1
Every friend to tea at the club is an event. Never-to-be-forgotten. What
each one says is written in my memory. And all of them are more real
there than on their own backgrounds. Simpler.
They are overwhelming, bringing both life and themselves; at large.
Shining; so that I want not to talk to them, but to keep them there in
place and contemplate them.
But for them it is dull. Perhaps embarrassing. They find me
empty-minded, distraite. And do not know why I am distraite. When they
go, there is no reason for asking them to come again, but my desire to
contemplate them.
Except Mrs. Orly.
Every moment in her presence is realisation. She babbles.... Has no
ideas. No self. Knows nothing about anyone. But redeems everyone.... God
can’t be worse than Mrs. Orly. And if she were on the judgment-seat,
everyone would be recklessly forgiven. With a flushed little face and
flashing eyes she would spank. Flare and scold. And then, pitiful
helping hands. Unscrupulously covering.
Having no self, she brings everyone a rich sense of self.
Most people, all the time, in every relationship, seek only themselves.
Past selves, if they are old....
Affection is joy in things past or things to come? Bereavement is losing
one’s deposits.... That would explain why old people always think the
past, the world of their own time, better than the one that is
developing under their eyes. We can take only what we have. Even from
genius. The accepting party must have within himself the same genius.
Otherwise, no taking what is given. There comes a new way of thinking; a
new world. But ultimately the changed world is the action of one’s own
spirit. The only sureness in things is the action of one’s own spirit.
Egoism. But egoism carried far enough....
Whoso would save his life must lose it. But not for the sake of saving
it. And first he must have a life he loves well enough to make it worth
losing. Perhaps all those big sayings of Christ are dangerous for small
people. So the Catholics won’t trust them with the Bible. The Bible let
loose means a crowd of uncultured little churches; fighting each other.
Insufficient egoism keeps people plaintive. That’s another line of
thought, but it joins. Egoism must be huge. Free from self.
Then I am the smallest thing I know. Caring only for the come and go of
days, and the promise of more days. There is not a soul I would
sacrifice myself for. Nor even Michael, in his helplessness. When I felt
that the world must stop to prevent his going to the Russian war, it was
myself I feared to lose. Otherwise I should want to stop the world for
all who go to be killed on battlefields. I do; a little. But that may be
fear.
2
“You were a lovely person in your blue gown.” A lovely person in your
blue gown....
“You were a lovely person in your blue gown.”
For that moment, walking across the empty spaces of the large high room
full of blazing lights—that was when it was I felt him looking, and felt
myself not there but looking on, with his eyes—I was a lovely person in
a blue gown....
“You were a lovely person in your blue gown. Again you surprise me with
a new aspect. I’ve seen you look charming, in Miriam’s quiet way. Didn’t
know you could be splendid. Don’t fly out. It’s all right. I’m staying
friends. Honour bright. For the present.”
That was written in the study in some luminous interval, eyes on a
person crossing a room in a blue gown. Written on his principle of the
niceness of saying nice things and having them said.... He is right. It
works.
“You were a lovely person....”
Yet there is something wrong in his way of wanting effects, illusions.
Seeing through them even while he goes under to them. Outline and
surface, the lines of flowing draperies, carriage, the shape of a skull,
he sees as fine because he sees them emerging from a fire-mist and a
planet. Pitiful, and passing in their turn towards other forms. Yet
those he singles out are at once in a solemn compulsion. Comically
consecrated. Set somewhere between heaven and earth.
But for a while it is a real state ... changing you.
What a difference it made to the sitting here in the club smoking-room,
waiting for people to arrive. This might have been shivering loneliness,
nervous anticipation of coming guests. Instead, there was calm, easy
anticipation and forgetfulness. Yet even now he might be moving forward
to some fresh beginning that would set her definitely in the past.
Meanwhile she was launched in a tide flowing brightly to music....
Launched with her own hands still steering the fragile barque ... how to
continue the metaphor? ... the bright firelight was intruding another.
The launched barque was best, suggesting cool freedom and movement. If
it stayed in mind it would serve to shape the letter to be written
to-day or to-morrow. To-morrow it must be, with the full evening ahead
to be followed by the disappearance of the secret life in the
companionship of Miss Holland.
To-morrow at Wimpole Street, where perhaps already another letter would
have arrived....
The fragile barque; ships that pass in the Night. In sunlight. There is
no night. For those who are alive there is no darkness. Meetings and
meetings and meetings, and every time a new setting.
“You are being made. You’ve no idea how you are growing.”
Better to find out for oneself and be grateful. But he must always be
instructing.... Yet there was joy apart from him. Joy that had lived so
long in secret, flowing out now across the strange world of people and
events.
