her being. But the instant she was called upon there came the startled realisation of being in the world, and the sense of nothingness, preceding and accompanying every remark she might make.
One opinion self-consciously stated made the light go down. Immediate substitution of the contrary, produced a chill followed by darkness....Mencalled out these contradictory statements, each one with his way of having only one set of opinions.
How powerful these Russians were, in advance, making her count herself up. If she saw much of them she would fail and fade into nothing under the Russian test. If there were only one short interview she might escape unknown, and knowing all the things about Russian revolutionaries that Michael Shatov had left incomplete.
Their scornful revolutionary eyes watched herglance about amongst her hoard of contradictory ideas. Statements about different ways of looking at things were irrelevancies that perhaps with Russians might be abandoned altogether. Yet to appear before them empty-handed, hidden in her earlier uninfluenced personality, would be not to meet them at all. Personal life to them was nothing, could be summed up in a few words, the same for everybody. They lived for an idea.
She offered them a comprehensive glimpse of the many pools of thought in which she had plunged, rising from each in turn, to recover the bank and repudiate; unless a channel could be driven, that would make all their waters meet. They laughed when she cried out at the hopelessness of uniting them. “All these things are nothing.”
But a revolutionary is a man who throws himself into space. In Russia there is nowhere else to throw himself? That would do as an answer to their criticisms of English socialism. She could say also that conservatives are the best socialists; being liberal-minded. Most socialists were narrow and illiberal, holding on to liberal ideas. The aim of the Lycurgans, alone amongst the world’s socialists, was to show the English aristocracy and middle classes that they were, still, socialists.
Therewerethings in England. But they struggled at cross purposes, refusing to get into a shape that would draw one,whole, along with it. But there were things in England with truthshining behind them. English people did not shine. But something shone behind them. Russians shone. But there was nothing behind them. There were things in England. She offered them the contents of books. They were as real as the pools of experience. Yet they, too, were irreconcilable.
A little blue-lit street; lamps with large round globes, shedding moonlight; shadows, grey and black. She had somehow got into the west-end—a little west-end street, giving out its character. She went softly along the middle of the blue-lit glimmering roadway, narrow between the narrow pavements skirting the high façades, flat and grey, broken by shadowy pillared porticoes; permanent exits and entrances on the stage of the London scene; solid lines and arches of pure grey shaping the flow of the pageant, and emerging, when it ebbed away, to stand in their own beauty, conjuring back the vivid tumult to flow in silence, a continuous ghostly garland of moving shapes and colours, haunting their self-sufficient calm.
Within the stillness she heard the jingling of hansoms, swinging in morning sunlight along the wide thoroughfares of the west-end; saw the wide leisurely shop-fronts displaying in a restrained profusion, comfortably within the experienced eye half turned to glance from a passing vehicle, all the belongings of west-end life; on the pavements, the trooping succession of masked life-moulded forms, their unobservant eyes, aware of the resources all about them, at gaze upontheir continuous adventure, yesterday still with them as they came out, in high morning light, into the adventure of to-day. Campaigners, sure of their weapons in the gaily decked mêlée, and sure every day of the blissful solitude of the interim times.
For as long as she could remember she had known something of their secret. During the years of her London life she had savoured between whiles the quality of their world, divined its tests and passwords, known what kept their eyes unseeing and their speech clipped to a jargon.
Best of all was the illumination that had come with her penetration of the mystery of their attitude towards directquestions. There was something here that had offered her again and again a solution of the problem of social life, a safeguard of individuality. Here it was once more, a still small voice urging that every moment of association would be transformed if she would only remember the practice the technique revealed by her contemplation of this one quality. Always to be solid and resistent; unmoved. Having no opinions and only one enthusiasm—to be unmoved. Momentary experiments had proved that the things that were about her in solitude could be there all the time. But forgetfulness always came. Because most people brought their worlds with them, their opinions, and the set of things they believed in; forcing in the end direct questions and disagreements. And most people were ready to answer questions,showing by their angry defence of their opinions that they were aware, and afraid, of other ways of looking at things. But these society people did not seem to be aware of anything but their one world. Perhaps that was why their social method was not able to hold her for long together.
“Is this the way to Chippenham?” Buteveryonedelights in telling the way. It brings the teller out into adventure; with his best self and his best moments all about him. The surroundings are suddenly new with life, and beautiful like things seen in passing, on a journey. English people delight because they are adventurous. They prolong the moment, beaming and expanding, and go on their way refreshed. Foreigners, except perhaps Germans, answer differently. Obsequiously; or with a studied politeness that turns the occasion into an opportunity for the display of manners; or indifferently, with a cynical suggestion that they know what you are like, and that you will be the same when you reach your destination. They are themselves, without any fulness or wonder. English people are always waiting to be different, to be fully themselves. Strangers, to them, are gods and angels.
But it is another kind of question that is meant, the question that is a direct attack on the unseeing gaze; a speech to the man at the wheel. That is where, without knowing it, these people are philosophers. What Socrates saw, answered all his questions; and his counterings of the youngmen’s questions were invitations to them to look for themselves. The single world these people see is, to them, so unquestionable that there is no room for question. Nothing can be communicated except the latest news; and scandal; information about people who have gone outside the shape. But, to each other, even their statements are put in the form of questions. “Fine day, what?” So that everyone may be not questioned, but questioner. It is also a sort of apology for falling into speech at all.
