The thought, at this moment, of the alternative of any sort of social life with its trampling hurry, made her turn to the simple single sense of her solitude with thankfulness that it was preserved. Social incompatibility thought of alone, brought a curious boundless promise, a sense of something ahead that she must be alone to meet, or would miss. The condemnation of social incompatibility coming from the voices of the world roused an impatience which could not feel ashamed; an angry demand for time, and behind it a sense of companionship for which there was no name....
Single, detached figures came vividly before her, all women. Each of them had spoken to her with sudden intimacy, on the outskirts of groups from which she had moved away to breathe and rest. They had all confessed their incompatibility; a chosen or accepted loneliness. But it was certain they never felt that human formsabout them crushed, with the sets of unconsidered assumptions behind their talk, the very sense of existence. They were either cynical, not only seeing through people, but not caring at all to be alive, never assuming characters in order to share the fun ... or they were “misjudged” or “resigned.” The cynical ones were really alone. They never had any sense of being accompanied by themselves. They had a strange hard strength; unexpected hobbies and interests. Those who were resigned were usually religious.... They lived in the company of their idea of Christ ... but regretfully ... as if it were a second best.... “And I who hoped for only God, foundthee.” ... Mrs. Browning could never have realised how fearfully funny that was ... from a churchwoman.... And Protestant churchwomen believe that only men are eligible to associate with God. Thinking of Protestant husbands the idea was suffocating. It made God intolerable; and even Heaven simplyabscheulich.... Buddhism.... “Buddhism is the only faith that offers itself to men and women alike on equal terms ...” and then, “women are not encouraged to become priests” ...Thibet.... The whole world would be Thibet if the people were evenly distributed. Only the historic centuries had given men their monstrous illusions; only the crowding of the women in towns. But the Church will go on being a Royal Academy of Males....
She called back her thoughts from a contemplationthat would lead only to anger, and was again aware of herself waiting, on the edge of her bed, just in time. In spite of her truancy the gay tumult was still seething in her mind; the whole of her past happinesses close about her, drawing her in and out of the years. Fragments of forgotten experience detached themselves, making a bright moving patchwork as she watched, waiting, while she passed from one to another and fresh patches were added drawing her on. Joy piled up within her; but while she savoured again the quality all these past things had held as she lived them through, she suddenly knew that they were there only because she was on her way to a goal. Somewhere at the end of this ramble into the past, was a release from wrath. She rallied to the coolness far away within her tingling blood. How astoundingly good life was; generous to the smallest effort.... The scenes gathered about her, called her back, acquired backgrounds that spread and spread. She watched single figures going on into lives in which she had no part; into increasing incidents, leaving them, as they had found them, unaware. They never stopped, never dropped their preoccupation with people and the things that happened, to notice the extraordinariness of the world being there and they on it ... and so it was, everywhere....
She seemed to be looking with a hundred eyes, multitudinously, seeing each thing from several points at once, while through her mind flitted one after another all the descriptions of humanityshe had ever culled. There was no goal here. Only the old familiar business of suspended opinions, the endless battling of thoughts. She turned away. She had gone too far. Now there would be lassitude and the precipice that waited.... Her room was clear and hard about her as she moved to take refuge near the friendly gas, the sheeny patch of wall underneath it.
As she stood within the radiance, conscious only of the consoling light, the little strip of mantelshelf and the small cavernous presence of the empty grate, a single scene opened for a moment in the far distance, closing in the empty vista, standing alone, indistinct, at the bottom of her ransacked mind. It was gone. But its disappearance was a gentle touch that lingered, holding her at peace and utterly surprised.
This forgotten thing was the most deeply engraved of all her memories? The most powerful? More than any of the bright remembered things that had seemed so good as they came, suddenly, catching her up and away, each one seeming to be the last her lot would afford?
It was. The strange faint radiance in which it had shone cast a soft grey light within the darkness concealing the future....
Oldfield. It had come about through Dr. Salem Oldfield. She could not remember his arrival. Only suddenly realising him, one evening at dinner when he had been long enough in the house to chaff Mrs. Bailey about some imaginary man. Sex-chaff; that was his form ofhumour; giving him away as a nonconformist. But so handsome, sitting large and square, a fine massive head, well shaped hair, thick, and dinted with close cropped waves; talking about himself in the eloquent American way. It was that night he had told the table how he met his fiancée. He was a charlatan, stagey; but there must have been something behind his clever anecdotal American piety. Something remained even after the other doctors’ stories about his sharing their sitting-room and books, without sharing expenses; about his laziness and self-indulgence.
