CHAPTER I

DEADLOCK

THE WORK OF

DOROTHY M. RICHARDSON

“In the ordinary novel, the novelist stands on the banks of

the river of life chronicling how and when people arise, and

how it is that things happen to them. But Miriam (the

central figure of Dorothy Richardson’s work) pulls us with her

into the yielding water.”--_Nation._

“The style grows upon one with familiarity; it is continually

illumined by passages of brilliant insight, and its

half-subconscious revelation of personality is wonderfully

attractive.”--_Daily Telegraph._

POINTED ROOFS

BACKWATER

HONEYCOMB

THE TUNNEL

INTERIM

DEADLOCK

REVOLVING LIGHTS

(in preparation)

DUCKWORTH & CO.

3 HENRIETTA STREET, LONDON, W.C.

DEADLOCK

BY

DOROTHY M. RICHARDSON

LONDON

DUCKWORTH & CO.

3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN

First Published 1921

DEADLOCK

CHAPTER I

Miriam ran upstairs narrowly ahead of her thoughts. In the small

enclosure of her room they surged about her, gathering power from the

familiar objects silently waiting to share her astounded contemplation

of the fresh material. She swept joyfully about the room ducking and

doubling to avoid arrest until she should have discovered some

engrossing occupation. But in the instant’s pause at each eagerly opened

drawer and cupboard, her mind threw up images. It was useless. There was

no escape up here. Pelted from within and without, she paused in

laughter with clasped restraining hands ..... the rest of the evening

must be spent with people ... the nearest; the Baileys; she would go

down into the dining-room and be charming with the Baileys until

to-morrow’s busy thoughtless hours were in sight. Half-way downstairs

she remembered that the forms waiting below, for so long unnoticed and

unpondered, might be surprised, perhaps affronted by her sudden

interested reappearance. She rushed on. She could break through that

barrier. Mrs. Bailey’s quiet withholding dignity would end in delight

over a shared gay acknowledgment that her house was looking up.

She opened the dining-room door, facing in advance the family gathered

at needlework under the gaslight, an island group in the waste of dreary

increasing shabbiness .... she would ask some question, apologising for

disturbing them. The room seemed empty; the gas was turned dismally low.

Only one light was on, the once new, drearily hopeful incandescent

burner. Its broken mantle shed a ghastly bluish-white glare over the

dead fern in the centre of the table and left the further parts of the

room in obscurity. But there was someone there; a man, sitting perched

on the sofa-head, and beyond him someone sitting on the sofa. She came

forward into silence. They made no movement; boarders, people she did

not know, stupefied by their endurance of the dreariness of the room.

She crossed to the fireside and stood looking at the clock-face. The

clock was not going. “Are you wanting the real Greenwich, Miss

Henderson?” She turned, ashamed of her mean revival of interest in a

world from which she had turned away, to observe the woman who had found

possible a friendly relationship with Mr. Gunner. “Oh yes I _do_,” she

answered hurriedly, carefully avoiding the meeting of eyes that would

call forth his numb clucking laughter. But she was looking into the eyes

of Mrs. Bailey..... Sitting tucked neatly into the sofa corner, with

clasped hands, her shabbiness veiled by the dim light, she appeared to

be smiling a far-away welcome from a face that shone rounded and rosy in

the gloom. She was neither vexed nor pleased. She was far away, and Mr.

Gunner went on conducting the interview. He was speaking again, with his

watch in his hand. He, having evidently become a sort of intimate of the

Baileys, was of course despising her for her aloofness during the bad

period. She paid no heed to his words, remaining engrossed in Mrs.

Bailey’s curious still manner, her strange unwonted air of having no

part in what was going on.

She sought about for some question to justify her presence and perhaps

break the spell, and recovered a memory of the kind of enquiry used by

boarders to sustain their times of association with Mrs. Bailey. In

reply to her announcement that she had come down to ask the best way of

getting to Covent Garden early in the morning Mrs. Bailey sat forward as

if for conversation. The spell was partly broken, but Miriam hardly

recognised the smooth dreamy voice in which Mrs. Bailey echoed the

question, and moved about the room enlarging on her imaginary

enterprise, struggling against the humiliation of being aware of Mr.

Gunner’s watchfulness, trying to recover the mood in which she had come

down and to drive the message of its gaiety through Mrs. Bailey’s

detachment. She found herself at the end of her tirade, standing once

more facing the group on the sofa; startled by their united appearance

of kindly, smiling, patient, almost patronising tolerance. Lurking

behind it was some kind of amusement. She had been an awkward fool,

rushing in, seeing nothing. They had been discussing business together,

the eternal difficulties of the house. Mr. Gunner was behind it all now,

intimate and helpful and she had come selfishly in, interrupting. Mrs.

Bailey had the right to display indifference to her assumption that

anything she chose to present should receive her undivided attention;

and she had not displayed indifference. If Mr. Gunner had not been there

she would have been her old self. There they sat, together, frustrating

her. Angered by the pressure of her desire for reinstatement she crashed

against their quietly smiling resistance. “Have I been interrupting

you?”

“No, young lady; certainly not,” said Mrs. Bailey in her usual manner,

brushing at her skirt.

“I believe I have,” smiled Miriam obstinately.

Mr. Gunner smiled serenely back at her. There was something

extraordinary in such a smile coming from him. His stupid raillery was

there, but behind it was a modest confidence.

“No,” he said gently. “I was only trying to demonstrate to Mrs. Bailey

the bi-nomial theorem.”

They did not want her to go away. The room was freely hers. She moved

away from them, wandering about in it. It was full, just beyond the veil

of its hushed desolation, of bright light; thronging with scenes ranged

in her memory. All the people in them were away somewhere living their

lives; they had come out of lives into the strange, lifeless, suspended

atmosphere of the house. She had felt that they were nothing but a part

of its suspension, that behind their extraordinary secretive talkative

openness there was nothing, no personal interest or wonder, no

personality, only frozen wary secretiveness. And they had _lives_ and

had gone back into them or forward to them. Perhaps Mrs. Bailey and Mr.

Gunner had always realised this ... always seen them as people with

other lives, not ghosts, frozen before they came, or unfortunates coming

inevitably to this house rather than to any other, to pass on, frozen

for life, by their very passage through its atmosphere.... There had

been the Canadians and the foreigners, unconscious of the atmosphere;

free and active in it. Perhaps because they really went to Covent Garden

and Petticoat Lane and Saint Paul’s.... There’s not many stays ’ere

long; them as stays, stays always. A man writing; pleased with making a

single phrase stand for a description of a third-rate boarding-house,

not seeing that it turned him into a third-rate boarding-house.... Stays

always; _always_. But that meant _boarders_; perhaps only those boarders

who did nothing at all but live in the house, waiting for their food;

“human odds and ends” ....... literary talk, the need for phrases.

These afterthoughts always came, answering the man’s phrase; but they

had not prevented his description from coming up always now together

with any thoughts about the house. There was a truth in it, but not

anything of the whole truth. It was like a photograph ..... it made you

_see_ the slatternly servant and the house and the dreadful looking

people going in and out. Clever phrases that make you see things by a

deliberate arrangement, leave an impression that is false to life. But

men do see life in this way, disposing of things and rushing on with

their talk; they think like that, all their thoughts false to life;

everything neatly described in single phrases that are not true.

Starting with a false statement they go on piling up their books. That

man never saw how extraordinary it was that there should be _anybody_,

waiting for _anything_. But why did their clever phrases keep on coming

up in one’s mind?

Smitten suddenly when she stood still to face her question, by a sense

of the silence of the room, she recognised that they were not waiting at

all for her to make a party there. They wanted to go on with their talk.

They had not merely been sitting there in council at the heart of the

gloom because the arrival of new boarders was beginning to lift it. They

had sat like that many times before. They were grouped together between

her and her old standing in the house, and not only they, but life,

going, at this moment, on and on. They did not know, life did not know,

what she was going to prove. They did not know why she had come down.

She could not go back again without driving home her proof. It was here

the remainder of the evening must be passed, standing on guard before

its earlier part, strung by it to an animation that would satisfy Mrs.

Bailey and restore to herself the place she had held in the house at the

time when her life there had not been a shapeless going on and on. The

shapelessness had gone on too long. Mrs. Bailey had been aware of it,

even in her estrangement. But she could be made to feel that she had

been mistaken. Looked back upon now, the interval showed bright with

things that would appear to Mrs. Bailey as right and wonderful life;

they were wonderful now, linked up with the wonder of this evening, and

could be discussed with her, now that it was again miraculously certain

they were not all there was.

But Mr. Gunner was still there, perched stolidly in the way. In the old

days antagonism and some hidden fear there was in his dislike of her,

would have served to drive him away. But now he was immovable; and felt,

or for some reason thought he felt, no antagonism. Perhaps he and Mrs.

