CHAPTER III

Three months ago the Christmas had been a goal for which she could

hardly wait. It had offered her, this time, more than its usual safe

deep firelit seclusion beyond which no future was visible. It was to pay

her in full for having missed the beginning of Eve’s venture, taking her

down into the midst of it when everything was in order and the

beginnings still near enough to be remembered. But having remained

during the engrossing months, forgotten, at the same far-distant point,

Christmas now suddenly reared itself up a few days off, offering nothing

but the shadow of an unavoidable interruption. For the first time she

could see life going on beyond it. She would go down into its

irrelevance, taking part in everything with absent-minded animation,

looking towards her return to town. It would not be Christmas, and the

long days of forced absence threatened the features of the year that

rose, far away and uncertain, beyond the obstruction.

But the afternoon she came home with four days holiday in her hand, past

and future were swept from her path. To-morrow’s journey was a far-off

appointment, her London friends remote shadows, banished from the

endless continuance of life. She wandered about between Wimpole Street

and St. Pancras, holding in imagination wordless converse with a

stranger whose whole experience had melted and vanished like her own,

into the flow of light down the streets; into the unending joy of the

way the angles of buildings cut themselves out against the sky, glorious

if she paused to survey them; and almost unendurably wonderful, keeping

her hurrying on pressing, through insufficient silent outcries, towards

something, anything, even instant death, if only they could be expressed

when they moved with her movement, a maze of shapes, flowing, tilting

into each other, in endless patterns, sharp against the light; sharing

her joy in the changing same same song of the London traffic; the bliss

of post-offices and railway stations, cabs going on and on towards

unknown space; omnibuses rumbling securely from point to point, always

within the magic circle of London.

Her meal was a crowded dinner-party, all the people in the restaurant

its guests, plunging with her, released from experience, unhaunted by

hope or regret, into the endless beginning. Into the wrapped

contemplation of the gathering, the thought of her visit flashed like a

star, dropping towards her, and when she was gathering things together

for her packing, her eagerness flamed up and lit her room.

....... The many Christmasses with the Brooms had been part of her long

run of escape from the pain-shadowed family life; their house at first a

dream-house in the unbroken dream of her own life in London, a shelter

where agony was unknown, and lately a forgetfulness, for the long days

of the holiday, of the challenge that lived in the walls of her room.

For so long the walls had ceased to be the thrilled companions of her

freedom, they had seen her endless evening hours of waiting for the next

day to entangle her in its odious revolution. They had watched her in

bleak daylight listening to life going on obliviously all round her, and

scornfully sped her desperate excursions into other lives, greeting her

empty glad return with the reminder that relief would fade, leaving her

alone again with their unanswered challenge. They knew the recurring

picture of a form, drifting, grey face upwards, under a featureless grey

sky, in shallows, “unreached by the human tide” and had seen its

realisation in her vain prayer that life should not pass her by; mocking

the echoes of her cry, and waiting indifferent, serene with the years

they knew before she came, for those that would follow her meaningless

impermanence. When she lost the sense of herself in moments of gladness,

or in the long intervals of thought that encircled her intermittent

reading, they were all round her, waiting, ready to remind her,

undeceived by her daily busy passing in and out, relentlessly counting

its secret accumulating shame.

During the last three months they had not troubled her. They had become

transparent, while the influence of her summer still had them at bay, to

the glow shed up from the hours she had spent downstairs with Mrs.

Bailey, and before there was time for them to close round her once more,

the figure of Michael Shatov, with Europe stretching wide behind him,

had forced them into companionship with all the walls in the world. She

had been conscious that they waited for his departure; but it was far

away out of sight, and when she should be once more alone with them,

their attack would find her surrounded; lives lived alone within the

vanquished walls of single poor bare rooms in every town in Europe would

come visibly to her aid, driving her own walls back into dependence.

But to-night they were radiant. On no walls in the world could there be

a brighter light. Streaming from their gaslit spaces, wherever she

turned, was the wide brilliance that had been on everything in the days

standing behind the shadow that had driven her into their enclosure. Eve

and Harriett, waiting for her together, in a new sunlit life, were the

full answer to their challenge. She was going _home_. The walls were

traveller’s walls. That had been their first fascination; but they had

known her only as a traveller; now as she dipped into the unbroken life

that would flow round her with the sound of her sisters’ blended voices,

they knew whence she came and what had been left behind. They saw her

years of travel contract to a few easily afforded moments, lit though

she had not known it, by light instreaming from the past and flowing now

visibly ahead across the farther years.

The distant forgotten forms of the friends of her London life, turning

away slighted, filled her, watching them, with a half-repenting

solicitude. But they had their mysterious secret life, incomprehensible,

but their own; they turned away towards each other and their own

affairs, all of them set, at varying angles, unquestioningly towards a

prospect she did not wish to share.

She went eagerly to sleep and woke in a few moments in a morning whose

sounds coming through the open window, called to her as she leapt out

towards them, for responsive demonstrations. Her desire to shout,

thrilled to her feet, winged them.

Sitting decorously at the breakfast-table, she felt in equal

relationship to all the bright assembly, holding off Mr. Shatov’s

efforts to engage her in direct conversation, that she might hear,

thoughtless and uncomprehending, the general sound of interwoven bright

inflections echoing quietly out into the vast morning. She ran out into

it, sending off her needless telegram for the joy of skimming over the

well-known flags with endless time to spare. The echoing London sky

poured down upon them the light of all the world. Within it her share

gleamed dancing, given to her by the London years, the London life,

shining now, far away, in multitudinous detail, the contemplated

enviable life of a stranger.