It was Michael Shatov’s amused delight in her stories of their method that had made her begin to cherish them as a possession. Gradually she had learned that irritation with their apparent insolence was jealousy. Within her early interested unenvious sallies of investigation amongst the social élite of the Wimpole Street patients, or as a fellow guest amongst the Orlys’ society friends, there had been moments of longing to sweep away the defences and discountenance the individual. But gradually the conviction had dawned that with the genuine members of the clan this could not be done. Their quality went right through, shedding its central light, a brightness that could not be encircled, over the whole of humanity. They disarmed attack, because in their singleness of nature they were not aware of anything to defend. They had no contempts; not being specially intellectual; and, crediting everyone with their own condition, they reached to the sources of nobility in all with whom they came in contact. It wasrefreshment and joy merely to be in the room with them. But also it was an arduous exercise. They brought such a wide picture and so long a history. They were England. The world-wide spread of Christian England was in their minds; and to this they kindled, more than to any personal thing.
The existence of these scattered few, explained those who were only conventional approximations....
To-night, immersed in the vision of a future that threatened their world, she found them one and all bright figures of romance. She sped as her footsteps measured off the length of the little street, into the recesses, the fair and the evil, of aristocratic English life, and affectionately followed the small bright freely moving troupe as it spread in the past and was at this moment spreading, abroad over the world, the unchangeable English quality and its attendant conventions.
The books about these people are not satisfactory.... Those that show them as a moral force, suggest that they are the fair flower of a Christian civilisation. But a Christian civilisation would be abolishing factories.... Lord Shaftesbury ... Arnold’s barbarian idea made a convincing picture, but it suggested in the end, behind his back, that there was something lacking in the Greeks. Most of the modern books seemed to ridicule the English conventions, and choose the worst types of people for their characters.
But inallthe books about these people, even in novelettes, the chief thing they all left out, was there. They even described it, sometimes so gloriously that it becamemorethan the people; making humanity look like ants, crowding and perishing as a vast scene. Generally the surroundings were described separately, the background on which presently the characters began to fuss. But they were never sufficiently shown as they were to the people when there was no fussing; what the floods of sunshine and beauty indoors and out meant to these people as single individuals, whether they were aware of it or not. The ‘fine’ characters in the books, acting on principle, having thoughts, and sometimes, the less likeable of them, even ideas, were not shown as being made strong partly by endless floods of sunshine and beauty. The feeble characters were too much condemned for clutching, to keep, at any price within the charmed circle....
The antics of imitators, all down the social scale, were wrongly condemned.
Buthere, in this separate existence,wasa shape that could draw her, whole, along with it ... and here suddenly, warmly about her in its evening quiet, was the narrow winding lane of Bond Street.... Was this bright shape, that drew her, the secret of her nature ... the clue she had carried in her hand through the maze?
It would explain my love for kingly old Hanover, the stately ancient house in Waldstrasse;the way the charm of the old-fashioned well-born Pernes held me so long in the misery of North London; the relief of getting away to Newlands, my determination to remain from that time forth, at any cost, amidst beautiful surroundings...? Though life has drawn me away these things have stayed with me. They were with me through the awful months.... Ifshehad been able to escape into the beauty of outside things, it would not have happened.
It was not the fear of being alone with the echoes of the tragedy that made me ill in suburban lodgings, but the small ugliness and the empty crude suburban air; the knowledge that if I stayed and forgot its ugliness in happiness it would mould me unawares. My drifting to the large old house in grey wide Bloomsbury was a movement of return.
Then I am attached forever to the spacious gentle surroundings in which I was born? Always watching and listening and feeling for them to emerge? My social happiness dependent upon the presence of some suggestion of its remembered features, my secret social ambition its perfected form in circumstances beyond my reach?...
No. There was something within her that could not tolerate either the people or the thoughts existing within that exclusive world. In the silences that flowed about its manifold unvarying expressions, she would always find herself ranging off into lively consciousnessof other ways of living, whose smiling mystery defied its complacent patronage.... It drew only her nature, the ease and beauty loving soul of her physical being, and that only in critical contemplation. She would never desire to bestir herself to achieve stateliness.
So that the faraway moment of being driven forth seemed to bear two meanings. It was life’s stupid error, a cruel blind destruction of her helpless youth. At this moment if it were possible she would reverse it and return. During all these years she had been standing motionless, fixed tearfully in the attitude of return. The joy she had found in her invisible life amongst the servants was the joy of remaining girt and ready for the flight of return, her original nature stored up and hidden behind the adopted manner of her bondage.
Or it was life’s wisdom, the swift movement of her lucky star, providence pouncing. And providence, having seized her indolent blissful protesting form and flung it forth with a laugh, had continued to pamper her with a sense of happiness that bubbled unexpectedly out in the midst of her utmost attempts to achieve misery by a process of reason.
It is my strange bungling in misery that makes everyone seem far off. A perpetual oblivion not only of my own circumstances, but, at the wrong moments, of those of other people, makes me disappoint and shock them, suddenly disappearing before their eyes in the midst of a sympathy that they had eagerlyseemed to find satisfying and rare.... A light frivolous elastic temperament? A helpless going to and fro between two temperaments. A solid charwomanly commonplace kindliness, spread like a doormat at the disposal of everybody, and an intermittent perfect dilettantism that would disgust even the devil?