Bailey had discussed her together. In this intolerable thought she moved

towards the sofa with the desperate intention of sitting intimately down

at Mrs. Bailey’s side and beginning somehow, no matter how, to talk in a

way that must in the end send him away. “There’s a new comet,” she said

violently. They looked up simultaneously into her face, each of their

faces wearing a kind, veiled, unanimous patience. Mrs. Bailey held her

smile and seemed about to speak; but she sat back resuming her dreamy

composure as Mr. Gunner taking out his notebook cheerfully said:

“If you’ll give me his name and address we’ll take the earliest

opportunity of paying a call.”

Mrs. Bailey was pleading for indulgence of her failure to cover and

distribute this jest in her usual way. But she was ready now for a

seated confabulation. But he would stay, permitted by her, immovable,

slashing across their talk with his unfailing snigger, unreproved.

“All sorts of people are staying up to see it; I suppose one ought,”

Miriam said cheerfully. She could go upstairs and think about the comet.

She went away, smiling back her response to Mrs. Bailey’s awakening

smile.

Her starlit window suggested the many watchers. Perhaps he would be

watching? But if he had seen no papers on the way from Russia he might

not have heard of it. It would be something to mention to-morrow. But

then one would have to confess that one had not watched. She opened her

window and looked out. It was a warm night; but perhaps this was not the

right part of the sky. The sky looked intelligent. She sat in front of

the window. Very soon now it would not be too early to light the gas and

go to bed.

No one had ever seen a comet rushing through space. There was nothing to

look for. Only people who knew the whole map of the sky would recognise

the presence of the comet.... But there was a sort of calming joy in

watching even a small piece of a sky that others were watching too; it

was one’s own sky because one was a human being. Knowing of the sky and

even very ignorantly a little of the things that made its effects, gave

the most quiet sense of being human; and a sense of other human beings,

not as separate disturbing personalities, but as sky-watchers.....

“Looking at the stars one feels the infinite pettiness of mundane

affairs. I am perpetually astonished by the misapplication of the term

_infinite_. How, for instance, can one thing be said to be infinitely

smaller than another?” He had always objected only to the inaccuracy,

not to the dreary-weary sentiment. Sic transit. Almost everyone, even

people who liked looking at the night-sky seemed to feel that, in the

end. How do they get this kind of impression? If the stars are sublime,

why should the earth be therefore petty? It is part of a sublime system.

If the earth is to be called petty, then the stars must be called petty

too. They may not even be inhabited. Perhaps they mean the movement of

the vast system going on for ever, while men die. The indestructibility

of matter. But if matter is indestructible, it is not what the people

who use the phrase mean by _matter_. If matter is not conscious, man is

more than matter. If a small, no matter how small, conscious thing is

called petty in comparison with big no matter how big unconscious

things, everything is made a question of size, which is absurd. But all

these people think that consciousness dies......

The quiet forgotten sky was there again; intelligent, blotting out

unanswered questions, silently reaching down into the life that rose

faintly in her to meet it, the strange mysterious life, far away below

all interference, and always the same.

Teaching, being known as a teacher, had brought about Mrs. Bailey’s

confident promise to the Russian student. There was no help for that. If

he were cheated, it was part of the general confusion of the outside

life. He also was subject to that. It would be a moment in his

well-furnished life, caught up whenever his memory touched it, into the

strand of contemptible things. He would see her drifting almost

submerged in the flood of débris that made up the boarding-house life,

its influence not recognised in the first moments because she stood out

from it, still bearing, externally, the manner of another kind of life.

The other kind of life was there, but able to realise itself only when

she was alone. It had been all round her, a repelling memory, just now

in the dining-room .... blinding her .... making her utterly stupid ....

and there they were, in another world, living their lives; their smiling

patience taking its time, amused that she did not see. Of _course_ that

was what he had meant. There was no other possible meaning .... behind

barred gates, closed against her, they had sat, patiently impatient with

her absurdity .... Mrs. Bailey and Mr. Gunner....

_He_ had had the clearness of vision to discover what she was ......

behind her half-dyed grey hair and terrible ill-fitting teeth. Glorious.

Into the midst of her failing experiment, at the very moment when the

shadow of on-coming age was making it visibly tragic, had come this man

in his youth, clear-sighted and determined, seeing her as his happiness,

his girl. She was a girl, modest and good.... Circumstances could do

nothing. There as she stood at bay in the midst of them, the thing she

believed in, her one test of everything in life, always sure of her

defence and the shelter of her curious little iron strength, had come

again to her herself, all her own ... it was the unasked reward of her

unswerving faith. She stood decorated by a miracle.

Mrs. Bailey had triumphed; justified her everlasting confident smile.

She was enviable; her qualities blazoned by success in a competition

whose judges, being blind, never failed in discovery......

But the miracle gleams only for a moment, and the personal life, no

longer threading its way in a wonderful shining mysteriously continuous

and decisive pattern freely in and out of the world-wide everything, is

henceforth labelled and exposed, repeating until the eye wearies of its

fixity, one little lustreless shape; and the outside world is left

untouched and unchanged. Is it worth while? A blind end, in which death

swiftly increases....... But without it, in the end, there is no shape

at all?

The hour had been such a surprising success because of a smattering of

_knowledge_: until the moment when he had said I have always from the

first been interested in philosophy. Then knowing that the fascinating

thing was philosophy and being ignorant of philosophy, brought the

certainty of being unable to keep pace..... Philosophy had come, the

strange nameless thread in the books that were not novels, with its

terrible known name at last and disappeared in the same moment for ever

away into the lives of people who were free to study... But if, without

knowing it, one had been for so long interested in a subject, surely it

gave a sort of right? Perhaps he would go on talking about philosophy

without asking questions. No matter what failure lay ahead, it might be

possible, even if the lessons lasted only a little while, to find out

all he knew about philosophy. It was a privilege, another of those

extraordinary privileges coming suddenly and unexpectedly in strange

places, books or people knowing all about things one had already become

involved in without knowing when or why, people interested and attracted

by a response that at first revealed no differences, so that they all in

turn took one to be like themselves, and looking at life in their way.

It made a relationship that was as false as it was true. What they were,

they were permanently; always true to the same things. Why being so

different, was one privileged to meet them? There must be some

explanation. There was something that for a while attracted all kinds of

utterly different people, men and women--and then something that

repelled them, some sudden revelation of opposition, or absolute

difference, making one appear to have been playing a part. Insincere and

fickle.

What is fickleness? He is fickle, people say, with a wise smile. But one

always knows quite well why people go away, and why one goes oneself.

Not having the sense of fickleness probably means that one is fickle.

There is something behind the accusation and the maddening smile with

which it is always made, that makes you say thank heaven. People who are

not what they call fickle, but always the same, are always, in the midst

of their bland security, depressed about life in general, and have “a

poor opinion of humanity.” “Humanity does not change,” they say. It is

the same as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be. _Oooo._

And now to Godthefather .... and they find even their steadfast

relationships _dull_. They are the people who talk about “ordinary

everyday life” and approve of “far horizons” and desert islands and the

other side of the moon, as if they were real and wonderful and life was

not. If they went there it would be the same to them; they would be just

the same there; but something in the way their lives are arranged

prevents them from ever suddenly meeting Mr. Shatov. They meet only each

other. The men make sly horrible jokes together ..... the Greeks had

only one wife; they called it monotony.

...... But I find my daily round at Wimpole Street dull. No, not dull;

wrong in some way. I did not choose it; I was forced into it. I chose

it; there was something there; but it has gone. If it had not gone I

should never have found other things. “But you would have found

something else my child.” No. I am glad it has gone. I see now what I

have escaped. “But you would have developed differently and not got out

of touch. People don’t if they are always together.” But that is just

the dreadful thing.... Cléo de Mérode going back sometimes, with just

one woman friend, to the little cabarets.... Intense sympathy with that

means that one is a sort of adventuress ... the Queen can never ride on

an omnibus.

Why does being free give a feeling of meanness? Being able to begin all

over again, always unknown, at any moment; feeling a sort of pity and

contempt for the people who can’t; and then being happy and forgetting

them. But there is pain all round it that they never know. It is only by

the pain of remaining free that one can have the whole world round one

all the time.... But it disappears....

No, just at the moment you are most sure that everything is over for

ever, it comes again, and you cannot believe it ever disappeared. But

with the little feeling of meanness; towards the people you have left

and towards the new people. If you have ever failed anybody, you have no

right to speak to anyone else. All these years I ought never to have

spoken to anybody. “If I have shrunk unequal from one contest the joy I

find in all the rest becomes mean and cowardly. I should hate myself if

I then made my other friends my asylum.” Emerson would have hated me.