The third-class carriage was stuffy and cold, crowded with excited

travellers whose separate eyes strove in vain to reach the heart of the

occasion through a ceaseless exclamatory interchange about what lay just

behind them and ahead at the end of the journey..... At some time, for

some moments during the ensuing days, each one of them would be

alone..... Consulting the many pairs of eyes, so different yet so

strangely alike in their method of contemplation, so hindered and

distracted, she felt, with a stifling pang of conviction, that their

days would pass and bring no solitude, no single touch of realisation,

and leave them going on, with eyes still quenched and glazed, striving

outwards, now here now there, to reach some unapprehended goal.

Immersing herself in her corner she saw nothing more until Eve’s face

appeared in the crowd waiting upon the seaside platform. Eve beamed

welcome and eager wordless communications and turned at once to lead the

way through the throng. They hurried, separated by Miriam’s

hand-luggage, silenced by the din of the traffic rattling over the

cobblestones, meeting and parting amongst the thronging pedestrians,

down the steep slope of the narrow street until Eve turned, with a

piloting backward glance, and led the way along the cobbled pavement of

a side-street, still narrower and sloping even more steeply downhill. It

was deserted, and as they went single-file along the narrow pavement,

Miriam caught in the distance, the unwonted sound of the winter sea. She

had not thought of the sea as part of her visit, and lost herself in the

faint familiar roll and flump of the south-coast tide. It was enough.

The holiday came and passed in the imagined sight of the waves tumbling

in over the grey beach, and the breaking of the brilliant seaside light

upon the varying house-fronts behind the promenade; she returned

restored; the prize of far-off London renewed already, keenly, within

her hands, to find Eve standing still just ahead, turned towards her;

smiling too breathlessly for speech. They were in front of a tiny

shop-front, slanting with the steep slant of the little road. The window

was full of things set close to the panes on narrow shelves. Miriam

stood back, pouring out her appreciation. It _was_ perfect; just as she

had imagined it; exactly the little shop she had dreamed of keeping when

she was a child. She felt a pang of envy.

“_Mine_” said Eve blissfully “my own.” Eve had property; fragile

delicate _Eve_, the problem of the family. This was her triumph. Miriam

hurried, lest her thoughts should become visible, to glance up and down

the street and exclaim the perfection of the situation.

“I know” said Eve with dreamy tenderness, “and it’s all my own; the shop

and the house; all mine.” Miriam’s eyes rose fearfully. Above the shop,

a narrow strip of bright white plaster house shot up, two storeys high;

charming, in the way it was complete, a house, and yet the whole of it,

with a strip of sky above, and the small neat pavement below, in your

eye at once, and beside it right and left, the irregular heights and

widths of the small houses, close-built and flush with the edge of the

little pavement, up and down the hill. But the thought of the number of

rooms inside the little building brought, together with her longing to

see them, a sense of the burden of possessions, and her envy

disappeared. While she cried you’ve got a _house_, she wondered,

scanning Eve’s radiant slender form, whence she drew with all her

apparent helplessness, the strength to face such formidable things.

“I’ve let the two rooms over the shop. I live at the top.” As she

exclaimed on the implied wealth, Miriam found her envy wandering back in

the thought of the two rooms under the sky, well away from the shop in

another world, the rest of the house securely cared for by other people.

She moved to the window. “All the right things” she murmured, from her

shocked survey of the rows of light green bottles filled with sweets,

the boxes of soap, cigarettes, clay pipes, bootlaces, jewellery pinned

to cards, crackers and tightly packed pink and white muslin Christmas

stockings. Between the shelves she saw the crowded interior of the

little shop, a strip of counter, a man with rolled up shirt sleeves,

busily twisting a small screw of paper.... _Gerald_.

“Come inside” said Eve from the door.

“Hullo, Mirry, what d’you think of the emporium?” Gerald, his old easy

manner, his smooth polished gentle voice, his neat, iron handshake

across the mean little counter, gave Eve’s enterprise the approval of

all the world. “I’ve done up enough screws of tea to last you the whole

blessed evening” he went on from the midst of Miriam’s exclamations “and

at least twenty people have been in since you left.” A little door flew

open in the wall just behind him and Harriett, in an overall, stood at

the top of a short flight of stairs, leaping up and down in the doorway.

Miriam ran round behind the counter, freely, Eve’s shop, their shop,

behind her. “Hulloh old silly” beamed Harriett kissing and shaking her

“I just rushed down, can’t stay a minute, I’m in the middle of nine

dinners, they’re all leaving to-morrow and you’re to come and sleep with

_us_.” She fled down the steps, out through the shop and away up the

hill, with a rousing attack on Gerald as she passed him leaning with Eve

over the till. Miriam was welcomed. The fact of her visit was more to

Harriett than her lodgers. She collected her belongings and carried them

up the steps past a small dark flight of stairs into a dark little room.

A small fire was burning in a tiny kitchen range; a candle guttered on

the mantelpiece in the draught from the shop; there was no window and

the air of the room was close with the combined odours of the things

crowded into the small space. She went back into the bright familiar

shop. Gerald was leaving; see you to-morrow he called from the door with

his smile.

“_Now_; I’ll light the lamp and we’ll be cosy” said Eve leading the way

back into the little room. Miriam waited impatiently for the lamp to

make a live centre in the crowded gloom. The little black kitchen fire

was intolerable as president of Eve’s leisure. But the dim lamp,

standing low on a little table, made the room gloomier and Eve was back

in the shop with a customer. Only the dingy little table, a battered

tray bearing the remains of a hasty, shabby tea, the fall below it of a

faded ugly fringed tablecloth and a patch of threadbare carpet, were

clearly visible..... She could not remove her attention from them.