That washistemperament? The quality that had made him gravitate, unaided, towards exclusive things, was also in her. But weaker, because it was less narrow? He had thrown up everything for leisure to wander in the fields of art and science and philosophy; shutting his eyes to the fact of his diminishing resources. She, with no resources at all, had dropped to easy irresponsible labour to avoid being shaped and branded, to keep her untouched strength free for a wider contemplation than he would have approved, a delight in everything in turn, aplebeiandilettantism, aware and defensive of the exclusive things, but unable to restrict herself to them, unconsciously from the beginning resisting the drawing of lines and setting up of oppositions? More and more consciously ranged on all sides simultaneously. Morecatholic. That was the other side of the family. But if with his temperament and his sceptical intuitive mind, she had also the nature of the other side of the family what a hopeless problem.... If she belonged to both, she was the sport of opposing forces that would never allow her to alight and settle. The movement of her life would be like a pendulum. No wonder people foundher unaccountable. But being her own solitary companion would not go on forever. It would bring in the end, somewhere about middle age, the state that people called madness.... Perhaps the lunatic asylums were full of people who had refused to join up? There were happy people in them? “Wandering” in their minds. But remembering and knowing happiness all the time? In dropping to nothingness they escaped forever into that state of amazed happiness that goes on all the time underneath the strange forced quotations of deeds and words.
Oxford Street opened ahead, right and left, a wide empty yellow-lit corridor of large shuttered shop-fronts. It stared indifferently at her outlined fate.
Even at night it seemed to echo with the harsh sounds of its oblivious conglomerate traffic. Since the high light-spangled front of the Princess’s Theatre had changed, there was nothing to obliterate the permanent sense of the two monstrous streams flowing all day, fierce and shattering, east and west. Oxford Street, unless she were sailing through it perched in sunlight on the top of an omnibus lumbering steadily towards the graven stone of the City, always wrought destruction, pitting its helpless harshness against her alternating states of talkative concentration and silent happy expansion. Going west itwasdestruction; forever approaching the west-end, reaching its gates and passing them by.
Stay here, suggested Bond Street. Walking here you can keep alive, out in the world, until the end, an aged crone, still a citizen of my kingdom, hobbling in the sun, along my sacred pavements. She turned gladly, encompassing the gift of the whole length of the winding lane with a plan of working round through Soho, to cross Oxford Street painlessly where it blended with St. Giles’s, and would let her through northwards into the squares. The strange new thoughts were about her the moment she turned back. They belonged to these old, central finely etched streets where they had begun, a fresh proof of her love for them; a new enrichment of their charm.
Whatever might be the truth about heredity, it was immensely disturbing to be pressed upon by two families, to discover, in their so different qualities, the explanation of herself. The sense of existing merely as a link, without individuality, was not at all compensated by the lifting, and distribution backwards, of responsibility. To be set in a mould, powerless to alter its shape ... to discover, too late for association and enquiry, the people she helplessly belonged to. Yet the very fact that young people fled their relatives, was an argument on the side of individuality. But not all fled their relatives. Perhaps only those of St. Paul’s evil generation, “lacking in natural affection.”
She glanced narrowly, with a curiosity that embarrassment could no longer hold back, ather father’s side of the family, and while she waited for them to fall upon her and wrathfully consume her, she met the shock of a surprise that caught her breath. They did notobject. Boldly faced, in the light of her new interest, the vividly remembered forms, paintings and photographs almost as vividly real, came forward and grouped themselves about her as if mournfully glad at last of the long-deferred opportunity. They offered, not themselves, but what they saw and knew, holding themselves withdrawn, rigorously in place about the centre of their preoccupation. Yet theywerepersonal. The terrible gentleness with which they asked her why for so long she had kept aloof from consultation with them, held a personal appeal that made her glow. Deeply desiring it, she held herself away from the solicited familiarity in a stillness of fascinated observation.
They werePuritans.... More wonderful than she had known in thinking of them as nonconformists, a disgrace her father had escaped together with the trade he had abandoned in youth. They were the Puritans she had read of; but not Cromwellian, certainly not Roundheads. Though they were tall and gaunt with strongly moulded features, their thoughtless, generous English ancestry showed in them, moulded by their sternness to a startling ...beauty. They had well-shaped hands, alive and speaking amongst their rich silks and fine old laces. They wore with a dignified austerity, but still they wore, and must therefore havethought about, silk and lace and broadcloth and fine frilled linen, as well as the sin in themselves and in the world. But principally they were aware of sin, gazing with stern meditative eyes, through the pages of their gloomily bound books, into the abyss yawning at their feet. She held herself in her place, growing bolder, longing now for parley with their silent resistance, disguising nothing, offering them pell-mell, the least suitable of her thoughts. But the eyes they turned on her, still dreadfully begging her to remember now, in the days of her youth, were kind, lit by a special smiling indulgence.... Their strong stern lives, full of the knowledge of experience, that had led down to her, had made themkind. However far she might stray, she was still their favourite, their different stubby round-faced darling, never to be condemned to the abyss. Listening as they called to their part in her, she shared the salvation they had wrought ... salvage ... of hard fine lives, reared narrowly, in beauty, above the gulf.
Yet it was also from their incompleteness that they called to her; thedarknessin them, visible in the air about them as they moved, that she had always feared and run away from. The thought of the stern gaunt chairs in which they sat and died of old age was horrible even at this moment, and now that she no longer feared them, she knew, though she felt a homesick longing for their stern righteousness, that it was incomplete. The pressing darkness keptthem firm, fighting the devil every inch of the way....
But the devil was not dark, he was bright. Brightest and best of the sons of the morning. What shocking profanity. Something has made me drunk. I am always drunk in the west-end. Satan was proud. God revenged himself. Revengeful, omnipotent, jealous, “the first of the autocrats.” ...