She blessed the club. Its gift at the moment when solitude had departed
from her home-life, of a new solitude; strange lives surrounding her
without pressure, and sometimes granting these large quiet moments.
The door opened upon Miss Holland....
Miss Holland at an immense distance. And somehow changed; coming in like
a visitor. She was dressed, what she called twollettay, and evidently at
the height of her social form. Free for the evening and looking in here
on her way almost as if she knew how supporting would be her familiar
figure, ceremonially transformed, at this moment of first launching out
as an evening hostess.
Miriam watched her come largely down the empty room. Ah, hers was
splendour, par exemple! How well she bore the high spaciousness. Hers
was an effectiveness that made its own terms, in advance.
“They’ve made you an enchanting table,” said Miss Holland, reaching the
fireplace to stand sideways, firm hand on the mantelpiece and well-shod
foot extended to the blaze.
Miriam had given no thought to the table. She gazed admiringly. What
nobility of form and outline....
The large shady hat hid the limp hair and gave the eyes more than their
usual depth. They were alight altogether, hesitating. She was communing
with herself, eager to communicate. What? Something about Flaxman’s. No,
or she would be frowning. And this high social moment was not for such
things.
Miriam plunged into the story of her visit to Dr. Densley, compressing
it to a few phrases, and throwing up her hands with the despairing
gesture of the correct hostess off duty, told how he had invited himself
to her party as an awkward fifth.
“But he gave you good news, or you would not look so bonny and happy.”
“Said Densleyish things. A number of old saws. Overwork, late hours,
heading for a crash. Said that for a New Woman I am disquietingly sane,
and that my criminal carelessness about things that most women are in a
reasonable hurry over, may possibly mean that I’m in for a long life.”
“A most ingenious theory!”
“I don’t know. He’s been reading Shaw. Can’t believe that women really
think about anything but capturing a man; for life. He wound up by
imploring me not to miss marriage and what of all things do you think is
his idea, or at least the idea that most appeals to him in marriage? The
famous ‘conflict for supremacy!’”
“Indeed an unfortunate definition of matrimony.”
“Yes, but wait. That’s not all. Talk about women getting hypnotised by
ideas! His mind, his so scientific mind—is putty. With immense solemnity
he informed me, ‘_No_ woman, dear girl, is truly happy until she is the
loser in that supreme conflict.’”
“Dear, dear! An essentially pagan view.”
“It’s the view of a man who knows he would lose.”
“I trust you did not tell the poor thing that!”
“Oh, but I did. I know it’s begging the question. But I say things like
that on principle. Anything to break up addlepated masculine
complacency. Not that it matters a toss to women, but because it’s all
over everything in the world like a fungus, hiding the revelations
waiting on every bush.”
“What was his response?”
“He looked very sick for a moment, and then laughed his laugh and began
repeating himself. Went back to his saws about wasting youth.”
“Indeed, indeed, many are doomed to that. There at least he is right.
Though most certainly not in regard to yourself. A propos, I am dining
here, with the Wheelers. The child is in great trouble. The Polish
’cellist, it seems, is not after all to be in London this season. She is
in despair.
“Of course, after coming across the world to see him.”
“In despair. They must now, if they can raise sufficient funds, go to
Poland. It seems that there is a lady, high up in the social scale and a
patroness of musicians in general, who might be willing to help,
provided that the ’cellist is willing to see the child and to make an
exception to his rule of not taking pupils. It is therefore imperative
to communicate with him by _letter_. I have been wondering whether your
Russian friend ...”
“Michael. Of course. I’ll ask him to-night. What is he to say?”
Miss Holland was flurried, transfigured; but still polite. Managing to
phrase her decorous thanks before she hurried, almost running, away down
the room. She returned in an instant, radiant.
“The Wheelers are _delighted_.”
But she was blushing. Evidently the Wheelers were in the next room.
Could easily be brought in to state their needs. She wanted to keep them
to herself. Be all in all to their stranded helplessness. And when a
moment later a maid announced Dr. Densley, she made at once for the
door, where she was held up for a moment by his entry, and so escaped
back to the tremendous consultation.
3
Dr. Densley, hands outstretched, had made his smiling rush down the room
and taken her lightly by the shoulders when the door opened to admit
Michael. Summoning Densley from the hearthrug to the bright central
light, she introduced them. They stood in a strange little silence.
Densley, robbed of his usual soft-voiced flow of words and laughter by
the spectacle of Michael, of whom he had heard so much, was taking a
moment for contemplation, sure no doubt that she, like all the women of
his world, would immediately emit suitable remarks. She ignored the
obligation, flouted a suddenly realised desire to please him by filling
up the measure of his large admiration, for the sake of watching these
two old friends for the first time confronted.