Lying sleepless by Eve’s side late that night, she watched the pictures

that crowded the darkness. Her first moments in the little back room

were far away. The small dark bedroom was full of the last picture of

Eve, in her nightgown, quietly relentless after explaining that she

always kept the window shut because plenty of air came in, taking a

heavy string of large blue beads out of her top drawer, to put them in

readiness with to-morrow’s dress. No; I don’t think that a bit; and if I

_were_ a savage, I should hang myself all over with beads and _love_ it.

She had spoken with such _conviction_...... Up here, with her things

arranged round her as she had had them at home and in her bedroom at the

Greens’, she kept her life as it had always been. She was still her

unchanged self, but her freedom was giving her the strength to be sure

of her opinions. It was as if she had been saying all the evening with

long accumulating preparedness, holding her poise throughout the

interruptions of customers and down into the details of the story of her

adventures, _Yes_ I know your opinions, I have heard them all my life,

and now I’m out in the world myself and can meet everybody as an equal,

and say what I think, without wondering whether it suits my part as the

Greens’ governess. She had got her strength from the things she had

done. It was amazing to think of her summoning courage to break again

with the Greens and borrowing from them to start in business, Mr. Green

‘setting his heart’ on the success of the little shop and meaning to

come down and see how it was getting on. How awful it would be if it did

not get on.... But it was getting on...... How terrifying it must have

been at first not knowing the price of anything in the shop or what to

buy for it ... and then, customers telling her the prices of things and

where they were kept, and travellers being _kind_; respectful and

friendly and ready to go out of their way to do _anything_ .... that was

the other side of Maupassant’s “hourrah pour la petite difference”

commis voyageurs .... and well-to-do people in the neighbourhood rushing

in for some little thing, taken aback to find a lady behind the counter,

and coming again for all sorts of things.... Eve would become like one

of those middle-aged women shopkeepers in books, in the country, with a

kind heart and a sarcastic tongue, seeing through everybody and having

the same manner for the vicar and a ploughman, or a rather nicer manner

for a ploughman. _No._ Eve was still sentimental....

Those wonderful letters were a bridge; a promise for the future.... They

were the letters of a boy; _that_ was the struggling impression she had

not been able to convey. She could start the day well by telling Eve

that in the morning. They were the letters of a youth in love for the

first time in his life ... and he had _fifteen_ grandchildren. “So

wonderful when you think of that old, old man” had not expressed it at

all. They were wonderful for _anybody_. Page after page, all breathing

out the way things shine when the sense of someone who is not there, is

there all the time. Eve knew what it had meant to him; “age makes no

difference.” Then might life suddenly shine like that at any moment,

right up to the end.... And it made Eve so wonderful; having no idea,

all those years, and thinking him just a very kind old man to come,

driving, almost from his death-bed, with a little rose-tree in the

carriage for her. It was so perfect that he wrote only after she had

gone, and he knew he was dying; a youth in love for the first time. If

there were a future life he would be watching, for Eve to walk gently in

crowned with song and making everything sing all round her.... But what

of the wife, and of Eve’s future husband? In Heaven there is neither

marrying nor giving in marriage .... but Kingsley said, then that has

nothing to do with me and my wife. Perhaps that was an example of the

things he suddenly thought of, walking quickly up and down the garden

with a friend, and introduced by saying “I have _always_ thought” .....

But perhaps the things that occur to you suddenly for the first time in

conversation _are_ the things you have always thought, without knowing

it .... that was one of the good things in talking to Michael Shatov,

finding out thoughts, looking at them when they were expressed and

deciding to change them, or think them more decidedly than ever .. she

could explain all that to Eve in the morning as an introduction to him.

Or perhaps she could again say, having Eve’s attention free of the shop,

“I have two pounds to spend on chocolate. Isn’t it extraordinary. I

must, I am on my honour,” and then go on. It was _horrible_ that Eve had

hardly noticed such a startling remark.... She turned impatiently; the

morning would never come; she would never sleep in this stagnant shut-in

motionless air. To-morrow night she would be in a room by herself at

Harry’s; but not quite so near to the sea. How _could_ Eve shut out life

and the sound of the sea? She puffed her annoyance, hardly caring if Eve

were disturbed, ready to ask her if she could not smell the smell of the

house and the shop and the little back room. But that was not true. She

was imagining it because the motionless air was getting on her nerves.

If she could not forget it she would have no sleep until she dozed with

exhaustion in the morning. And to-morrow was Christmas Day. She lay

still, straining her ears to catch the sound of the sea.

The next night the air poured in at an open window, silently lifting

long light muslin curtains and waving them about the little narrow room

filled as with moonlight by the soft blue light from the street-lamp

below. The sound of the sea drowned the present in the sense of sea-side

summers; bringing back moments of chance wakenings on sea-side holidays,

when the high blaze of yesterday and to-morrow were together in the

darkness. Miriam slept at once and woke refreshed and careless in the

frosty sunrise. Her room was blazing with golden light. She lay

motionless, contemplating it. There was no sound in the house. She could

watch the sunlight till something happened. Harry would see that she got

up in time for breakfast. There would be sunlight at breakfast in the

room below; and Harry and Gerald and the remains of Christmas

leisure..... “We only keep going because of Elspeth.” How could she have

gone off to sleep last night without recalling that? If Harry and Gerald

found marriage a failure, it was a failure. Perhaps it was a passing

phase and they would think differently later on. But they had spoken so

simply, as if it were a commonplace fact known to everybody ... they had

met so many people by this time. Nearly all their lodgers had been

married, and unhappy. Perhaps that was because they were nearly all

theatrical people? If Harry had stayed in London and not had to work for

a living would she have been happier? No; she was gayer down here; even

more herself. It _amused_ her to have rushes, and turn out three rooms

after ten o’clock at night. They both seemed to run the house as a sort

of joke, and remained absolutely themselves. Perhaps that was just in

talking about it, at Christmas, to her. It certainly must be horrible in

the season, as Harry said, the best part of the house packed with

selfish strangers for the very best part of the year; so much to do for

them all day that there was never even time to run down to the sea......