Mr. Chadband. But why shouldn’t people on the way to Heaven enjoy buttered toast? A hypocrite is all the time trying to be something, or he wouldn’t be a hypocrite.... And the story he told wastrue.... Dr. Winchester knew. It was with his friends at Balham that the girl had been staying. Wonderful. His lonely despair in Uganda; the way he had forced himself in the midst of his darkness to visit the sick convert ... and found the answer to his trouble in a leaflet hymn at the bedside; and come to London for his furlough and met the authoress in the very first house he visited. Things like that don’t happen unless people are real in some way. And the way he had admired Michael; and liked him.
It had been Michael he had taken to the Quaker meeting. But there must have been some talk with him about religion, to lead up to that sudden little interview on the stairs,he holding a book in one large hand and thumping it with the other.... “You’ll find the basic realities of religious belief set forthhere; in this small volume. Your George Fox was a marvellous man.” There was an appealing truth in him at that moment, and humility.... But before his footsteps had died away she knew she could not read the book. Even the sight of it suggested his sledge-hammer sentimental piety. Also she had felt that the religious opinions of a politician could not clear up the problems that had baffled Emerson. It was only after she had given back the book that she remembered the other George Fox and the Quaker inUncle Tom’s Cabin. But she had said she had read it and that it was wonderful, to silence his evangelistic attacks, and also for the comfort of sharing, with anybody, the admission that there was absolute wonderfulness.
After that there was no memory of him until the Sunday morning when Michael had come panting upstairs to ask her to go to this meeting. He was incoherent, and she had dressed and gone out with them, into the high bright Sunday morning stillness; without knowing whither. Finding out, somewhere on the way, that they were going to see Quakers waiting to be moved by the spirit.... A whitewashed room, with people in Quaker dress sitting in a circle? Shocking to break in on them.... Startling not to have remembered them in all these years of hoping to meet someone who understood silence; and now to be going to them as a show; becauseDr. Oldfield admired Michael, and being American, found out the unique things in London....
In amongst the small old shops in St. Martin’s Lane, gloomy, iron-barred gates, a long bleak corridor, folding doors; and suddenly inside a large room with sloping galleries and a platform, like a concert room, a row of dingy modern people sitting on the platform facing a scattered “chapel” congregation; men and women sitting on different sides of the room ... being left standing under the dark gallery, while Dr. Oldfield and Michael were escorted to seats amongst the men; slipping into a chair at the back of the women’s side; stranded in an atrocious emphasis of sex. But the men were on theleft... and numbers of them; not the few of a church congregation; and young; modern young men in overcoats; really religious, andnotthinking the women secondary.... But there were men also on the women’s side; here and there. Married men? Then those across the way were bachelors.... That young man’s profile; very ordinary and with awalrusmoustache; but stilled from its maleness, deliberately divested and submitted to silence, redeeming him from his type....
To have been born amongst these people; to know at home and in the church asharedreligious life.... They were in Heaven already. Through acting on their belief. Where two or three are gathered together. Nearer than thoughts; nearer than breathing; nearerthan hands and feet. The church knew it; but put the cart before the horse; the surface before the reality. The beautiful surroundings, the bridge of music and then, the moment the organ stopped a booming or nasal voice at top speed, “T’ th’Lordour God b’longmahcies ’n f’giveness.” ... Anger and excited discovery and still more time wasted, in glancing across to find Michael, small and exposed at the gangway end, his head decorously bent, the Jew in him paying respect, but looking up and keenly about him from under his bent brows, observing on the only terms he knew, through eye and brain....
Michael was a determinist.... But to assume the presence of the holy spirit was also determinism?... Beyond him Dr. Oldfield, huge and eagerly bowed, conforming to Quaker usages, describing the occasion in his mind as he went. It was just then, turning to get away from his version, that the quality of the silence had made the impression that had come back to her now.
Dr. McHibbert said pure being was nothing. But there is no such thing as nothing ... being in the silence was being in something alive and positive; at the centre of existence; being there with others made the sense of it stronger than when it was experienced alone. Like lonely silence it drove away the sense of enclosure. There had been no stuffiness of congregated humanity; the air, breathed in, had held within it a freshness, spreading coolnessand strength through the secret passages of the nerves.