It made them strangers to herself, people seen for the first time.
Divested of their relationship to her they were at once diminished and
enlarged. Large and separate, each set in the stream of his own life.
And small; small figures in a moving crowd.
It was Michael who broke the silence, announcing with stern shyness and
courteously bent head that the profession of medicine was arduous and at
the same time most fascinating. Miriam saw the other man, as he stood
listening with a dawning smile to the slow stately English, read
Michael’s gentle spirit and hand him on the spot a protective affection.
They stood talking. Michael bowing to punctuate his phrases but with a
pleased smile shining behind his pale features, ready to emerge when the
gravity he thought fitting to the occasion should have had its due.
Densley, below a brow grave and thoughtful as Michael’s but without its
sadness, smiled his smile that was laughter, the laughter of his
everlasting enchantment.
She left them to spy from the landing for any sign of the arrival of the
Taylors. The silent empty hall brought her a vision of Dora, hurrying
home to dress, meeting a friend on an island in the midst of traffic,
one of those encounters that occur whenever one is in a hurry, and to
which Dora would give herself as if space and time had no existence.
The gong rang out and residents became audible descending from the upper
rooms.
She went back to summon the men and warn Densley that he had committed
himself to a meal prepared in honour of the Taylors, without meat. Also
that he would hear from Mrs. Taylor all about the medical profession.
His to-and-fro gust of laughter left him open-mouthed like a mask of
Comedy, silently gazing at her his assurance of his readiness for all
her friends might do.
Through the open door she heard the continuous rustling descent of
residents. All the tables would be full. So much the better, in case her
oddly asserted party should produce long silences. She felt no desire
for conversation and wondered as she led the way downstairs whether
hostesses in general suffered the indifference that now held her in its
grip. And if they did, why the business of entertainment was not
abolished. She remembered how porous to the onlooking eye were people
gathered talking at a feast. To be merely a silent guest was troublesome
enough, but it was nothing to the burden of being obliged to produce,
before the assembled eyes of the twenty residents even the semblance of
a dinner-party.
The dining-room was full of sound as she went in followed by the two
men, held a little in the rear by the backward sweep of her long gown; a
fabric of sound unbroken at any point in the rows of tables set against
the walls, and all, even the one she had selected, fully occupied. All
heads were averted, intent towards centres.
Gentlewomen. Yes; but those were just the people who saw without
looking.
Here was the secretary at her elbow, smilingly indicating.... Miss
Holland was right, there in the central pool of light, well away from
the serried ranks of small square tables, was the club’s settlement of
the problem of five diners, a round table, gleaming with silver and
glass and festive with bowls of flowers.
As they took their places, falling accidentally into the best
distribution for her serenity, herself facing away from the main wall
and its unbroken row of diners, Michael on her right giving them his
impressive profile, and Densley across the way, his fine easy presence
set full towards them, a servant announced the arrival of the Taylors.
She left her party begun, with Densley, grave and kindly, set towards
Michael to draw from him and cherish, just anything it might occur to
him to say.
Dora and George, unbelievably there, brought to the decorous hall its
furthest reach of odd experience. They came from so much further than
the long distance they had travelled across London to spend an evening
in the land that to them was not even Philistia, but just Bedlam. The
Bedlam of an illusion so monstrous as to be comic—for all observers but
those who toiled helplessly at its provisioning; George’s “under-dog.”
They stood face to face, not seeing her. George in the half-light and
against the dark ancient furniture, looking more than ever like the
young Beethoven, his searching eyes bent beneath a frowning brow upon
Dora’s serene face of an intellectual madonna upturned in absent-minded
protest, while he explained, certainly not for the first time, exactly
where, in their passage across London, they had missed their way. For an
instant Miriam watched them, the beauty that together they made standing
there in perfect physical contrast, a rare pure balance, as rare as
their unmistakable equality of spirit. She rejoiced in the thought of
them set down with Michael and Densley. Four widely separated worlds met
together.
When actually they were so set down, George on her left and Dora all
delicately harmonious colour between Michael’s and Densley’s black and
white, the enchantment was so strong that she felt it must radiate to
the four corners of the room. It served to support her in face of the
absence in her thoughts of anything that could form a starting-point for
general conversation.
She took refuge with Dora. Dora’s was the mind that could enclose all
the others, and gaze over each of their territories in turn. She began
at once by accusing Dora. Making her the culprit of the wandering
pilgrimage.