There was a glory hidden in that old darkness, but they did not know it; though they followed it. Accepting them, plunging into their darkness she would never be able to keep from finding the bright devil and wandering wrapt in gloom, but forgetful, perpetually in the bright spaces within the darkness. And perhaps it was God. Impossible to say. Religious people shunned the bright places believing them haunted by the devil. Other religious people believed they were the gift of God and would presently be everywhere, for everybody, the kingdom of God upon Earth. But even if factories were abolished and the unpleasant kinds of work shared out so that they pressed upon nobody, how could the Kingdom of Heaven come upon earth as long as there were childbirth and cancer?
Light makesshadows. The devil is God’s shadow? The Persians believed that in the end the light would absorb the darkness. That was credible. But it could never happen on earth. That was where the Puritans were right with their vale of tears, and why theywere more deeply attractive than the other side of the family. Their roots in life were deeper and harder and the light from the Heavenly City fell upon their foreheadsbecausethey struggled in the gloom. If only they knew what the gloom was, the marvel of its being there. They were solemn and reproachful because they could not get at their own gaiety....
The others weretoojolly, too much turned out towards life, deliberately cheerful and roystering, not aware of the wonder and beauty of gloom, yet more dreadfully haunted and afraid of it, showing its uncomprehended presence by always deliberately driving it away. They spread gloom about them, by their perpetual impatient cheerfulness, afraid to listen and look. Their wild spirits were tragic, bright tragedy, making their country life sound in the distance like one long maddening unbroken noise, afraid to stop, rushing on, taking everything for granted, and troubling about nothing. People who lived in the countryweredifferent. Fresh. All converted by their surroundings into perpetual noise? The large spaces gave them large rich voices ... rounded sturdy west country yeomen, blunt featured and jolly, with big voices. Jesting with women. The women all dark and animated ... arch ... minxes. Any amount of flirting. All the scandals of the family were on that side. Girls, careering, with flying hair, round paddocks, on unbroken bare-backed ponies. Huge families.Hunting. Great Christmas and Harvest parties. Maypoles in the spring. They always saw the spring, every year without fail. Perhaps that was their secret? Wherever they were they saw nothing but dawn and spring, the light coming from the darkness. They shouted against the darkness because they knew the light was hidden in it. If you’re waking, call me early, call me early ...
So ear-ly in, the mor-ning,My Belo-vedMyBeloved.
So ear-ly in, the mor-ning,My Belo-vedMyBeloved.
So ear-ly in, the mor-ning,My Belo-vedMyBeloved.
So ear-ly in, the mor-ning,
My Belo-ved
MyBeloved.
Thosewomen’s voices pealed out into the wakening air of pure silver dawns. The chill pure dawn and dark over the fields where L’Allegro walked in her picture, the dewy dawn-lit grass under her white feet, her hair blown softly back by the morning breeze flowing over her dawn-lit face, shaping her garments to her happy limbs as she walked dancing, towards the increasing light. Little pools and clumps of wet primroses over the surface of the grey-green grass, flushed with rose, like her glowing dancing face as she skimmed, her whole bright form pealing with song towards theincreasing light. Was that sort of life still going on somewhere?
Yet Il Penserosoknewand L’Allegro did not.
Long-featured Sarah was on the Puritan side, with a strain of the artist, drawn fromthe other half, tormenting her. Eve, delicately and unscrupulously adventurous, was the west country side altogether.
Within me ... thethirdchild, the longed-for son, the two natures, equally matched, mingle and fight? It is their struggle that keeps me adrift, so variously interested and strongly attracted, now here, now there? Which will win?... Feeling so identified with both, she could not imagine either of them set aside. Then her lifewouldbe the battle field of her two natures. Which of them had been thrilled through and through, so that she had seemed to enter, lightly waving her hand to all that had gone before, for good, into a firelit glow, the door closing behind her, and leaving her launched, without her belongings, but richly accompanied, on a journey to the heart of an unquenchable joy? It was not socialism that had drawn her, though the moment before, she had been, spontaneously a socialist, for the first time. The glow that had come with his words was still there, drawing her, an unfulfilled promise. She was still waiting to be, consciously, in league and everlasting company with others, a socialist. Yet the earlier lonely moment had been so far her only experience of the state; everything that had followed had been a slow gradual undoing of it.
What was the secret of the immense relief, the sense of being and doing in an unbounded immensity that had come with her dreamy sudden words? One moment sitting on thehearth-rug living in the magic of the woven text, feeling its message rise from the quiet firelit room, drive through the sound of the winter sea and out and away over the world, to everyone who had ears to hear; giving the power of hearing to those who had not, until they equally possessed it. And then hearing her own voice, like a whisper in the immensity, thrilled with the sense of a presented truth, cominggiven, suddenly, from nowhere, the glad sense of a shape whose denial would be death, and bringing as she dreamily followed its prompting, a willingness to suffer in its service.
“You ought to cut out the pathos in that passage.”
“Whichpassage, Miriametta?” The effort of throwing off the many distractions of the interested, mocking, critical voice.
“You weaken the whole argument by coming forward in those three words to tell your readers what they ought to feel. Anenormousamount of time is lost, while attention is turned from the spectacle to yourself.”
“Yes.Whichpassage?”
“In the moment that the reader turns away, everything goes, and they come back distracted and different, having been racing all over their own world, perhapsindifferent.”
“Passage, passage——”
“Therealtruth is that you don’t feel that pathos to yourself, or not in that way and in those words ... there are one or two earlierpassages that stopped me, the same sort of thing.”
“Right. We’ll have’m all out.”