Visitors did not think of that. If they considered their landlady it

would spoil their one fortnight of being free. Landladies ought to be

old; not minding about working all day for other people and never seeing

the sea. Harry was too young to be a landlady ...... the gently moving

curtains were flat against the window again for a moment, a veil of thin

muslin screening the brilliant gold, making it an even tone all over the

room; a little oblong of misty golden light. Even for Harry’s sake she

could not let any tinge of sadness invade it... That was being exactly

like the summer visitors...

“Good _Gracious_!” The door was open and Harry, entering with a jug of

hot water was enveloped in the end of the out-blown curtains. “Why on

Earth d’you have your window like that? It’s simply _bitter_.”

“I love it” said Miriam, watching Harriett’s active little moving form

battle with the flying draperies. “I’m revelling in it.”

“Well I won’t presume to shut it; but revel _up_. Here you are.

Breakfast’s nearly ready. Hold the ends while I get out and shut the

door.”

Harry _too_; and she used to be so fond of open windows. But it was not

a snub. She would say to Gerald she’s got her window bang open, isn’t

she an old _Cure_? She got out singing into the fresh golden air leaving

the window wide. The London temptation to shirk her swift shampoo and

huddle on a garment did not come. The sense of summer was so strong in

the bright air that she felt sure, if only she could have always bright

screened light in her room, summer warmth and summer happiness would

last the whole year round.

Gerald was pouring out coffee. In the kitchen the voices of Harriett and

Mrs. Thimm were railing cheerfully together. Harriett came in with a

rush, slamming the door. “Is it too warm for you in here Miss

Henderson?” she asked as she drove Gerald to his own end of the table.

“It’s glorious” said Miriam subsiding into indefinite anticipation. The

room was very warm with sunlight and a blazing fire. But there was no

pressure anywhere. It was their youth and the way being with them made

things go backwards as far as one could see and confidently forward from

any room they happened to be in. A meal with them always seemed as if it

might go on for ever. She glanced affectionately from one to the other,

longing to convey to them in some form of words the thing they did not

seem to know, the effect they made, together, through having been

together from such early beginnings, how it gave and must always give a

_confidence_ to the very expression of their hair, making them always

about to start life together. It came from Harriett, and was reflected

by Gerald, a light that played about him, decking him in his most

unconscious, busy, man’s moments with the credit of having found

Harriett. They seemed more suitably arranged, confronted here together

in this bright eventful house, meeting adventures together, mutually

efficient towards a common end, than with Gerald in business and Harry

silken and leisurely in a suburban house ......

“We’ll be more glorious in a minute” said Gerald sweeping actively

about. “I’ll just move that old fern.”

“Oh of _course_” mocked Harriett, “_look_ at the importance ...”

Whistling softly Gerald placed a small square box on the table amongst

the breakfast things.

“_Oh_ dear me” moaned Harriett from behind the coffee pot, smirking

coyly backwards over her shoulder, “hoh, _ar’n’t_ we grand.” “It’s the

new _toy_” she rapped avertedly towards Miriam, in a despairing whisper.

Gerald interrupted his whistling to fix on to the box a sort of trumpet,

a thing that looked like a wide-open green nasturtium.

“Is it a musical box?” asked Miriam.

“D’you mean to say you’ve never seen a gramophone yet?” murmured Gerald,

frowning and flicking away dust with his handkerchief. They did not mean

as much as they appeared to do when they said life was not worth living

...... they had not discovered life. Gerald did not know the meaning of

his interest in things. “People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is

not half so bad with them as they say” ......

“I haven’t. I’ve heard them squeaking inside public houses of course.”

“Now’s your chance then. Woa Jemima! That’s the ticket. _Now_ she’s

off----”

Miriam waited, breathless; eagerly prepared to accept the coming wonder.

A sound like the crackling of burning twigs came out into the silence.

She remembered her first attempt to use a telephone, the need for

concentrating calmly through the preliminary tumult, on the certainty

that intelligible sounds would presently emerge, and listened

encouragingly for a voice. The crackling changed to a metallic scraping,

labouring steadily round and round, as if it would go on for ever; it

ceased and an angry stentorian voice seemed to be struggling,

half-smothered, in the neck of the trumpet. Miriam gazed, startled, at

the yawning orifice, as the voice suddenly escaped and leapt out across

the table with a shout--‘Edison-BELL RECord!’ Lightly struck chords

tinkled far away, fairy music, sounding clear and distinct on empty

space remote from the steady scraping of the machine. Then a song began.

The whole machine seemed to sing it; vibrating with effort, sending

forth the notes in a jerky staccato, the scarcely touched words clipped

and broken to fit the jingling tune; the sustained upper notes at the

end of the verse wavered chromatically, as if the machine were using its

last efforts to reach the true pitch; it ceased and the far away chords

came again, fainter and further away. In the second verse the machine

struggled more feebly and slackened its speed, flattened suddenly to a

lower key, wavered on, flattening from key to key and collapsed,

choking, on a single downward-slurring squeak----

“Oh, but that’s absolutely _perfect_” gasped Miriam.