It had felt like the beginning of a life that was checked and postponed into the future by the desire to formulate it; and by the nudging of a homesickness for daily life with these people who lived from the centre, admitted, in public, that life brims full all the time, away below thoughts and the loud shapes of things that happen.... And just as she had longed for the continuance of the admission, the spell had been broken. Suddenly, not in continuance, not coming out of the stillness, but interrupting it, an urbane, ingratiating voice. Standing up in the corner of the platform, turned towards the congregation, as if he were a lecturer facing an audience, a dapper little man in a new spring suit, with pink cheeks and a pink rose in his buttonhole.... Afterwards it had seemed certain that he had broken the silence because the time was running out. Strangers were present and the spirit must move....
It had been a little address, a thought-out lecture on natural history, addressed by a specialist to people less well informed. He had talked his subject not with, but at them.... While his voice went on, the gathering seemed to lose all its religious significance. His informing air; his encouraging demonstrator’s smiles; his obvious relish of the array of facts. They fell on the air like lies, losing even their own proper value, astray and intruding in the wrong context. When he sat down the silence was thereagain, but within it were the echoes of the urbane, expounding, professorial voice. Then, just afterwards, the breaking forth of that old man’s muffled tones; praying; quietly, as if he were alone. No one to be seen; a humbled life-worn old voice, coming out of the heart of the gathering, carrying with it, gently, all the soreness and groaning that might be there. No whining or obsequiousness; no putting on of a special voice; patient endurance and longing; affection and confidence. And far away within the indistinct aged tones, a clarion note; the warm glow of sunlight; his own strong certainty beating up unchanged beneath the heavy weight of his years. A gentle, clean, clear-eyed old man, with certainly a Whitman beard. Beautiful. For a moment it had been perfectly beautiful.
If he had stopped abruptly.... But the voice cleared and swelled. Life dropped away from it; leaving a tiresome old gentleman in full blast; thoughts coming in to shape carefully the biblical phrases describing God; to God. In the end he too was lecturing the congregation, praying at them, expressing his judgment.... Bleakness spread through the air. It was worse than the little pink man, who partly knew what he was doing and was ashamed. But this old chap was describing, at awful length, without knowing it, the secret of his own surface misery, the fact that he had never got beyond the angry, jealous, selfish, male God of the patriarchate.
Almost at once after that, the stirring andbreaking up; and those glimpses, as people moved and turned towards each other, shaking hands, of the faces of some of the women, bringing back the lost impression. The inner life of the meeting was more fully with the women? It was they who spread the pure, live atmosphere? But they were obviously related. They had a household look, but not narrowly; none of the air of isolation that spread from churchwomen; the look of being used up by men and propping up a man’s world with unacknowledged, or simply unpondered, private reservations. Nor any of the jesting air of those women who ‘make the best of things.’ They looked enviably, deeply, richly alive, on the very edge of the present, representing their faith in their own persons, entirely self-centred and self-controlled; poised and serene and withdrawn, yet not withholding. They had no protesting competing eagerness, and none of the secret arrogance of churchwomen. Their dignity was not dignified. Seen from behind they had none of the absurdity of churchwomen, devoutly uppish about the status of an institution which was a standing insult to their very existence.... It was they, the shock of the relief, after the revealed weakness of the men, of their perfect poise, their personality, so strong and intense that it seemed to hold the power of reaching forth, impersonally, in any thinkable direction, that had finally confirmed the impression that had been so deep and that yet had not once come up into her thoughts since the day it was made....
The poorest, least sincere type of Anglican priest had a something that was lacking in Dr. Oldfield and the pink man. The absence of it had been the most impressive part of seeing them talking together. He had introduced Michael first. And the feeling of being affronted had quickly changed to thankfulness at representing nothing in the eyes of the suave little man. He had given only half his attention, not taking up the fact that Michael was a Zionist; his eyes wandering about; the proprietary eyes of a churchwarden....
St. Pancras clock struck two. But there was no sense of night in the soft wide air; pouring in now more strongly at the open casement, rattling its fastening gently, rhythmically, to and fro, sounding its two little notes. It was thewestwind. Ofcourseshe was not tired and there was no sense of night. She hurried to be in bed in the darkness, breathing it in, listening to the little voice at the window. Here was part of the explanation of her evening. Again and again it had happened; the escape into the tireless unchanging centre; when the wind was in the west. Michael had been hurt when she had told him that the west wind brought her perfect happiness and always, like a sort of message, the certainty that she must remain alone. But it was through him that she had discovered that it transformed her. It was an augury for tomorrow. For the way of the wind tonight, its breath passing through her, recalled, seeming exactly to repeat, that wonderful nightof restoration when, for the only time, he had been away from London. It was useless to deplore the seeming cruelty. The truth was forced upon her, wafted through her by this air that washed away all the circumstances of her life.