But he thinks evil people are necessary. How is one to know whether one

is really evil? Suppose one is. The Catholics believe that even the

people in hell have a little relaxation now and again. Lewes said it is

the relief from pain that gives you the illusion of bliss. It was cruel

when she was dying; but if it is true where is the difference? Perhaps

in being mean enough to take relief you don’t deserve. Can anyone be

thoroughly happy and thoroughly evil?

Botheration. Some clue had been missed. There was something incomplete

in the thought that had come just now and seemed so convincing. She

turned back and faced the self that had said one ought to meet

everything in life with one’s eyes on the sky. It had flashed in and

out, between her thoughts. Now it seemed alien. Other thoughts were

coming up, the thoughts and calculations she had not meant to make, but

they rushed forward, and there was something extraordinary behind them,

something that was part of the sky, of her own particular sky as she

knew it. She had the right to make them, having been driven away from

turning them into social charm for the dining-room. Once more she turned

busily to the sky, thrusting back her thoughts; but it was just the flat

sky of everyday, part of London; with nothing particular to say.

Thinking it over up here, alone in the universe, could not hurt the

facts. To-morrow there would be more facts. That could not be helped,

unless one died in the night or the house were burned down. Facing the

empty sky, sitting between it and the empty stillness of the house she

felt she was beaten; too tired now to struggle against the tide of

reflections she had fled downstairs to avoid......

Only this morning, it seemed days ago, coming into the hall at Wimpole

Street, the holidays still about her, little changes in the house, the

greetings, the busy bustling cheerfulness, the sense of fresh

beginnings, all ending in that dreadful moment of realisation; being

back in the smell of iodoform for another year; knowing that the

holidays had changed nothing; that there was nothing in this life that

could fulfil their promises; nothing but the circling pressing details,

invisible in the distance, now all there, at a glance, horribly

promising to fill her days and leave her for her share only tired

evenings. Unpacking, the spell of sunburnt summer-scented,

country-smelling clothes, the fresh beginning in her room, one visit to

an A.B.C. and the British Museum and everything would be dead again. No

change at Tansley Street; through the crack in the dining-room door Mr.

Rodkin and his newspapers, Mr. Gunner sitting over the empty grate

waiting for nothing; Mrs. Mann standing on the hearthrug, waiting to

explain away something, watching Sissie and Mrs. Bailey clear the table,

with a smile fixed on her large well-made child’s face, Mr. Keppel

coming out of the room with his graceful halting lounge and going on,

unseeing, upstairs, upright in his shabby dreamy grey clothes as if he

were walking on level ground. Lingering a moment too long, Mrs. Bailey

in the hall, her excited conspirator’s smiles as she communicated the

news of Mr. Rodkin’s friend and the lessons, as if nothing were changed

and one were still always available for association with the house; her

smiling calculating dismay at the refusal, her appeal to Mr. Rodkin, his

abstracted stiff-jointed emergence into the hall with his newspaper, his

brilliant-eyed, dried-up laugh, his chuckling assertion, like a lawyer,

that he had promised the lessons and Shatov must not be disappointed;

the suspicion that Mrs. Bailey was passing the moments in fear of losing

a well-to-do newcomer, an important person brought in by her only good

boarder; the wretched sense of being caught and linked up again in the

shifts and deceptions of the bankrupt house; the uselessness; the

certainty that the new man, as described, would be retained only by his

temporary ignorance and helplessness, the vexatious thought of him,

waiting upstairs in the drawing-room in a state of groundlessly aroused

interest and anticipation, Mr. Rodkin’s irresponsible admiring

spectator’s confidence as he made the introductions and vanished whilst

the little dark frock-coated figure standing alone in the cold gaslight

of the fireless room was still in the attitude of courteous obeisance;

the happy ease of explaining to the controlledly waiting figure the

impossibility of giving lessons on one’s own language without the

qualification of study; his lifted head, the extraordinary gentleness of

the white, tremulous, determined features, the child-like openness of

the broad forehead, the brilliant gentle deprecating eyes, familiar

handsome unknown kindliness gleaming out between the high arch of rich

black hair and the small black sharply-pointed French beard; the change

in the light of the cold room with the sound of the warm deep voice; the

few well-chosen struggling words; scholarship; that strange sense that

foreigners bring, of knowing and being known, but without the irony of

the French or the plebeianism of Germans and Scandinavians, bringing a

consciousness of being on trial, but without responsibility.....

The trial would bring exposure. Reading and discussion would reveal

ignorance of English literature....

The hour of sitting accepted as a student, talking easily, the right

phrases remembering themselves in French and German, would not come

again; the sudden outbreak of happiness after mentioning Renan .....

_how_ had she suddenly known that he made the Old Testament like a

newspaper? _Parfaitement_; j’ai toujours été fort intéressé dans la

philosophie. After reading so long ago, not understanding at the time

and knowing she would only remember, without words, something that had

come from the pages. Perhaps that was how students learned; reading and

getting only a general impression and finding thoughts and words years

afterwards; but then how did they pass examinations?

For that moment they had been students together, exchanging photographs

of their minds. That could not come again. It was that moment that had

sent him away at the end of the lesson, plunging lightly upstairs,

brumming in his deep voice, and left her singing in the drawing-room

.... the best way would be to consider him as something superfluous, to

be forgotten all day and presently, perhaps quite soon, to disappear

altogether.... But before her exposure brought the lessons to an end and

sent him away to find people who were as learned as he was, she would

have heard more. To-morrow he would bring down the Spinoza book. But it

was in German. They might begin with Renan in English. But that would

not be reading English. He would demur and disapprove. English

literature. Stopford Brooke. He would think it childish; not sceptical

enough. Matthew Arnold. _Emerson_. Emerson would be perfect for reading;

he would see that there was an English writer who knew everything. It

would postpone the newspapers, and meanwhile she could find out who was

Prime Minister and something about the English system of education. He

_must_ read Emerson; one could insist that it was the purest English and

the most beautiful. If he did not like it, it would prove that his idea

that the Russians and the English were more alike than any other

Europeans was an illusion. Emerson; and the Comet.

* * * * *

Mr. Shatov stood ceremoniously waiting and bowing as on the previous

evening, a stranger again; conversational interchange was far away at

the end of some chance opening that the hour might not bring. Miriam

clasped her volume; she could fill the time triumphantly in correcting

his accent and intonation, after a few remarks about the comet.

Confronting him she could not imagine him related to Emerson. No

continental could fully appreciate Emerson; except perhaps Maeterlinck.

It would have been better to try something more simple, with less depth

of truth in it. Darwin or Shakespeare. But Shakespeare was poetry; he

could not go about in England talking Shakespeare. And Darwin was bad,

for men.

He listened in his subdued controlled way to her remark and again she

saw him surrounded by his world of foreign universities and professors,

and wondered for a sharp instant whether she were betraying some

dreadful English, middle-class, newspaper ignorance; perhaps there were

no longer any comets; they were called by some other name ... he might

know whether there was still a nebular theory and whether anything more

had been done about the electrical contact of metals ... that man in the

Revue des deux Mondes saying that the first outbreak of American

literature was unfortunately feminine. Mill thought intuition at least

as valuable as ratiocination.... Mill; he could read Mill. Emerson would

be a secret attack on him, an eloquent spokesman for things no foreigner

would agree with. “Ah yes,” he said thoughtfully, “I always have had

great interest for astronomy, but now please tell me,” he lifted

yesterday’s radiant face. Had there been yesterday that glow of crimson

tie showing under the point of his black beard and the gold watch-chain

across the blackness of his waistcoat? “how I shall obtain admission to

the British Moozayum.”

Miriam gave instructions delightedly. Mr. Shatov hunched crookedly in

his chair, his head thrown up and listening towards her, his eyebrows

raised as if he were singing and on his firm small mouth the pursed look

of a falsetto note. His brown eyes were filmed, staring averted, as if

fixed on some far-away thing that did not move; it was like the

expression in the eyes of Mr. Helsing but older and less scornful. There

was no scorn at all, only a weary cynically burning knowledge, yet the

eyes were wide and beautiful with youth. Yesterday’s look of age and

professorship had gone; he was wearing a little short coat; in spite of

the beard he was a student, only just come from being one amongst many,

surrounded in the crowding sociable foreign way; it gave his whole

expression a warmth; the edges of his fine soft richly-dented black

hair, the contours of his pale face, the careless hunching of his

clothes seemed in a strange generous way unknown in England, at the

disposal of his fellow-creatures. Only in his eyes was the contradictory

lonely look of age. But when they came round to meet hers, his head

still reined up and motionless, she seemed to face the chubby upright

determination of a baby, and the deep melancholy in the eyes was like

the melancholy of a puppy.

“Pairhaps,” he said, “one of your doctors shall sairtify me for a fit

and proper person.”