“You want to set it _slower_ silly; it all began too _high_.”

“_I_ know, la reine, _he_ knows, he’ll set it slower all right.”

This time the voice marched lugubriously forth, with a threatening

emphasis on each word; the sustained notes blared wide through their

mufflings; yawned out by an angry lion.

“My _word_” said Harriett “it’s a funeral this time.”

“But it’s _glorious_! Can you make it go as slowly as you like?”

“We’ll get it right presently, never fear.”

Miriam felt that no correct performance could be better than what she

had heard, and listened carelessly to the beginning of the third

performance. If it succeeded the blissful light flowing from the room

out over her distant world must either be shattered by her tacit

repudiation of the cheaply devised ditty, or treacherously preserved at

the price of simulated satisfaction. The prelude sounded nearer this

time, revealing a piano and an accompanist, and the song came steadily

out, a pleasant kindly baritone, beating along on a middle key; a nice

unimaginative brown-haired young man, who happened to have a voice. She

ceased to attend; the bright breakfast-table, the cheerfully decorated

square room bathed in the brilliant morning light that was flooding the

upward slope of the town from the wide sky towering above the open sea,

was suddenly outside space and time, going on for ever untouched; the

early days flowed up, recovered completely from the passage of time,

going forward with to-day added to them, forever. The march of the

refrain came lilting across the stream of days, joyfully beating out the

common recognition of the three listeners. She restrained her desire to

take it up, flinging out her will to hold back the others, that they

might face out the moment and let it make its full mark. In the next

refrain they could all take the relief of shouting their

acknowledgement, a hymn to the three-fold life. The last verse was

coming successfully through; in an instant the chorus refrain would be

there. It was old and familiar, woven securely into experience,

beginning its life as memory. She listened eagerly. It was partly too,

she thought, absence of singer and audience that redeemed both the music

and the words. It was a song overheard; sounding out innocently across

the morning. She saw the sun shining on the distant hill-tops, the

comrades in line, and the lingering lover tearing himself away for the

roll-call. The refrain found her far away, watching the scene until the

last note should banish it.

The door opened and Elspeth stood in the doorway.

“_Well_ my pet?” said Harriett and Gerald gently, together.

She trotted round the open door, carefully closing it with her body, her

steady eyes taking in the disposition of affairs. In a moment she stood

near the table, the silky rounded golden crown of her head rising just

above it. Miriam thrilled at her nearness, delighting in the firm clutch

of the tiny hand on the edge of the table, the gentle shapely bulge of

the ends of her hair inturned towards her neck, the little busy bustling

expression of her bunchy motionless little muslin dress. Suddenly she

looked up in her way, Gerald’s disarming gentleness, all Eve’s reined-in

gaiety ... “I your baby?” she asked with a small lunge of affection.

Miriam blushed. The tiny thing had _remembered_ from yesterday ......

Yes, she murmured encircling her and pressing her lips to the warm

silken top of her head. Gerald burst into loud wailing. Elspeth moved

backwards towards Harriett and stood propped against her, contemplating

him with sunny interest. Harriett’s firm ringed hand covered the side of

her head.

“Poor Poppa” she suggested.

“Be _cri_-ut Gerald!” Elspeth cried serenely, frowning with effort. She

stood on tip-toe surveying the contents of the table and waved a

peremptory hand towards the gramophone. Gerald tried to make a bargain.

Lifted on to Harriett’s knee she bunched her hands and sat compact. The

direct rays made her head a little sunlit sphere, smoothly outlined with

silky pale gold hair bulging softly over each ear, the broken curve

continued by the gentle bulge of her cheeks as she pursed her face to

meet the sunlight. She peered unsmiling, but every curve smiled; a

little sunny face, sunlit. Fearing that she would move, Miriam tried to

centre attention by seeming engrossed in Gerald’s operations, glancing

sideways meanwhile in an entrancement of effort to define her small

perfection. The list of single items summoned images of children who

missed her charm by some accentuation of character, pointing backwards

to the emphatic qualities of a relative and forward so clearly that

already they seemed adult. Elspeth predicted nothing. The closest

observation revealed no point of arrest. Her undivided impression once

caught, could be recovered in each separate feature.

Eve came in as the music ceased. In the lull that followed the general

greetings Miriam imagined a repetition of the song, to carry Eve back

into what had gone before and forward with them in the unchanged

morning. But Mrs. Thimm broke in with a tray and scattered them all

towards the fire. Let’s hear Molly Darling once more she thought in a

casual tone. After yesterday Eve would take that as a lack of interest

in her presence. Supposing she did? She was so changed that she could be

treated without consideration, as an equal ...... but she overdid it,

preening herself, caring more for the idea of independence than for the

fact. That would not keep her going. She would not be strong enough to

sustain her independence ......

The sense of triumph threw up an effulgence even while Miriam accused

herself of cruelty in contemplating the droopy exhaustion which had

outlived Eve’s day of rest. But she was not alone in this; nice good

people were secretly impatient with relatives who were always

threatening to break down and become problems. And Eve had almost ceased

to be a relative. Descending to the rank of competitor she was no longer

a superior ...... she was an inferior masquerading as an equal ......

that was what men meant in the newspapers. Then it couldn’t be true.

There was some other explanation. It was because she was using her

independence as a revenge for the past...... What men resented was the

sudden reflection of their detachment by women who had for themselves

discovered its secret, and knew what uncertainties went on behind it.