Delicately flushing, her limpid absent eyes aware of the presence about
her of disturbed people waiting for conversational openings, aware also
of the restraining influence of her serene beauty, Dora defended herself
in the leisurely dimpling way that showed her armed for no matter what
conflict. Dora was at her best. Densley hung towards her delighted at
once.
Here in strange garb and unfamiliar bearing was yet, he was assuming,
the woman he understood, the woman existing in such numbers in his own
set, and vocal, until Miriam had revolted and silenced her, in all his
conversation; the woman who professes to be either amused or shocked by
sexual allusions, disguised in commonplace remarks, and jests back, or
tactfully heads off. How far, she wondered, would Dora, with her hobby
of endless cool sampling of humanity, go out to meet this naïve
masculinity? So far she sat screened, gently glowing, harmless.
If she held to this mood, went on turning upon him her lovely mild eyes,
and Densley’s warm-hearted worldliness took the field, then it was
George, indulgent to Dora’s adventure, who would be the enclosing,
contemplating mind. Already, amidst the jests that carried them through
the first courses, he was gathering fuel for the sole recreation
afforded him by chance social festivities. For mirth over the spectacle
of evasions. To-night the spectacle was all about him, all over the
room, rampant and unconscious, distracting him almost completely.
4
By the time the sweets appeared there were two groups at the table, Dora
and Densley, averted towards each other in animated talk. George and
Michael responding to everything Miriam offered, usually both at once,
refusing to blend. Here, already, at her first party, was the English
separation. No general conversation. Not even the English alternative,
the duel between two men; the prize-fight. The party had fallen to bits.
But it was worth while. For on the far side of the table, Dora’s sweet
mezzo was dominating Densley’s baritone. She had tackled him. It was his
opportunity, perhaps his utmost chance of being lifted outside his
complacent dogmas.
It was presently evident that he was remaining impermeable. Though still
listening and responding, he had lost interest, discovered that she did
not for all her soft appeal, fall into either of the classes he thought
he understood, either into the fascinating, the maternal, or the
saintly. His mind gave her its ear, but his eyes with their everlasting
message went again and again to a far corner of the room. Which of the
disdainful club residents had become his chosen companion?
Dora was questioning him now, collecting physiology. Her voice
penetrated the subdued, rapidly thinning talk coming from the small
tables. Glancing round as if in search of an attendant, Miriam
discovered the long row of diners, lingering over their coffee, one and
all intent upon the centre table. And in the far corner that was drawing
Densley’s glances, Mrs. Wheeler, talking with Miss Holland and her
daughter, both with their backs to the room and unable to see the
distant bourne of her eyes, dark and gleaming above the heightened flush
upon her cheeks as she sat there, mutely wise, telling him a plain tale
of gallant endeavour.
The women at the table near the fireside were now openly staring.
As if by arrangement, by some operation of the fascinated attention of
these two listeners, there was a sudden silence all over the room.
“Of course,” said Dora’s voice into the midst of it, dreamy as her pose,
elbow on table, hand supporting chin, brow lifted in thought above eyes
gazing into space: “we shan’t get parthenogenesis until we want it.”
The silence ended in abrupt risings and departures.
“Not in our time,” Densley had said, encircling the departing ladies
with a smile that was not only homage and benediction, but glee. Private
glee over the addition to his store of anecdotes, of such a fine new
specimen. He, at least, thought Miriam, as they rose from the table,
would not regret the evening spent outside his world.
Michael, half risen, bowing towards the centre of the group, had
something to say. One of his generalisations. The party was united at
last.
“These speculations,” he announced to the group Miriam rejoiced to see
not only arrested by the inevitable topic but charmed by his gentleness,
feeling the pull of him in their midst, “are most-interesting. There are
it is sure in these matters no absolute certainties, but what is sure
is, that the realisation of this idea would be, not advance, but
retrogression.”
“Hear, hear,” said Densley, in his smoothest girlish falsetto.
As they all went down Fleet Street on their way to the Lycurgan meeting,
Miriam wondered whether she would be asked to resign from the club. But
much more pressing than this question was the feeling that her party
had, in bringing together three of her worlds, shown her more clearly
than she had known it before, that there was no place for her in either
one of them. So clearly that she now wished it could end and leave her
to go to the meeting alone.
There was in Lycurgan meetings some sort of reality, either coming from
the platform or more often from irrelevant things rising in her own mind
as she sat surrounded by so many speculative minds.
But to-night she would not reach unconsciousness of her surroundings.
And the ideas coming from the platform would be severely tested by these
alien presences. Already in advance, these ideas looked like a mere
caprice of her leisure hours, a more or less congenial background of
thought upon which presently might emerge a sudden enlargement of her
own life. More and more lately they had been growing to mean things
shared with Hypo, bright with life because they were his, and for the
same reason suspect, suspect because of his unrivalled expressiveness, a
faculty that might be turned with equal conviction in a quite opposite
direction.