Miriam stared her double stupefaction. For a moment, as if to give her

time to consider his suggestion, his smile remained, still deferential

but with the determined boldness of a naughty child lurking behind it;

then his eyes fell, too soon to catch her answering smile. She could

not, with his determined unaverted and now nervously quivering face

before her, either discourage the astounding suggestion or resent his

complacent possession of information about her.

“I should tell you,” he apologised gently, “that Mrs. Bailey has say me

you are working in the doctors’ quarter of London.”

“They are not doctors,” said Miriam, feeling stiffly English, and in her

known post as dental secretary utterly outside his world of privileged

studious adventure, “and you want a householder who is known to you and

not a hotel or boarding-house keeper.”

“That is very English. But no matter. Perhaps it shall be sufficient

that I am graduate.”

“You could go down and see the librarian, you must write a statement.”

“That is an excellent idee.”

“I am a reader, but not a householder.”

“No matter. That is most excellent. You shall pairhaps introduce me to

this gentleman. Ah, that is very good. I shall be most happy to find

myself in that institution. It is one of my heartmost dreams of England

to find myself in midst of all these leeter-aytchoors..... When can we

go?”

There was a ring on the little finger of the hand that drew from an

inner pocket a limp leather pocket-book; pale old gold curving up to a

small pimple of jewels. The ringed hand moving above the dip of the

double watch-chain gave to his youth a strange look of mellow wealthy

middle age.

“Ah. I must write in English. Please tell me. But shall we not go at

once, this evanink?”

“We can’t; the reading-room closes at eight.”

“That is very English; well; tell me what I shall write.”

Miriam watched as he wrote with a small quick smoothly moving pencil.

The pale gold of the ring was finely chased. The small cluster of tiny

soft-toned pearls encircling and curving up to a small point of diamond

were set in a circlet of enamel, a marvellous rich deep blue. She had

her Emerson ready when the writing was done.

“What is Emerson?” he enquired, sitting back to restore his book to its

pocket. “I do not know this writer.” His reared head had again the look

of heady singing, young, confronting everything, and with all the stored

knowledge that can be given to wealthy youth prepared to meet her

precious book. If he did not like it there was something shallow in all

the wonderful continental knowledge; if he found anything in it; if he

understood it at all, they could meet on that one little plot of equal

ground; he might even understand her carelessness about all other books.

“He is an American,” she said, desperately handing him the little green

volume.

“A most nice little volume,” he demurred, “but I find it strandge that

you offer me the book of an American.”

“It is the most perfect English you could have. He is a New Englander, a

Bostonian; the Pilgrim Fathers; they kept up the English of our best

period. The fifteenth century.”

“That is most interesting,” he said gravely, turning the precious pages.

“Why have I not heard of this man? In Russia we know of course their

Thoreau, he has a certain popularity amongst extremists, and I know also

of course their great poet, Vitmann. I see that this is a kind of

philosophical disquisitions.”

“You could not possibly have a better book for style and phraseology in

English, quite apart from the meaning.”

“_No_,” he said, with reproachful gravity, “preciosity I cannot have.”

Miriam felt out of her depth. “Perhaps you won’t like Emerson,” she

said, “but it will be good practice for you. You need not attend to the

meaning.”

“Well, ach-ma, we shall try, but not this evanink; I have headache, we

shall rather talk; let us return to the soobjects we have discussed

yesterday.” He rested his elbows on the table, supporting his chin on

one hand, his beard askew, one eye reduced to a slit by the bulge of his

pushed up cheek, his whole face suddenly pallid and heavy,

sleepy-looking.

“I am _most_-interested in philosophy,” he said, glowering warmly

through his further, wide-open eye. “It was very good to me. I found

myself most excited after our talk of yesterday. I think you too were

interested?”

“Yes, wasn’t it extraordinary?” Miriam paused to choose between the

desire to confess her dread of confronting a full-fledged student and a

silence that would let him go on talking while she contemplated a series

of reflections extending forward out of sight from his surprising

admission of fellowship. It was so strange, an exhilaration so deep and

throwing such wide thought-inviting illumination, to discover that he

had found yesterday exceptional; that he too, with all his wonderful

life, found interest scattered only here and there. Meanwhile his

eagerness to rekindle without fresh fuel, the glow of yesterday,

confessed an immaturity that filled her with a tumult of astonished

solicitude.

“You must let me correct your English to-day,” she said, busily taking

him with her voice by the hand in a forward rush into the empty hour

that was to test, perhaps to destroy the achievement of their first

meeting. “Just now you said ‘the subjects we have discussed yesterday.’

‘Have’ is the indefinite past; ‘yesterday,’ as you used it, is a

definite point of time; passé défini, we _discussed_ yesterday. We have

always discussed these things on Thursdays. We always discussed these

things on Thursdays. Those two phrases have different meanings. The

first indefinite because it suggests the discussions still going on, the

second definite referring to a fixed period of past time.”

She had made her speech at the table and glanced up at him

apologetically. Marvelling at her unexpected knowledge of the grammar of

her own tongue, called into being she supposed by the jar of his

inaccuracy, she had for a moment almost forgotten his presence.

“I perceive,” he said shifting his chin on his hand to face her fully,

with bent head and moving beard-point; his voice came again as strange,

from an immense distance; he was there like a ghost; “that you are in

spite of your denials a most excellent institutrice. Ach-ma! My English

is bad. You shall explain me all these complications of English

verb-mixing; but to-night I am reeally too stupid.”

“It is all quite easy; it only appears to be difficult.”

“It shall be easy; you have, I remark, a more clear pure English than I

have met; and I am very intelligent. It shall not be difficult.”

Miriam hid her laughter by gathering up one of his books with a random

question. But how brave. Why should not people admit intelligence?......

It was a sort of pamphlet, in French.

“Ah, that is most interesting; you shall at once read it. He is a most

intelligent man. I have hear this lectchoor----”

“I heard, I heard,” cried Miriam.

“Yes; but excuse a moment. Really it is interstink. He is one of the

most fine lecturours of Sorbonne; membre de l’Académie; the soobject is

l’Attention. Ah it is better we shall speak in French.”

“Nur auf deutsch kann man gut philosophieren,” quoted Miriam disagreeing

with the maxim and hoping he would not ask where she had read it.

“That is not so; that is a typical German arrogance. The French have

some most distinguished p-sychologues, Taine, and more recently, Tarde.

But listen.”

Miriam listened to the description of the lecture. For a while he kept

to his careful slow English and her attention was divided between her

growing interest in the nature of his mistakes, her desire to tell him

that she had discovered that he spoke Norman English in German idiom

with an intonation that she supposed must be Russian, and the

fascination of watching for the fall of the dead-white, black-fringed

eyelids on to the brooding face, between the framing of each sentence.

When he passed into French, led by a quotation which was evidently the

core of the lecture, she saw the lecturer, and his circle of students

and indignantly belaboured him for making, and them for quietly

listening to the assertion that it is curious that the human faculty of

attention should have originated in women.

Certainly she would not read the pamphlet. However clever the man might

be, his assumptions about women made the carefully arranged and solemnly

received display of research, irritatingly valueless. And Mr. Shatov

seemed to agree, quite as a matter of course.... “Why should he be

_surprised_?” she said when he turned for her approval. “_How_,

surprised,” he asked laughing, an easy deep bass chuckle, drawing his

small mouth wide and up at the corners; a row of small square even teeth

shining out.

“Ach-ma,” he sighed, with shining eyes, looking happily replete, “he is

a _great_ p-sycho-physiologiste,” and passed on to eager narration of

the events of his week in Paris. Listening to the strange inflections of

his voice, the curiously woven argumentative sing-song tone, as if he

were talking to himself, broken here and there by words thrown out with

explosive vehemence, breaking defiantly short as if to crush opposition

in anticipation, and then again the soft almost plaintive sing-song

beginning of another sentence, Miriam presently heard him mention Max

Nordau and learned that he was something more than the author of

Degeneration. He had written Die Conventionellen Lügen der

Kulturmenschheit, which she immediately must read. He had been to see

him and found a truly marvellous white-haired old man, with eyes,

_alive_; so young and vigorous in his enthusiasm that he made Mr. Shatov

at twenty-two feel _old_.

After that she watched him from afar, set apart from his boyhood, alone

with her twenty-five years on the borders of middle-age. _There_ was the

secret of the youthful untested look that showed in certain poses of his

mature studious head. His beard and his courtly manner and the grave

balanced intelligence of his eyes might have belonged to a man of forty.

Perhaps the Paris visit had been some time ago. No; he had come through

France for the first time on his way to England.... She followed him,

growing weary with envy, through his excursions in Paris with his

father; went at last to the Louvre, mysterious grey building, heavy

above a row of shops, shutting in works of “art,” in some extraordinary

way understood, and known to be “good”; and woke to astonishment to find

him sitting alone, his father impatiently gone back to the hotel, for an

hour in motionless contemplation of the Venus, having _wept_ at the

first sight of her in the distance. The impression of the Frenchman’s

lecture was driven away. All the things she had heard of on these two

evenings were in the past.