She was resenting Eve’s independence as a man would do. Eve was saying

she now understood the things that in the past she had only admired, and

that they were not so admirable, and quite easy to do. But she disgraced

the discovery by flaunting it. It was so evident that it was her shop,

not she that had come into the room and spoiled the morning. Even now

she was dwelling on next week. Inside her mind was nothing but her

customers, travellers, the possible profits, her many plans for

improvement. Nothing else could impress her. Anything she contributed

would rest more than ever, now that Christmas Day was over, upon a

back-ground of absent-minded complacency. Like herself, with the Brooms?

Was it she who was being judged and not Eve? No, or only by herself.

Harriett shared her new impressions of Eve, saw how eagerly in her

clutch on her new interests she had renounced her old background of

inexhaustible sympathy. Gerald did not. But men have no sense of

atmosphere. They only see the appearances of things, understanding

nothing of their relationships. Bewilderment, pessimistic philosophies,

_regretful_ poetry ......

The song might banish Eve’s self-assertion and bring back something of

her old reality. Music, any music, would always make Eve real. Perhaps

Elspeth would ask for it. But in the long inactive seconds, things had

rushed ahead shattering the sunlit hour. Nothing could make it settle

again. Eve had missed it for ever. But she had discovered its presence.

Its broken vestiges played about her retreat as she turned away to

Elspeth; Gerald who alone was unconscious of her discovery, having

himself been spell-bound without recognising his whereabouts, was

inaccessibly filling his pipe. She was far-off now, trying to break her

way in by an attack on Elspeth. Miriam watched anxiously, reading the

quality of their daily intercourse. Elspeth was responding with little

imitative movements, arch smiles and gestures. Miriam writhed. Eve would

teach her to see life as people, a few prominent over-emphasised people

in a fixed world..... But Elspeth soon broke away to trot up and down

the hearth-rug, and when Gerald caught and held her, asking as he puffed

at his pipe above her head a rallying question about the shop, she stood

propped looking from face to face, testing voices.

The morning had changed to daytime...... Gerald and Eve made busy

needless statements, going over in the form of question and answer the

history of the shop, and things that had been obviously already

discussed to exhaustion. Across Harriett’s face thoughts about Eve and

her venture passed in swift comment on the conversation. Now and again

she betrayed her impatience, leaping out into abrupt ironic emendations

and presently rose with a gasp, thumping Miriam gently, “Come on, you’ve

got to try on that blouse.” The colloquy snapped. Eve turned a flushed

face and sat back looking uneasily into vacancy as if for something she

had forgotten to say.

“Try it on down here,” said Gerald.

“Don’t be idiotic.”

“It’s all right. _We_ shan’t mind. We won’t look till she’s got it on.”

“If you look then, you will be dazzled by my radiance.” Miriam stood

listening in astonishment to the echoes of the phrase, fashioned from

nothing upon her lips by something within her, unknown, wildly to be

welcomed if its power of using words that left her not merely untouched

and unspent, but taut and invigorated, should prove to be reliable. She

watched the words go forward outside her with a life of their own,

palpable, a golden thread between herself and the world, the first

strand of a bright pattern she and Gerald would weave from their

separate engrossments whenever their lives should cross. Through

Gerald’s bantering acknowledgement she gazed out before her into the

future, an endless perspective of blissful unbroken silence, shielded by

the gift of speech ...... The figure of Eve, sitting averted towards the

fire, flung her back. To Eve her words were not silence; but a blow

deliberately struck. With a thrill of sadness she recognised the

creative power of anger. If she had not been angry with Eve she would

have wondered whether Gerald were secretly amused by her continued

interest in blouses, and have fallen stupidly dumb before the need of

explaining, as her mind now rapidly proceeded to do, cancelling her

sally as a base foreign achievement, that her interest was only a

passing part of holiday relaxation, to be obliterated to-morrow by the

renewal of a life that held everything he thought she was missing, in a

way and with a quality new and rich beyond anything he could dream, and

contemplating these things, would have silently left him with his

judgment confirmed. She had moved before Gerald, safely ensphered in the

life of words, and in the same movement was departing now, on the wings

of Harriett’s rush, a fiend denying her kindred.

Running upstairs she reflected that if the finished blouse suited her it

was upon Eve that it would most powerfully cast its spell. The shoulders

had been good. Defects in the other parts could not spoil them, and the

squareness of her shoulders was an odd thing for which she was not

responsible. Eve only admired them because hers sloped. She would come

down again as the gay buffoon Eve used to know, letting the effect of

the blouse be incidental, making to-day to-day, shaking them all out of

the contemplation of circumstances. She would give some of her old

speeches and musical sketches, if she could manage to begin when Gerald

was not there, and Eve would laugh till she cried. No one would guess

that she was buoyed up by her own invisible circumstances, forgotten as

she browsed amongst new impressions, and now returning upon her moment

by moment with accumulated force. But upstairs, confronted by Harriett

in the summerlit seaside sunshine, she found the past half-hour between

them, pressing for comment, and they danced silently confronting each

other, dancing and dancing till they had said their say.