And once they were in the hall and she was sitting with the serene
worlds of Michael and Densley and the Taylors close to her, the urgency
of all the Lycurgans stood for grew immediately less. This world of
clear ideas summoning mankind to follow like an army, seemed again, as
when she had first met it, to contain a trick, to be too clear, too
hard, too logical to embrace the rich fabric of life. She experimented
in unthinking it; and a silence fell on many of the flagrant cruelties
of civilisation. They lost their voice. Their only educated, instructed
voice. The Lycurgans were a league to arrest cruelties. But a cold,
cynical, jesting league, cold and hard as thought, cynical as paganism
and cultivating a wit that left mankind small and bleak, in a darkness
where there was no hope but in intelligent scheming. Even the women. The
Lycurgan women were all either as hopelessly logical as men, or
methodically pink. And the men; the everlasting prize-fight, the perfect
unsociability underlying their cold ideas. Except for one or two. And
they were idealists, blind with the illusion that humanity moves with
one accord.
Each one moves singly. To join the movements of others is harmful until
you have moved yourself. Movement is with the whole of you. Ideas come
afterwards.
How much time had passed? Only a moment or two. The chairman was still
bleating. And they had not noticed her inattention.
They were sitting in a row at the back of the hall. The proceedings
seemed very far away. Held off by their nearness to each other, by the
way after one short hour and in spite of their incompatibilities, they
were, when placed amongst strangers, in touch with each other.
It was worth while. Worth while to miss the intensities. To be happily
surrounded. And this way, the social and domestic way of meeting things,
the cool easy way of normal people, was perhaps the best way. It robbed
things of all but their obvious surfaces, the practical data of life.
Reduced them to the terms of what could be said about them and handed
round from one to the other. Small wonder that reformers tended to
become tub-thumpers, so immense must be the resistance offered by people
living as nearly everyone did, in groups, closely related and drawn this
way and that by perpetual single instances.
Less wonder that most people assumed the fact of life, took it without
amazement, for granted, so thinly of necessity was spread their
awareness of anything whatever. Homeopathic.
She gave herself up to joy in her party, in being linked with them in
profane, mirthful detachment from all that was going forward, shockingly
accompanied by the crackling of Michael’s disgraceful bag of hardbake.
Was it her fault that they were so detached? The result of some
demoralising influence at work behind her imagined interest in
socialism? She felt it was not. They were all on a moral holiday, not
only from their own worlds, but from any world whatsoever. Happy in
being together, passing through an uncalculated interval, a strange
small time that they would remember with pleasure.
5
Going homewards through the spring evening with Densley she felt the
world even further off; thin, irrelevant. That was his influence. For
him the world was something against which everyone was fighting with
weapons feeble or stout. Single people, the individual battle, that was
the centre of his preoccupation. His interest in Mrs. Wheeler was his
sense that she was making a good fight, sturdily, perhaps unscrupulously
... that she was what he would call a real woman. Herself he regarded as
so far unreal, good material for reality, holding back.
His wide, varied experience of humanity seemed all about them, as they
wandered at truce arm-in-arm through the darkened evening streets. And
she found herself, as always, leaning upon his ordered knowledge and yet
repudiating it, so entirely did it imply an incomplete conception of
life. Every symbol he used called up the image of life as process, never
in any direction as completeness.
Faced alone, it appeared to him as bitterly sad, and the last disaster
of an unhappy fate.
Faced in groups as he knew it best, it showed in his eyes only as
material for comedy. It was of the comedy he was always trying to
convince her. In life itself the bare fact of life, there seemed for him
to be no splendour. For men there was ambition, hard work and kindly
deeds by the way. And for women motherhood. Sacred. The way to it pure
comedy; but once attained, life for the mother in a mansion of the
spirit unknown to men, closed against them and forever inaccessible. The
attainment of full womanhood was farewell, a lonely treading of a
temple, surrounded by outcasts.
He stood, it was true, to some extent within the lives of women, but
witnessed again and again the farewell, saw the man lessened, left
behind for ever on the threshold of magnificence, the woman left in a
loneliness mitigated only by the fireside companionship.
The strange thing was that seeming to value her for what he called the
intellectual heights that had kept her uncorrupted by petty social life,
he yet wanted her to come down from them and join the crowd. That if
even for one moment she could show any unguarded feeling, anything free
from criticism, even deliberately freed from criticism, he was ready to
become the gay priest of initiation into the comedy whose every dramatic
possibility he knew by heart.