He was in England now, through all the wonders of his continental life,

England had beckoned him. Paris had been just a stage on his confident

journey; and the first event of his London life would be Saturday’s

visit to the British Museum. His eager foreign interest would carry the

visit off .... and she remembered, growing in the thought suddenly

animated towards his continued discourse, that she could show him the

Elgin Marbles.

* * * * *

The next evening, going down to the drawing-room at the appointed time,

Miriam found it empty and lit only by the reflection from the street.

Standing in the dim blue light she knew so well, she passed through a

moment of wondering whether she had ever really sat talking in this room

with Mr. Shatov. It seemed so long ago. His mere presence there had been

strange enough; youth and knowledge and prosperity where for so long

there had been nothing but the occasional presence of people who were in

mysterious disgraceful difficulties, and no speech but the so quickly

acrimonious interchange of those who are trying to carry things off.

Perhaps he was only late. She lit the gas and leaving the door wide sat

down to the piano. The loose flatly vibrating shallow tones restored her

conviction that once more the house was as before, its usual

intermittent set of boarders, coming punctually to meals, enduring each

other downstairs in the warmth until bedtime, disappearing one by one up

the unlighted stairs, having tea up here on Sundays, and for her, the

freedom of the great dark house, the daily oblivion of moving about in

it, the approach up the quiet endlessly dreaming old grey street in the

afternoon, late at night, under all the changes of season and of

weather; the empty drawing-room that was hers every Sunday morning with

its piano, and always there at night within its open door, inviting her

into its blue-lit stillness; her room upstairs, alive now and again

under some chance spell of the weather, or some book which made her feel

that any life in London would be endurable for ever that secured her

room with its evening solitude, now and again the sense of strange fresh

invisibly founded beginnings; often a cell of torturing mocking memories

and apprehensions, driving her down into the house to hear the dreadful

voices, giving out in unchanged accents, their unchanging words and

phrases.

Someone had come into the room, bringing a glow of life. She clung to

her playing; he need not know that she had been waiting for him. A

figure was standing almost at her side; with that voice he would

certainly be musical .... the sturdiness and the plaintiveness were like

the Russian symphonies; he could go to the Queen’s Hall; his being late

for the lesson had introduced music.... She broke off and turned to see

Sissie Bailey, waiting with sullen politeness to speak. Mr. Shatov was

out. He had gone out early in the afternoon and had not been seen since.

In Sissie’s sullenly worried expression Miriam read the Baileys’ fear

that they had already lost hold of their helpless new boarder. She

smiled her acceptance and suggested that he had met friends. Sissie

remained grimly responseless and presently turned to go. Resuming her

playing, Miriam wondered bitterly where he could have lingered, so

easily dropping his lesson. What did it matter? Sooner or later he was

bound to find interests; the sooner the better. But she could not go on

playing; the room was cold and black; horribly empty and still.... Mrs.

Bailey would know where he had set out to go this afternoon; she would

have directed him. She played on zealously for a decent interval, closed

the piano and went downstairs. In the dining-room was Sissie, alone,

mending a table-cloth.

To account for her presence Miriam enquired whether Mrs. Bailey were

out. “Mother’s lying down,” said Sissie sullenly, “she’s got one of her

headaches.” Miriam sympathised. “I want her to have the doctor; it’s no

use going on like this.” Miriam was drawn irresistibly towards Mrs.

Bailey, prostrate in her room with her headache. She went down the hall

feeling herself young and full of eager strength, sinking with every

step deeper and deeper into her early self; back again by Eve’s bedside

at home, able to control the paroxysms of pain by holding her small head

grasped in both hands; she recalled the strange persistent strength she

had felt, sitting with her at night, the happiness of the moments when

the feverish pain seemed to run up her own arms and Eve relaxed in

relief, the beautiful unfamiliar darkness of the midnight hours, the

curious sharp savour of the incomprehensible book she had read lying on

the floor by the little beam of the nightlight. She could surely do

something for Mrs. Bailey; meeting her thus for the first time without

the barrier of conversation; at least she could pit her presence and her

sympathy against the pain. She tapped at the door of the little room at

the end of the passage. Presently a muffled voice sounded and she went

in. A sense of release enfolded her as she closed the door of the little

room; it was as if she had stepped off the edge of her life, out into

the wide spaces of the world. The room was lit feebly by a small lamp

turned low within its smoky chimney. Its small space was so crowded that

for a moment she could make out no recognisable bedroom shape; then a

figure rose and she recognised Mr. Gunner standing by a low camp

bedstead. It’s Miss Henderson he said quietly. There was a murmur from

the bed and Miriam bending over it saw Mrs. Bailey’s drawn face,

fever-flushed, with bright wild eyes. “We think she ought to have a

doctor,” murmured Mr. Gunner. “M’m” said Miriam absently.

“Good of you,” murmured Mrs. Bailey thickly. Miriam sat down in the

chair Mr. Gunner had left and felt for Mrs. Bailey’s hands. They were

cold and trembling. She clasped them firmly and Mrs. Bailey sighed.

“Perhaps you can persuade her,” murmured Mr. Gunner. “M’m” Miriam

murmured. He crept away on tiptoe. Mrs. Bailey sighed more heavily.

“Have you tried anything?” said Miriam dreamily, out into the crowded

gloom.

The room was full of unsightly necessaries, all old and in various

stages of dilapidation, the overflow of the materials that maintained in

the rest of the house the semblance of ordered boarding-house life. But

there was something vital, even cheerful in the atmosphere; conquering

the oppression of the crowded space. The aversion with which she had

contemplated, at a distance, the final privacies of the Baileys behind

the scenes, was exorcised. In the house itself there was no life; but

there was brave life battling in this room. Mrs. Bailey would have

admitted her at any time, with laughing apologies. Now that her entry

had been innocently achieved, she found herself rejoicing in the

disorder, sharing the sense Mrs. Bailey must have, every time she

retired to this lively centre, of keeping her enterprise going for yet

one more day. She saw that to Mrs. Bailey the house must appear as

anything but a failure and the lack of boarders nothing but

unaccountable bad luck. “A compress, or hot fomentations, hot

fomentations could not do harm and they might be very good.”

“Whatever you think my dear; good of you” murmured Mrs. Bailey feebly.

“Not a bit” said Miriam looking about wondering how she should carry

out, in her ignorance, this mysteriously suggested practical idea. There

was a small fire in the little narrow fireplace, with a hob on either

side. Standing up she caught sight of a circular willow pattern sink

basin with a tap above it and a cupboard below set in an alcove behind a

mound of odds and ends. The room was meant for a sort of kitchen or

scullery; and it had been the doctors’ only sitting-room. How had the

four big tall men, with their table and all their books, managed to

crowd themselves in?

In the dining-room Sissie responded with unconcealed astonishment and

gratitude to Miriam’s suggestions and bustled off for the needed

materials, lingering, when she brought them, to make useful suggestions,

affectionately controlling Mrs. Bailey’s feeble efforts to help in the

arrangements, and staying to supply Miriam’s needs, a little compact

approving presence.

As long as the hot bandages were held to her head Mrs. Bailey seemed to

find relief and presently began to murmur complaints of the trouble she

was giving. Miriam, longing to sing, threatened to withdraw unless she

would remain untroubled until she was better, or weary of the treatment.

At ten o’clock she was free from pain, but her feet and limbs were cold.

“You ought to have a pack all over,” said Miriam judicially.

“That’s what I felt when you began,” agreed Mrs. Bailey.

“Of course. It’s the even temperature. I’ve never had one, but we were

all brought up homeopathically.” Sissie went away to make tea.

“Was you?” said Mrs. Bailey drawing herself into a sitting posture.

Miriam launched into eager description of the little chest with its tiny

bottles of pilules and tinctures and the small violet-covered book about

illnesses strapped into its lid; the home-life all about her as she

talked.... Belladonna; aconite; she was back amongst her earliest

recollections, feeling small and swollen and feverish; Mrs. Bailey,

sitting up, with her worn glad patient face seemed to her more than ever

like her mother; and she could not believe that the lore of the book and

the little bottles did not reside with her.

“Aconite,” said Mrs. Bailey, “that was in the stuff the doctor give me

when I was so bad last year.” That was all new and modern. Mrs. Bailey

_must_ see if she could only rapidly paint them for her, the home scenes

all about the room.

“They _use_ those things in the British Pharmacopoeia, but they pile

them in in bucketsful with all sorts of minerals” she said

provisionally, holding to her pictures while she pondered for a moment

over the fact that she had forgotten until to-night that she was a

homeopath.