The visit ended in the stillness that fell upon the empty carriage as

the train left the last red-roofed houses behind and slid out into the

open country. She swung for an instant over the spread of the town,

serene unchanging sunlit grey, and brilliant white, green shuttered and

balconied, towards the sea, warm yellow brick, red-roofed, towards the

inland green, her visit still ahead of her. But the interiors of Eve’s

dark little house and Harriett’s bright one slipped in between her and

the pictured town, and the four days’ succession of incidents overtook

her in disorder, playing themselves out, backwards and forwards, singly,

in clear succession, two or three together, related to each other by

some continuity of mood within herself, pell mell, swiftly

interchanging, each scene in turn claiming the foremost place; moments

stood out dark and overshadowing; the light that flooded the whole

strove in vain to reach these painful peaks. The far-away spring offered

a healing repetition of her visit; but the moments remained immovable.

Eve would still be obstinately saying the Baws and really thinking she

knew which side she was on ...... Wawkup and Poole Carey ...... those

were quotations as certainly as were Eve’s newspaper ideas; Wimpole

Street quotations. The thing was that Eve had learned to want to be

always in the right and was not swift enough in gathering things ......

not _worldly_ enough. The train was rocking and swaying in its rush

towards its first stop. After that the journey would seem only a few

minutes, time passing more and more rapidly filled with the pressure of

London coming nearer and nearer. But the junction was still a good way

off.

“No. It’s nothing of that kind. All Russian students are like that. They

have everything in common. On the inside of the paper he had written it

will be unfriendly if it should occur to you to feel any sentiment of

resentment. What could I do? Oh yes they would. A Russian would think

nothing of spending two pounds on chocolate if he wanted to. They live

on bread too, nothing but bread and tea, some of them, for the sake of

being able to work. What I can’t make him see is that although I am

earning my living and he is not, he is preparing to earn a much more

solid living than I ever shall. He says he is ashamed to be doing

nothing while I am already independent. The next moment he is indignant

that I have not enough for clothes and food; I have to be absolutely

rude to make him let me pay for myself at restaurants. When I say it is

worth it and I have enough much more than thousands of women workers he

is silent with indignation. Then when I say that what is really wrong is

that I have been cheated of my student period and ought to be living on

somebody as a student, he says, pairhaps, but you are in _life_, that is

the more important.”

“All right, I will ask him. Poor little man. He has spent his Christmas

at Tansley Street. He would adore Elspeth; although she is not a

‘beef-steak.’ He says there are no children in Europe finer than English

children, and will stop suddenly in the middle of a serious conversation

to say look, look; but _that_ is a _real_ English beef-steak.”

Harry had partly understood. But she still clung to her private

thoughts. Meeting him to-day would not be quite the same as before she

had mentioned him to anyone. Summoning his familiar form she felt that

her talk had been treachery. Yet not to have mentioned him at all felt

like treachery too.

“There’s quite an interesting Russian at Tansley Street now.” That meant

simply nothing at all.... Christmas _had_ been an interruption ...

Perhaps something would have happened in his first days of London

without her. Perhaps he would not appear this evening.

Back at her work at Wimpole Street she forgot everything in a sudden

glad realisation of the turn of the year. The sky was bright above the

grey wall opposite her window. Soon there would be bright light in it at

five o’clock, daylight remaining to walk home in, then at six, and she

would see once more for another year the light of the sun on the green

of the park. The alley of crocuses would come again, then daffodils in

the grass and the green of the on-coming blue-bells. Her table was

littered with newly paid accounts, enough to occupy her pen for the

short afternoon with pleasant writing, the reward of the late evenings

spent before Christmas in hurrying out overdue statements, and the easy

prelude to next week’s crowded work on the yearly balance sheets. She

sat stamping and signing, and writing picturesque addresses, her eyes

dwelling all the while in contemplation of the gift of the outspread

year. The patients were few and no calls came from the surgeries. Tea

came up while she still felt newly-arrived from the outside world, and

the outspread scenes in her mind were gleaming still with fresh high

colour in bright light, but the last receipt was signed, and a pile of

envelopes lay ready for the post.

She welcomed the sound of Mrs. Orly’s voice, tired and animated at the

front door, and rose gladly as she came into the room with little bright

broken incoherent phrases, and the bright deep unwearied dauntless look

of welcome in her little tired face. She was swept into the den and kept

there for a prolonged tea-time, being questioned in detail about her

Christmas in Eve’s shop, seeing Mrs. Orly’s Christmas presents and

presently moving in and out of groups of people she knew only by name.

An extraordinary number of disasters had happened amongst them. She

listened without surprise. Always all the year round these people seemed

to live under the shadow of impending troubles. But Mrs. Orly’s dolorous

list made Christmas seem to be, for them, a time devoted to the

happening of things that crashed down in their midst, dealing out

life-long results. Mrs. Orly talked rapidly, satisfied with gestures of

sympathy, but Miriam was conscious that her sympathy was not falling

where it was demanded. She watched the family centres unmoved, her mind

hovering over their imagined houses, looking regretfully at the

shattered whole, the views from their windows that belonged to the past

and were suddenly strange as when they had first seen them; passing on

to their servants and friends and outwards into their social life,

following results as far as she could, the principal sufferers

impressing her all the time in the likeness of people who suddenly make

avoidable disturbances in the midst of a conversation. Driven back, from

the vast questioning silence at the end of her outward journey, to the

centres of Mrs. Orly’s pictures, she tried to dwell sympathetically with

the stricken people and fled aghast before their inexorable

circumstances. They were all so hemmed in, so closely grouped that they

had no free edges, and were completely, publicly at the mercy of the

things that happened. Everyone in social life was aware of this.