“Without them the book will convince everybody.”
“No sane person can read it and keep out of socialism.”
“No.” But how fearful that sounds said by the author. As if he knew something else as well.
“Y’knowyouought to be a Lycurgan, Miriam.” And then had come the sense of the door closing on all past loneliness, the rich sense of being carried forward to some new accompanied moulding change; but without any desire to go. Even with him, a moment of expression, seeming, while it lasted, enough in itself; the whole of life, when it happened not alone, but in an understanding presence; led toresults, the destructive demand for the pinning of it down to some small shape of specialised action. Could he not see that the thing so surprising her and coming to him also as a surprise, was enough in itself ... would disappear if she rushed forward into activities, masquerading, with empty hands, as one who had something to give. Yethewas going forward into activities.... She ought, having learned from him a clear theory of the working of the whole of human life, to be willing to follow, only too glad of the opportunity of any sort of share, even as an onlooker in the making of the new world.
But if she responded, she would be supporting his wrong estimate of her, his way of endowing everyone with his own gifts, seeing people only as capability, waiting for opportunities for action. She wanted only further opportunities with him, of forgetfulness, and the strange following moments of expression.
“Everyone will be socialists soon; there’s no need to join societies.”
“There’s mountains, my dear Miriam,mountainsof work ahead, that only an organised society can compass. And you’d like the Lycurgans. We’ll make you a Lycurgan.”
“What could I do?”
“You can talk. You might write. Edit. You’ve got a deadly critical eye. Yes, you are a Lycurgan. That’s settled.”
“Howcanyou say I can talk?”
“You’ve got atenacity. I’d back you against anyone in argument, when you’re roused.”
“Argument is no good to anybody, world without end, amen.”
“Don’t be frivolous, Miriam. Real argument’s a fine clean weapon.”
“Cutting both ways; provinganything.”
“Quarrelsome Miriam.”
“And you know what you think about my writing. That I, oranybodycouldlearnto write, passably.”
“If youhavewritten anything, I’ve not seen it. You shall learn to write, passably, in the interests of socialism.”
What an awful fate. To sit in a dusty corner,loyally doing odd jobs, considered by him “quite a useful intelligent creature” among other much more clever, and to him, more attractive creatures, all working submissively in the interests of a theory that he understood so well that he must already be believing in something else. But she was already a useful fiercely loyal creature, that was how he described her, at Wimpole Street——But that was for the sake of freedom. Working with him there would be no freedom at all. Only a series of loyal posings.
Standing upon the footstool to get out, back, away from the wrong turning into the sense of essential expression. The return into the room of the sound of the sea, empty and harsh, in a void.
“That’s admirable. You could carry off any number of inches, Miriam. You only want the helmet and the trident. You’re Britannia, you know. The British Constitution. You’re infinitely more British than I am.”
“Foreigners always tell me I am the only English person who understands them.”
“Flattery.You’ve noideahow British you are. A mass of British prejudice and intelligent obstinacy. I shall put you in a book.”
“Then how can you want me to be a socialist. I am a Tory and an anarchist by turns.”
“You’re certainly an anarchist. You’re an individualist you know, that’s what’s wrong with you.”
“And what’s wrong withyou?”
“And now you shall experiment in being a socialist.”
“Tories are the best socialists.”
“You shall be a Tory socialist. My dear Miriam, there will be socialists in the House ofLords.”
The same group of days had contained the relief of the beginning of generalisations; the end, on her part, of stories about people, told with an eye upon his own way of observing and stating. These stories had, during the earlier time, kept him so amused and, with his profane comments and paraphrases, so perpetually entertaining, that a large part of her private councils during the visits were spent in reviewing the long procession of Tansley Street boarders, the patients at Wimpole Street, and people ranged far away in her earlier lives, as material for anecdote. But throughout the delight of his interest and his surprising reiterated envy of the variety of her contacts, there had been a haunting sense of misrepresentation, and even of treachery to him, in contributing to his puzzling almost unvarying vision of people as pitifully absurd, from the small store of experiences she had dropped and forgotten, until he drew them forth and called them wealth.
His refusal to believe in a Russian’s individuality because no one had heard of him had set a term to these communications, leaving an abrupt pain. It was so strange that he should fail to recognise the distinction of the Russianbeing, the quality of the Russian attitude towards life. He had followed with interest, gentle and patient at first before her overwhelming conviction, allowing her to add stroke after stroke to her picture, seeming for a moment to see what she saw and then——What has hedone? Either it was that his pre-arranged picture of European life had no place for these so different, inactive Russians, or her attempts to represent people in themselves, without borrowed methods of portrayal, were useless because they fell between the caricature which was so uncongenial to her and the methods of description current in everyday life, which equally refused to serve by reason of their tacit reference to ideas she could not accept.
But the beginnings of abstract discussion had brought a most joyful relief, and a confirming intensification of the beauty of the interiors and of the surrounding landscape, in which their talks were set. Discussing people, save when he elaborated legend and profanity until privately she called upon the hosts of heaven to share this brightest terrestrial mirth, cast a spell of sadness all about her. With every finished vignette there came a sense of ending. Sacrificed to its sharp expressiveness were the real moments of these people’s lives; and the moments of the present, counting themselves off, ignored and irrecoverable, offering, as their extension, time that was unendurably narrow and confined, a narrow featureless darkness, its walls grinning with the transfixed features of consciousnessthat had always been, and must, if the pictures were accepted as true, forever be, a motionless absurdity.