Mr. Gunner came quietly in with Sissie and the tea, making a large party

distributed almost invisibly in the gloom beyond the circle of dim

lamplight. There was a joyful urgency of communication in the room. But

the teacups were filled and passed round before the accumulated

intercourse broke through the silence in a low-toned remark. It seemed

to come from everyone and to bear within it all the gentle speech that

had sounded since the world began; light spread outward and onward from

the darkened room.

Taking her share in the remarks that followed, Miriam marvelled.

Unqualified and unprepared, utterly undeserving as she felt, she was

aware, within the controlled tone of her slight words, of something that

moved her, as she listened, to a strange joy. It was within her, but not

herself; an unknown vibrating moulding force.....

When Sissie went away with the tea-things, Mr. Gunner came to the

bedside to take leave. Sitting on the edge of the bed near Miriam’s

chair he bent murmuring; Miriam rose to go; Mrs. Bailey’s hand

restrained her. “I think you know” whispered Mr. Gunner, “what we are to

each other.” Miriam made no reply; there was a golden suffusion before

her eyes, about the grey pillow. Mrs. Bailey was clutching her hand. She

bent and kissed the hollow cheek, receiving on her own a quick eager

mother’s kiss, and turned to offer her free hand to Mr. Gunner who

painfully wrung it in both his own. Outside in the darkness St. Pancras

clock was striking. She felt a sudden sadness. What could they know of

each other? What could any man and woman know of each other?

When Mr. Gunner had gone and she was alone with Mrs. Bailey, the trouble

lifted. It was Mrs. Bailey who had permitted it, she who would steer and

guide, and she was full of wisdom and strength. She could unerringly

guide anyone through anything. But how had she arrived at permitting

such an extraordinary thing?

“Poor boy,” sighed Mrs. Bailey.

“Why poor boy? Nothing of the sort,” said Miriam.

“Well, it’s a comfort to me you think that; I’ve worried meself ill over

him. I’ve been keeping him off for over a twelvemonth.”

“Well, it’s all settled now so you needn’t worry any more.”

“It’s his age I look to; he’s only two and twenty,” flushed Mrs. Bailey.

“He looks older than that.”

“He does look more than his age, I allow; he never had any home; his

father married a second time; he says this is the first home he’s had;

he’s never been so happy.” All the time he had been halting about in the

evenings in the dining-room, never going out and seeming to have nothing

to do but a sort of malicious lying-in-wait to make facetious remarks,

he had been feeling at home, happy at home, and growing happier and

happier. Poor little man, at home in nothing but the dining-room at

Tansley Street.... Mrs. Bailey..... Was he good enough for her? She had

not always liked or even approved of him.

“Well; that’s lovely. Of course he has been happy here.”

“That’s all very well for the past; but there’s many breakers ahead. He

wants me to give up and have a little home of our own. But there’s my

chicks. I can’t give up till they’re settled. I’ve told him that. I

can’t do less than my duty by _them_.”

“Of course not. He’s a dear. I think he’s splendid.” But how generously

glowing the struggling house seemed now; compared to a life alone, in

some small small corner, with Mr. Gunner.....

“Bless ’im. He’s only a clurk, poor boy, at thirty-five weekly.”

“Of course clerks don’t make much; unless they have languages. He ought

to learn one or two languages.”

“He’s not over strong. It’s not money I’m thinking of--” she flushed and

hesitated and then said with a girlish rush, “I’d manage; once I’m free;

I’d manage. I’d work my fingers to the bone for ’im.” Marvellous, for a

little man who would go on writing yours of yesterday’s date to hand as

per statement enclosed; nothing in his day but his satisfaction in the

curves and flourishes of his handwriting ... and then home comforts,

Mrs. Bailey always there, growing more worn and ill and old; an old

woman before he was thirty.

“But that won’t be for a long time yet; though Polly’s doing splendid.”

“Is she?”

“Well, I oughtn’t to boast. But they’ve wrote me she’s to be

pupil-teacher next year.”

“_Polly?_”

“Polly,” bridled Mrs. Bailey and laughed with shining eyes. “The

chahld’s not turned fifteen yet, dear little woman blesser.” Miriam

winced; poor little Polly Bailey, to die so soon, without knowing it.

“Oh, that’s magnificent.” Perhaps it was magnificent. Perhaps a Bailey

would not feel cheated and helpless. Polly would be a pupil-teacher,

perkily remaining her same self, a miniature of Mrs. Bailey, already

full of amused mysterious knowledge and equal to every occasion.

Mrs. Bailey smiled shyly, “She’s like her poor mother; she’s got a will

of her own.” Miriam sat at ease within the tide .... where did women

find the insight into personality that gave them such extraordinary

prophetic power? She herself had not an atom of it. Perhaps it was

matronhood; and Mary hid all these things in her heart. No; aunts often

had it, even more than matrons; Mrs. Bailey was so splendidly controlled

that she was an aunt as well as a mother to the children. She

contemplated the sharply ravaged little head, reared and smiling above

the billows of what people called ‘misfortunes’ by her conscious and

self-confessed strength of will; yes, and unconscious fairness and

generosity, reflected Miriam and an immovable sense of justice. All

these years of scraping and contrivance had not corrupted Mrs. Bailey;

she ought to be a judge, and not Mr. Gunner’s general servant....

Justice is a woman; blindfolded; seeing from the inside and not led away

by appearances; men invent systems of ethics, but they cannot weigh

personality; they have no individuality, only conformity or

non-conformity to abstract systems; yet it was impossible to acknowledge

the power of a woman, of any woman she had ever known, without becoming

a slave; or to associate with one, except in a time of trouble; but in

her deliberate excursion into this little room she was free; all her

life lay far away, basking in freedom; spreading out and out,

illimitable; each space and part a full cup on which no hand might be

laid .... that little man was just a curious foreign voice, which would

presently rouse her impatience .... and just now he had seemed so

near.... Was she looking at him with Mrs. Bailey’s eyes? Mrs. Bailey

would say, “oh yes, I think he’s a very nice little man.” Beyond his

distinction as a well-to-do boarder, he would have, in her eyes, nothing

to single him out; she would respect his scholarship, but regarding it

as a quality peculiar to certain men; and without the knowledge that it

was in part an accident of circumstance. She would see beyond it; she

would never be prostrate before it.

But the distant vision of the free life was not Mrs. Bailey’s vision;

there was something there she could not be made to understand, and would

in any way there were words that tried to express it, certainly not

approve. Yet why did it come so strongly here in her room? The sense of

it was here, somewhere in their intercourse, but she was unconscious of

it..... Miriam plumbed about in the clear centre--where without will or

plan or any shapely endeavour in her life, she was yet so strangely

accepted and indulged. Mrs. Bailey was glancing back at her from the

depths of her abode, her face busy in control of the rills of laughter

sparkling in her eyes and keeping, Miriam knew, as she moved, hovering,

and saw the fostering light they shed upon the world, perpetual holiday;

the reassuring inexhaustible substance of Mrs. Bailey’s being.

“It’s Sissie I worry about,” said Mrs. Bailey. Miriam attended

curiously. “She’s like her dear father; keeps herself to herself and

goes on; she’s a splendid little woman in the house; but I feel she

ought to be doing something more.”

“She’s awfully capable” said Miriam.

“She is. There’s nothing she can’t turn her hand to. She’ll have the

lock off a door and mend it and put it on again and put in a pane of

glass neater than a workman and no mess or fuss.” Miriam sat astonished

before the expanding accumulation of qualities.

“I don’t know how I should spare her; but she’s not satisfied here; I’ve

been wondering if I couldn’t manage to put her into the typing.”

“There isn’t much prospect there” recited Miriam, “the supply is bigger

than the demand.”

“That is so” assented Mrs. Bailey; “but I see it like this; where

there’s a will there’s a way and one has to make a beginning.” Mrs.

Bailey had made up her mind. Quite soon Sissie would know typewriting; a

marketable accomplishment; she would rank higher in the world than a

dental secretary; a lady typist with a knowledge of French. That would

be her status in an index. No doubt in time she would learn shorthand.

She would go capably about, proud of her profession; with a home to live

in, comfortably well off on fifteen shillings a week; one of the

increasing army of confident illiterate young women in the city; no,

Sissie would not be showy; she would bring life into some office,

amongst men as illiterate as herself; as soon as she had picked up

“yours to hand” she would be reliable and valuable..... Sissie, with a

home, and without putting forth any particular effort, would have a

place in the world.....