Launched into wide opposition, no longer trying to see with his eyes, while still hoarding, as a contrasting amplification of her own visions, much that he had given her, she found people still there; rallying round her in might, ranging forward through time, each one standing clear of everything that offered material for ironic commentary, in a radiant individuality.
Wide generalisation was, she had immediately vowed, the way to illuminating contemplation of humanity. Its exercise made the present moment a life in itself, going on forever; the thought of the speakers and the surroundings blended in an unforgettable whole; her past life gleaming about her in a chain of moments; leaping glad acceptances or ardent refusals, of large general views.
The joy of making statements not drawn from things heard or read but plumbed directly from the unconscious accumulations of her own experience was fermented by the surprise of his interested attention, and the pride of getting him occasionally to accept an idea or to modify a point of view. It beamed compensation for what she was losing in sacrificing, whenever expression was urgent in her, his unmatchable monologue to her own shapeless outpourings. But she laboured, now and then successfully, to hold this emotion in subjectionto the urgency of the things she longed to express.
“Women, everybody knows nowadays, have made civilisation, the thing civilisation is so proud of—social life. It’s one of the things I dislike in them. There you are, by the way, women were the first socialists.” Havelock Ellis; and Emerson quoting Firdusi’s description of his Persian Lilla ... but the impression, remaining more sharp and deep than the event, became one’s own by revealing an inborn sharing of the view expressed. And waiting behind it now, was the proof, in life, as she had seen it.
“I don’t mean that idea of public opinion ‘the great moulding and civilising force steered by women’ that even the most pessimistic men admit, in horror.”
“Whatdoyou mean, Miriam?” Patient scepticism.
“Something quite different. It’s amazing, the blindness in men, even in you, about women. There must be a reason for it. Because it’s universal. It’s no good looking, with no matterwhateyes, if you look in the wrong place. All that men have done, since the beginning of the world, is to find out and give names to and do, the things that were in women from the beginning, and that the best of them have been doing all the time. Not me.”
“You, Miriam, are an incorrigibleloafer. I’ve a sneaking sympathy withthat.”
“Well, the thing is, that whereas a few menhere and there are creators, originators ...artists, women are this all the time.”
“My dear Miriam, I don’t knowwhatwomen are. I’m enormously interested in sex; but I don’t knowanythingabout it. Nobody does. That’s just where we are.”
“Because you’re a man and have no personality.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Miriam.”
“How can a man have personality?”
“All right.Men—have no personality.”
“You see women simply as a sex. That’s one of the proofs.”
“Right. Women have no sex.”
“You are doubtful about ‘emancipating’ women, because you think it will upset their sex-life.”
“I don’t knowanything, Miriam. No personality. No knowledge. But there’s Miss Waugh, with a thoroughly able career behind her; beeneverywhere, doneeverything, my dear Miriam; come out of it all, shouting you back into the nursery.”
“I don’t know her. Perhaps she’s jealous, like a man, of her freedom. But the point is, there’s no emancipation to be done. Women are emancipated.”
“Prove it, Miriam.”
“I can. Through their pre-eminence in an art. The art of making atmospheres. It’s as big an art as any other. Most women can exercise it, for reasons, by fits and starts. The best women work at it the whole of the time.Not one man in a million is aware of it. It’s like air within the air. It may be deadly. Cramping and awful, or simply destructive, so that no life is possible within it. So is the bad art of men. At its best it is absolutely life-giving. And not soft. Very hard and stern and austere in its beauty. And like mountain air. And you can’t get behind it, or in any way divide it up. Just as with ‘Art.’ Men live in it and from it all their lives without knowing. Even recluses.”
“Don’t drive it too far, Miriam.”
“Well; I’m so staggered by it. All women, of course, know about it, andthere’sthe explanation of why women clash. Over what men call ‘trifles.’ Because the thing I mean goes through everything. A woman’s way of ‘being’ can be discovered in the way she pours out tea.Mencan’t get on together. If they’re boxed up. Do you know there’s hardly a partnership in Wimpole Street that’s not a permanent feud. Yes. Would you believe it. And for scandal and gossip and jealousy there’snothingto beat the professors in a University Town. Several of them don’t speak. They communicate by letter.... But it’s the women who are not grouped who can see all this most clearly. By moving, amongst the grouped women, from atmosphere to atmosphere. It’s one of my principal social entertainments. I feel the atmosphere created by the lady of the house as soon as I get on to the door step.”
“Perceptive Miriam.... Youhavea flair,Miriam. I grant you that. I believe in your flair.”
“Well, it’strue, what I’m trying to tell you. It’s one of the answers to the question about women and art. It’s all there. It doesn’t show, like men’s art. There’s no drama or publicity.There; d’you see? It’s hard and exacting; needing ‘the maximum of detachment and control.’ And people have to learn, or be taught, to see it.”
“Y...es. Is it conscious?”
“Absolutely. And there you are again. Artists, well, andliterarypeople, say they have to get away from everything at intervals. They associate with queer people, and some of them are dissipated. They can only rest, stop being artists, by gettingaway. That is why so many women get nervy and break down. The only way they can rest, is by being nothing to nobody, leaving off for a while giving out any atmosphere.”
“Stop breathing.”
“Yes. But if you laugh at that, you must laugh at artists,andliterary people.”
“I will. Ido.”