“I’ll make some inquiries” said Miriam cheerfully. Mrs. Bailey thanked

her with weary eagerness; she was flushed and flagging; the evening’s

work was being cancelled by the fascination which had allowed her to go

on talking. She admitted a return of her neuralgia and Miriam,

remorseful and weary, made her lie down again. She looked dreadfully

ill; like someone else; she would go off to sleep looking like someone

else, or lie until the morning, with plans going round and round in her

head and get up, managing to be herself until breakfast was over. But

all the time, she had a house to be in. She was Mrs. Bailey; a

recognised centre. Miriam sat alone, the now familiar little room added

to the strange collection of her inexplicable life; its lamplit walls

were dear to her, with the extraordinary same dearness of all walls seen

in tranquillity. She seemed to be responding to their gaze. Had she

answered Mrs. Bailey’s murmur about going to bed? It seemed so long ago.

She sat until the lamp began to fail and Mrs. Bailey appeared to be

going to sleep. She crept out at last into the fresh still darkness of

the sleeping house. On the first floor there was a glimmer of blue

light. It was the street lamp shining in through Mr. Shatov’s wide-open

empty room. When she reached her own room she found that it was one

o’clock. _Already_ he had found his way to some horrible haunt. She

wrapped her evening round her, parrying the thought of him. There should

be no lesson to-morrow. She would be out, having left no message.

* * * * *

When she came in the next evening he was in the hall. He came forward

with his bearded courteous emphatically sweeping foreign bow; a foreign

professor bowing to an audience he was about to address. Bitte verzeihen

Sie, he began, his rich low tones a little breathless; the gong blared

forth just behind him; he stood rooted, holding her with respectful

melancholy gaze as his lips went on forming their German sentences. The

clangour died down; people were coming downstairs drawing Miriam’s gaze

as he moved from their pathway into the dining-room, still facing her

with the end of his little speech lingering nervously on his features.

He was in his frock-coat and shone richly black and white under the

direct lamplight; he was even more handsome than she had thought,

solidly beautiful, glowing in shapely movement as he stood still and

gestureless before her, set off by the shapelessly moving, dinner drawn

forms passing into the dining-room. She smiled in response to whatever

he may have said and wondered, having apologised for yesterday, in what

way he would announce to her the outside engagement for this evening for

which he was so shiningly prepared. “Zo,” he said gravely, “if you are

now free, I will almost immediately come up; we shall not wait till

eight o’clock.” Miriam bowed in response to the sweeping obeisance with

which he turned into the dining-room, and ran upstairs. He came up

before the end of the first course, before she had had time to test in

the large overmantel the shape of her hair that had seemed in the little

mirror upstairs, accidentally good, quite like the hair of someone who

mysteriously knew how to get good effects.

“I have been sleeping,” he said in wide cheerful tones as he crossed the

room, “all day until now. I am a little stupid; but I have very many

things to say you. First I must say you,” he said more gravely and stood

arrested with his coat tails in his hands, in front of the chair

opposite to hers at a little table, “that your Emerson is

_most_-wonderful.”

Miriam could not believe she had heard the deep-toned emphatic words.

She stared stupidly at his unconscious thoughtful brow; for a strange

moment feeling her own thoughts and her own outlook behind it. She felt

an instant’s pang of disappointment; the fine brow had lost something,

seemed familiar, almost homely. But an immense relief was surging

through her. “No--Ree--ally, most-wonderful,” he reiterated with almost

reproachful emphasis, sitting down with his head eagerly forward between

his shoulders, waiting for her response. “Yes, _isn’t_ he?” she said

encouragingly and waited in a dream while he sat back and drew little

volumes from his pocket, his white eyelids downcast below his frowning

brow. Would he qualify his praise? Had he read enough to come upon any

of the chills and contradictions? However this might be, Emerson had

made upon this scholarly foreigner, groping in him with his scanty

outfit of language, an overwhelming impression. Her own lonely

overwhelming impression was justified. The eyes came up again, gravely

earnest. “No,” he said, “I find it most difficult to express the

profound impression this reading have made on me.”

“He isn’t a bit original,” said Miriam surprised by her unpremeditated

conclusion, “when you read him you feel as if you were following your

own thoughts.”

“That is so; he is not himself philosophe; I would call him rather,

poète; a most remarkable quality of English, _great_ dignity and with at

the same time a most perfect simplicity.”

“He understands everything; since I have had that book I have not wanted

to read anything else .... except Maeterlinck” she murmured in

afterthought, “and in a way he is the same.”

“I do not know this writer” said Mr. Shatov, “and what you say is

perhaps not quite good. But in a manner I can have some sympa-thaytic

apprysiacion with this remark. I have read yesterday the whole day; on

different omnibuses. Ah. It was for me _most_-wonderful.”

“Well, I always feel, all the time, all day, that if people would only

read Emerson they would understand, and not be like they are, and that

the only way to make them understand what one means would be reading

pieces of Emerson.”

“That is true; why should you not do it?”

“Quotations are feeble; you always regret making them.”

“No; I do not agree,” said Mr. Shatov devoutly smiling, “you are wrong.”

“Oh, but think of the awful people who quote Shakespeare.”

“Ach-ma. People are, in general, silly. But I must tell you you should

not cease to read until you shall have read at least some Russian

writers. If you possess sensibility for language you shall find that

Russian is _most_-beautiful; it is perhaps the most beautiful European

language; it is, indubitably, the most rich.”

“It can’t be richer than English.”

“Certainly, it is richer than English. I shall prove this to you, even

with dictionary. You shall find that it occur, over and over, that where

in English is one word, in Russian is six or seven different, all

synonyms, but all with _most_ delicate individual shades of nuance ....

the abstractive expression is there, as in all civilised European

languages, but there is also in Russian the most immense _variety_ of

natural expressions, coming forth from the strong feeling of the Russian

nature to all these surrounding influences; each word opens to a whole

aperçu in this sort .... and what is most significant is, the great

richness, in Russia, of the people-language; there is no other

people-language similar; there is in no one language so immense a

variety of tender diminutives and intimate expressions of all natural

things. None is so rich in sound or so marvellously powerfully

colourful..... _That_ is Russian. Part of the reason is no doubt to find

in the immense paysage; Russia is zo _vast_; it is inconceivable for any

non-Russian. There is also the ethnological explanation, the immense

vigour of the people.”

Miriam went forward in a dream. As Mr. Shatov’s voice went on, she

forgot everything but the need to struggle to the uttermost against the

quiet strange attack upon English; the double line of evidence seemed so

convincing and was for the present unanswerable from any part of her

small store of knowledge; but there must be an answer; meantime the

suggestion that the immense range of English was partly due to its

unrivalled collection of technical terms, derived from English science,

commerce, sports, “all the practical life-manoeuvres” promised vibrating

reflection, later.

But somewhere outside her resentful indignation, she found herself

reaching forward unresentfully towards something very far-off, and as

the voice went on, she felt the touch of a new strange presence in her

Europe. She listened, watching intently, far-off, hearing now only a

voice, moving on, without connected meaning.... The strange thing that

had touched her was somewhere within the voice; the sound of Russia. So

much more strange, so much wider and deeper than the sound of German or

French or any of the many tongues she had heard in this house, the

inpouring impression was yet not alien. It was not _foreign_. There was

no barrier between the life in it and the sense of life that came from

within. It expressed that sense; in the rich, deep various sound and

colour of its inflections, in the strange abruptly controlled

shapeliness of the phrases of tone carrying the whole along, the voice

_was_ the very quality he had described, here, alive: about her in the

room. It was, she now suddenly heard, the disarming, unforeign thing in

the voice of kind commercial little Mr. Rodkin. Then there was an

answer. There was something in common between English and this strange

language that stood alone in Europe. She came back and awoke to the

moment, weary. Mr. Shatov had not noticed her absence. He was talking

about Russia. Unwillingly she gave her flagging attention to the Russia

already in her mind; a strip of silent sunlit snow, just below Finland,

St. Petersburg in the midst of it, rounded squat square white

architecture piled solidly beneath a brilliant sky, low sledges smoothly

gliding, drawn by three horses, bell-spanned, running wildly abreast,

along the silent streets or out into the deeper silence of dark,

snow-clad wolf-haunted forests that stretched indefinitely down the map;

and listened as he drew swift pictures, now north, now south. Vast

outlines emerged faintly, and here and there a patch remained, vivid.

She saw the white nights of the northern winter, felt the breaking

through of spring in a single day. Whilst she lingered at Easter

festivals in churches, all rich deep colour blazing softly through

clouds of incense, and imagined the mighty sound of Russian singing, she

was carried away to villages scattered amongst great tracts of forest,

unimaginable distances of forest, the vast forests of Germany small and

homely ..... each village a brilliant miniature of Russia, in every hut

a holy image; brilliant colouring of stained carved wood, each peasant a

striking picture, filling the eye in the clear light, many

“most-dignified”; their garments coloured with natural dyes, “the most

pure plant-stain colours,” deep and intense. She saw the colours, mat

and sheenless, yet full of light, taking the light in and in, richly,

and turned grievously to the poor cheap tones in all the western shops,

clever shining chemical dyes, endless teasing variety, without depth or

feeling, cheating the eye of life; and back again homesick to the rich

tones of reality...... She passed down the winding sweep of the Volga, a

consumptive seeking health, and out into the southern plains where wild

horses roamed at large, and stayed at a lodge facing towards miles and

miles of shallow salt water, sea-gull haunted, and dotted with floating

islands of reeds, so matted and interwoven that one could get out from

the little shallow leaky fishing-boat and walk upon them; and over all a

crystal air so life-giving that one recovered. She heard the peasants in

the south singing in strong deep voices, dancing by torchlight a wild

dance with a name that described the dance....