“Yes; but in general. You must see the identity of the two things for good or for bad. If people reverence men’s art and feel their sacrifices are worth while, tothemselves, as well as to other people, they must not justpitythe art of women. It doesn’t matter to women. But it’s so jolly bad for men, to go about feeling lonely and superior. Men, and the womenwho imitate them, bleat about women ‘finding their truest fulfilment inself-sacrifice.’ In speaking of male art it is calledself-realisation. That’s men all over. They get an illuminating theory—man must die, to live—and apply it only to themselves. If a theory is true, you may be sure it applies in a most thorough-going way to women. They don’t stop dead at self-sacrifice. They reap ... freedom. Self-realisation. Emancipation. Lots of women hold back. Just as men do—from exacting careers.Ido.Idon’t want to exercise the feminine art.”
“It’s true you don’t compete or exploit yourself, Miriam.”
“Some women want to be men. And the contrary, men wanting to be women, is almost unknown. This is supposed to be evidence of the superiority of the masculine state. It isn’t. Women only want to be men before they begin their careers. It’s a longing for exemptions. Young women envy men, as young men, faced with the hard work of life, envy dogs.”
“Harsh Miriam.”
“It’s true. At any rate it’s deserved, after all men have said. And I believe it’strue.”
“Pugilistic Miriam.... Your atmospheric idea is quite illuminating. I think there’s some truth in it; and I’d be with you altogether but for one ... damning ... yes, I think absolutely damning,fact.”
“Well?”
“The men women will marry. The men quite fine, intelligent women marry; andidolise, my dear Miriam.”
“Many artists have to use any material that comes to hand. The treatment is the thing.”
“Treatment that mistakes putty for marble, my dear Miriam——”
“And you don’t see that you are proving my point. Womenseethings when they are not there. That’s creativeness. What is meant by women ‘making’ men.”
“They don’t. They’ll make idols of nothing at all; and go on burning incense—all their lives.”
“I don’t believe women areeverdeceived about their husbands. But they don’t give up hope. And there’s something in everybody. That’s what women see.”
“Nonsense, Miriam. Girls, with quite good brains and abilities will marry anything; accept its views and quote them.”
“Yes; just as they will show off a child’s tricks. Views and opinions are masculine things. Women are indifferent to them, really. Any set will do. I know the way a woman’s opinions and interests change with her different husbands, if she marries more than once, is supposed to prove the vacuity of her mind. Half the satirists of women have made their reputation on that idea. It isn’t so. It is that women can hold all opinions at once, or any, or none. It’s because they see the relations of things which don’t change, more than things which are alwayschanging, and mostly the importance to men of the things men believe. But behind it all their own lives are untouched.”
“Behind.... Whatisthere behind, Miriam?”
“Life.”
“What do they do with it?”
“Live.”
“Mysterious, Miriam.... The business of women; the career; that makes you all rivals, is to find fathers. Your material is children.”
“Then look here, if you thinkthat, there’s a perfect instance. If women’s material is people, their famous ‘curiosity’ is the curiosity of the artist. Men call it ‘incurable’ in women. Men’s curiosity, about things, science and so forth, is called divine. There you are. Myword.”
“Idon’t, Miriam.”
“Shaw knows how wildly interested women are in psychology. That’s funny.... But about children. If only you could realise how incidental all that is.”
“Incidental to what?”
“To thelifeof the individual.”
“Try it, Miriam. Marry your Jew. You know Jew and English makes a good mix.”
“You see I never knew he was a Jew. It did not come up until a possible future came in view. Icouldn’thave Jewish children.”
“Incidents. Mere incidents.”
“No; the wrong material. I, being myself,couldn’t do anything with it; couldn’t be anything in relationship to it.”
“You’dbe, through seeing its possibilities and making an atmosphere.”
“I’ve told you I’mnotone of those stupendous women.”
“Whatareyou?”
“Well, now here’s something you will like. If I were to marry a Jew, I should feel that all my male relatives would have the right tobeatme.”
“That’s strange.... And, I think, great nonsense, Miriam.”
“And I’m not anti-semite. I think Jews are better Christians than we are. We have things to learn from them. But not by marrying them, until they’ve learnt things from us. Women, particularly, can’t marry Jews. Men can marry Jewesses, if they like.”
“Marriage is a more important affair for women than for men. Just so.”
“I didn’t say so.”
“Youdid, Miriam, and it’s quite true.”
“It appears to be so because, as I’ve been trying to show you, men don’t know where they are.”
“Your man’ll know, Miriam. You ought to marry and have children. You’d have good children. Good shapes and good brains.”
“The mere sight of a child, moving unconsciously, its little shoulders and busy intentions, makes me catch my breath.”
“Marry your Jew, Miriam. Well—perhaps no; don’t marry your Jew.”
“The other day we were walking somewhere. I was dead-tired. He knew it and kept on suggesting a hansom. Suddenly there was a woman, lugging a heavy perambulator up some steps. He stood still, shouting tometo help her.”
“What did you do?”
“I blazed his own words back at him. I daresay I stamped my foot. Meanwhile the woman, who was very burly, had got the perambulator up. We walked on and presently he said in a quiet intensely interested voice ‘Whydid you not help this woman?’”
“What did you say?”
“I began to talk about something else.”
“Diplomatic Miriam.”
“Not at all. It’suselessto talk toinstincts. I know; because I have tried. Poor little man. I am afraid, now that I am not going to marry him, of hurting and tiring him. I talked one night. We had been agreeing about things, and I went on and on, it was in the drawing-room in the dark, after a theatre, talking almost to myself, very interested, forgetting that he was there. Presently a voice said, trembling with fatigue, ‘Believe me, Miriam, I am profoundly interested. Will you perhaps put all this down for me on paper?’ Yes. Wasn’t it funny andappalling. It was three o’clock. Since then I have been afraid. Besides, he will marry a Jewess. If I were not sure of that I could not contemplate his loneliness. It’s heartbreaking. When Igo to see friends in the evening, he waits outside.”
“Isay. Poorchap. That’s quite touching. You’ll marry him yet, Miriam.”
“There are ways in which I like him and am in touch with him as I never could be with an Englishman. Things he understands. And his absolute sweetness. Absence of malice and enmity. It’s so strange too, with all his ideas about women, the things he will do. Little things like cleaning my shoes. But look here; an important thing. Having children is just shelving the problem, leaving it for the next generation to solve.”
That stood out as the end of the conversation; bringing a sudden bright light. The idea that there was something essential, for everybody, that could not be shelved. Something had interrupted. It could never be repeated. But surely he must have agreed, if there had been time to bring it home to him. Then it might have been possible to get him to admit uniqueness ... individuality. He would. But would say it was negligible. Then the big world he thinks of, since it consists of individuals, is also negligible....
Somethinghad been at work in the conversation, making it all so easy to recover. Vanity? The relief of tackling the big man? Not altogether. Because there had been moments of thinking of death. Glad death if the truth couldoncebe stated. Disinterested rejoicing in the fact that a man who talked to so many peoplewas hearingsomethingabout the world of women. And if anyone had been there to express it better, the relief would have been there, just the same, without jealousy. But what an unconscious compliment to men, to feel that it mattered whether or no they understood anything about the world of women....
The remaining days of the visit had glowed with the sense of the beginning of a new relationship with the Wilsons. The enchantment that surrounded her each time she went to see them and always as the last hours went by, grew oppressive with the reminder of its impermanence, shone, at last, wide over the future. The end of a visit would never again bring the certainty of being finally committed to an overwhelming combination of poverties, cut off, by an all-round ineligibility, from the sun-bathed seaward garden, the joyful brilliant seaside light pouring through the various bright interiors of the perfect little house; the inexpressiblecharm, always renewed, and remaining, however deeply she felt at variance with the Wilson reading of life, the topmost radiance of her social year; ignored and forgotten nearly all the time, but shining out whenever she chanced to look round at the resources of her outside life, a bright enduring pinnacle, whose removal would level the landscape to a rolling plain, its modest hillocks, easy to climb, robbed of their light, the bright reflection that came, she half-angrily admitted, from this central height.
But there had been a difference in the returnto London after that visit, that had filled her with misgiving. Usually upon the afterpain of the wrench of departure, the touch of her own returning life had come like a balm. That time, she had seemed, as the train steamed off, to be going for the first time, not away from, but towards all she had left behind. There had been a strange exciting sense of travelling, as everyone seemed to travel, preoccupied, missing the adventure of the journey, merely suffering it as an unavoidable time-consuming movement from one place to another. She, like all these others, had a place and a meaning in the outside world. She could have talked, if opportunity had offered, effortlessly, from the surface of her mind, borrowing emphasis and an appearance of availability and interest, from a secure unshared possession. She had suddenly known that it was from this basis of preoccupation with secure unshared possessions that the easy shapely conversations of the world were made. But also that those who made them were committed, by their preoccupations, to a surrounding deadness. Liveliness of mind checked the expressiveness of surroundings. The gritty interior of the carriage had remained intolerable throughout the journey. The passing landscape had never come to life.
But the menace of a future invested in unpredictable activities in a cause that seemed, now that she understood it, to have been won invisibly since the beginning of the world, was lost almost at once in the currents of her London life.Things had happened that had sharply restored her normal feeling of irreconcilableness; of being altogether differently fated, and to return, if ever they should wish it, only at the bidding of the inexpressible charm. There had been things moving all about her with an utterly reassuring independent reality. Mr. Leyton’s engagement ... bringing to light as she lived it through chapter by chapter, sitting at work in the busy highway of the Wimpole Street house, a world she had forgotten, and that rose now before her in serene difficult perfection; a full denial of Mr. Wilson’s belief in the death of family life. In the midst of her effort to launch herself into a definite point of view, it had made her swerve away again towards the beliefs of the old world. Meeting them afresh after years of oblivion, she had found them unassailably new. The new lives inheriting them brought in the fresh tones, the thoughts and movement of modern life, and left the old symphony recreated and unchanged.
The Tansley Street world had been full and bright all that summer with the return of whole parties of Canadians as old friends. With their untiring sociability, their easy inclusion of the abruptly appearing unintroduced foreigners and provincials, they had made the world look like one great family party.
They had influenced even Michael ... steeping him in sunlit gaiety. By breaking up the strain of unrelieved association they had made him seem charming again. Their immenserespect for him turned him, in their presence, once more into a proud uncriticised possession.
Rambles round the squares with him, snatched late at night, had been easy to fill with hilarious discussions of the many incidents; serious exhausting talk held in check by the near presence of unquestioning people, and the promise of the lively morrow. Yet every evening, when they had her set down and surrounded at the piano, there came the sense of division. They cared only for music that interpreted their point of view.
Captain Gradoff ... large flat lonely face, pock-marked, eyes looking at nothing, with an expression of fear. Improper, naked old grizzly head, suggesting other displayed helpless heads, above his stout neat sociable Russian skipper’s jacket ... praying in his room at the top of his voice, with howls and groans. Suddenly teaching us all to make a long loud syren-shriek with half a Spanish nutshell. He had an invention for the Admiralty ... lonely and frightened, in a ghostly world; with an invention to save the lives of ships.