Throughout the recital were vivid words, each a picture of the thing it

expressed. She would never forget them. Russia was _recognisable_. So

was every language .... but no foreign sound had brought her such an

effect of strength and musical beauty and expressiveness combined. That

was it. It was the strange number of things that were together in

Russian that was so wonderful. In the end, back again in England,

sitting in the cold dilapidated room before the table of little books,

weary, opposite Mr. Shatov comfortably groaning and stretching, his eyes

already brooding in pursuit of something that would presently turn into

speech, she struggled feebly with a mournful uneasiness that had haunted

the whole of the irrevocable expansion of her consciousness. A _German_,

not a Russian ethnologist, and therefore without prejudice, had declared

that the Russians were the strongest kinetic force in Europe. He proved

himself disinterested by saying that the English came next. The English

were “simple and fundamentally sound.” Not intelligent; but healthy in

will, which the Russians were not. Then why were the Russians more

forceful? What was kinetic force? And ... mystery .... the Russians

themselves knew what they were like. “There is in Russia except in the

governing and bourgeois classes almost no hypocrisy.” What was

kinetic... And religion was an “actual force” in Russia! “What is

ki----”

“Ah but you shall at least read some of our great Russian authors ....

at least Tourgainyeff and Tolstoy.”

“Of course I have heard of Tolstoy.”

“Ah, but you shall read. He has a most profound knowledge of human

psychology; the most marvellous touches. In that he rises to

universality. Tourgainyeff is more pure Russian, less to understand

outside Russia; more academical; but he shall reveal you most admirably

the Russian aristocrat. He is cynic satirical.”

“Then he can’t reveal _anything_,” said Miriam. Here it was again; Mr.

Shatov, too, took satire quite unquestioningly; thought it a sort of

achievement, worthy of admiration. Perhaps if she could restrain her

anger, she would hear at least in some wonderful explanatory continental

phrase, what satire really was, and be able to settle with herself why

she knew it was in the long run, waste of time; _why_ the word satirist

suggested someone with handsome horns and an evil clever eye and thin

cold fingers. Thin. Swift was probably fearfully thin. Mr. Shatov was

smiling incredulously. If he went on to explain she would miss the more

important worrying thing. Novels. It was extraordinary that he

should....

“I don’t care for novels... I can’t see what they are about. They seem

to be an endless fuss about nothing.”

“That may apply in certain cases. But it is a too extreme statement.”

“It is extreme. Why not? How can a statement be too extreme if it is

true?”

“I cannot express an opinion on English novelistic writings. But of

Tolstoy it is certainly not true. _No_; it is not in general true that

in fictional representations there is no actuality. I have read with my

first English teacher in Moscow a story of your Myne-Reade. There was in

this story a Scotch captain who remained for me most typical British. He

was _very_ fine this chap. This presentation here made me the more want

what I have want always since a boy; to come to England.” Was Mayne

Reade a novelist? Those boys’ stories were glorious. But they were about

the sea; and the fifth form ... “a noble three-bladed knife, minus the

blades”.....

“There’s a thing called the Ebb-Tide,” she began, wondering how she

could convey her impression of the tropical shore; but Mr. Shatov’s

attention, though polite, was wandering, “I’ve read some of Gorki’s

short stories,” she finished briskly. They were not novels; they were

alive in some way English books were not. Perhaps all Russian books

were...

“Ah _Gorrrki_. He is come out direct from the peasantry; very powerfully

strange and rough presentations. He may be called the apostle of

misère.”

... the bakery and the yard; the fighting eagles, the old man at the

prow of the boat with his daughter-in-law.... All _teaching_ something.

How did people find it out?

“But really I must tell you of yesterday” said Mr. Shatov warmly. “I

have made a Schach-Partei. That was for me _very good_. It include also

a certain exploration of London. That is for me I need not say most

_fascinatink_.” Miriam listened eagerly. The time was getting on; they

had done no work. She had not once corrected him and he was plunging

into his preliminary story as if their hour had not yet begun. She was

to share...

“There was on one of these many omnibuses a gentleman who tell me where

in London I shall obtain a genuine coffee. Probably you know it is at

this Vienna Café, in Holeborne. You do not know this place? _Strange._

It is quite near to you all the time. Almost at your British Museum. Ah;

this gentleman has told me too a most funny story of a German who go

there proudly talking English. He was waiting; ach they are very slow in

this place, and at last he shouts for everyone to hear, Vaiter! Venn

shall I become a cup of coffee?”

Miriam laughed her delight apprehensively. “Ah, I like very much these

stories,” he was saying, his eyes dreamily absent, she feared, on a

memory-vista of similar anecdotes. But in a moment he was alive again in

his adventure. “It was at London Bridge. I have come all the way,

walkingly, to this Café. It is a strange place. Really glahnend;

Viennese; very dirrty. But coffee most excellent; just as on the

Continent. You shall go there; you will see. Upstairs it is most

dreadful. More dirrty; and in an intense gloom of smoke, very many men,

ah they are dreadful, I could not describe to you. Like monkeys; but all

in Schach-parteis. That shall be very good for me. I am most

enthusiastic with this game since a boy.”

“Billiards?”

Why should he look so astonished and impatiently explain so

reproachfully and indulgently? She grasped the meaning of the movements

of his hands. He was a chess-player “a game much older--uralt--and the

most mental, the only true abstractive game.” How differently an English

chess-player would have spoken. She regarded his eager contained

liveliness. Russian chess players remained alive. Was chess mental? Pure

tactics. Should she declare that chess was a dreadful boring indulgence,

leading nowhere? Perhaps he would be able to show her that this was not

so.... Why do the Germans call two people playing chess a chess-party?

“I have met there a man, a Polish doctor. We have made party and have

play until the Café close, when we go to his room and continue there to

play till the morning. Ah, it was most-beautiful.”

“Had you met him before?”

“Oh no. He is in London; stewdye-ink medicine.”

“St_uddy_ing,” said Miriam impatiently, lost in incredulous

contemplation. It could not be true that he had sat all night playing

chess with a stranger. If it were true, they must both be quite insane

..... the door was opening. Sissie’s voice, and Mr. Shatov getting up

with an eager polite smile. Footsteps crossing the room behind her; Mr.

Shatov and a tall man shaking hands on the hearthrug; two inextricable

voices; Mr. Shatov’s presently emerging towards her, deferentially, “I

present you Dr. Veslovski.” The Polish doctor, gracefully bowing from a

cold narrow height, Mr. Shatov, short, dumpy, deeply-radiant little

friend, between them; making a little speech, turning from one to the

other. The Polish head was reared again on its still cold grey height;

undisturbed.... Perfect. Miriam had never seen anything so perfectly

beautiful. Every line of the head and face harmonious; the pointed beard

finishing the lines with an expressiveness that made it also a feature,

one with the rest. Even the curious long narrow capless flatly lying

foreign boots, furrowed with mud-stiffened cracks, and the narrowly cut,

thin, shabby grey suit shared the distinction of the motionless

reined-in head. Polish beauty. If that were Polish beauty the Poles were

the most beautiful people in Europe. Polish; the word suggested the

effect, its smooth liquid sheen, sinuous and graceful without weakness

.... the whole word was at home in the eyes; horribly beautiful, abysses

of fathomless foreign ... any kind of known happenings were unthinkable

behind those eyes .... yet he was here; come to play chess with Mr.

Shatov who had not expected him until Sunday, but would go now

immediately with her permission, to fetch his set from upstairs. She

lingered as he hurried away, glancing at the little books on the table.

The Emerson was not among them. The invisible motionless figure on the

hearthrug had brought her a message she had forgotten in her annoyance

at his intrusion. Going from the room towards his dim reflection in the

mirror near the door she approached the waiting thought--Mr. Shatov’s

voice broke in, talking eagerly to Mrs. Bailey on the floor below. From

the landing she heard him beg that it might be some _large_ vessel,

quite voll tea; some drapery to enfold it, and that the gazz might be

left alight. They were going to play chess, through the night, in that

cold room .... but the thought was gladly there. The Polish doctor’s

presence had confirmed Mr. Shatov’s story. It had not been a young man’s

tale to cover an escapade.