Experienced people said “there is always _something_,” “a skeleton in

every cupboard” ..... But why did people get into cupboards? Something

or someone was to blame. In some way that pressed through the picture

now in one form and now in another, just eluding expression in any

single statement she could frame, these bright-looking lives, free of

all that civilisation had to offer, were all to blame; all facing the

same way, unaware of anything but the life they lived among themselves,

they _made_ the shadow that hung over them all; they invited its sudden

descents ...... She felt that her thoughts were cruel; like an

unprovoked blow, worthy of instant revenge by some invisible observant

third party; but even while in the presence of Mrs. Orly’s sympathy she

accused herself of heartlessness and strove to retreat into a kindlier

outlook, she was aware, moving within her conviction, of some dim shape

of truth that no sympathy could veil.

At six o’clock the front door closed behind her, shutting her out into

the multitudinous pattering of heavy rain. With the sight of the

familiar street shortened by darkness to a span lit faintly by dull

rain-shrouded lamps, her years of daily setting forth into London came

about her more clearly than ever before as a single unbroken

achievement. Jubilantly she reasserted, facing the invitation flowing

towards her from single neighbourhoods standing complete and

independent, in inexhaustibly various loveliness through the procession

of night and day, linked by streets and by-ways living in her as mood

and reverie, that to have the freedom of London was a life in itself.

Incidents from Mrs. Orly’s conversation pressing forward through her

outcry, heightened her sense of freedom. If the sufferers were her own

kindred, if disaster threatened herself, walking in London, she would

pass into that strange familiar state, where all clamourings seemed

unreal and on in the end into complete forgetfulness.

Two scenes flashed forth from the panorama beyond the darkness and while

she glanced at the vagrants stretched asleep on the grass in the Hyde

Park summer, carefully to be skirted and yet most dreadfully claiming

her companionship, she saw, narrow and gaslit, the little unlocated

street that had haunted her first London years, herself flitting into

it, always unknowingly, from a maze of surrounding streets, feeling

uneasy, recognising it, hurrying to pass its awful centre where she must

read the name of a shop, and, dropped helplessly into the deepest pit of

her memory, struggle on through thronging images threatening, each time

more powerfully, to draw her willingly back and back through the

intervening spaces of her life to some deserved destruction of mind and

body, until presently she emerged faint and quivering, in a wide

careless thoroughfare. She had forgotten it; perhaps somehow learned to

avoid it. Her imagined figure passed from the haunted scene, and from

the vast spread of London the tide flowed through it, leaving it a

daylit part of the whole, its spell broken and gone. She struggled with

her stiffly opening umbrella, listening joyfully to the sound of the

London rain. She asked nothing of life but to stay where she was, to go

on ...... London was her pillar of cloud and fire, undeserved, but

unsolicited, life’s free gift. In still exultation she heard her

footsteps go down into the street and along the streaming pavement. The

light from a lamp just ahead fell upon a figure, plunging in a swift

diagonal across the muddy roadway towards her. He had come to meet her

... invading her street. She fled exasperated, as she slackened her

pace, before this postponement of her meeting with London, and silently

drove him off, as he swept round to walk at her side, asking him how he

dared unpermitted to bring himself, and the evening, and the evening

mood, across her inviolable hour. His overcoat was grey with rain and as

she glanced he was scanning her silence with that slight quivering of

his features. Poor brave little lonely man. He had spent his Christmas

at Tansley Street.

“Well? How was it?” he said. He was a gaoler, shutting her in.

“Oh it was all right.”

“Your sisters are well? Ah I _must_ tell you,” his voice boomed

confidently ahead into the darkness; “while I waited I have seen two of

your doctors.”

“They are not doctors.”

“I had an immensely good impression. I find them both most fine English

types.”

“Hm; they’re absolutely English.” She saw them coming out, singly,

preoccupied, into their street. English. He standing under his lamp, a

ramshackle foreigner whom they might have regarded with suspicion,

taking them in with a flash of his prepared experienced brown eye.

“Abso-lutully. This unmistakable expression of humanity and fine

sympathetic intelligence. Ah, it is fine.”

“I _know_. But they have very simple minds, they quote their opinions.”

“I do not say that you will find in the best English types a striking

originality of _mentality_” he exclaimed reproachfully. Her attention

pounced unwillingly upon the promised explanation of her own

impressions, tired in advance at the prospect of travelling through his

carefully pronounced sentences while the world she had come out to meet

lay disregarded all about her. “But you will find what is perhaps more

important, the characteristic features of your English civilisation.”

“I know. I can _see_ that; because I am neither English nor civilised.”

“That is a nonsense. You are most English. No, but it is really most

wonderful,” his voice dropped again to reverence and she listened

eagerly, “how in your best aristocracy and in the best types of

professional men, your lawyers and clerics and men of science, is to be

read so strikingly this history of your nation. There is a something

common to them all that shines out, _durchleuchtend_, showing,

sometimes, understand me, with almost a naivety, the centuries of your

freedom. Ah it is not for nothing that the word gentleman comes from

England.”

“I know, I know what you mean” said Miriam in contemplation, they _were_

naïve; showing their thoughts, in sets, readable, with shapes and edges,

but it was the Tories and clerics who had the roomiest, most sympathetic

expressions, liberals and nonconformists had no thoughts at all, only

ideas. Lawyers had no ideas even ...

“You would like my father; he hasn’t a scrap of originality, only that

funny old-fashioned English quality from somewhere or other Heaven

knows” ... and they could play chess together!.... “But lawyers are not

gentlemen. They are perfectly awful.”

“That is a prejudice. Your English law is the very basis of your English

freedom.”

“They are awful. The others look Christians. They _don’t_.” Fancy

defending Christianity ...

“The thing you are seeing,” she said, “is Christianity. I don’t mean

that there is anything in it; but Christian ideas have made English

civilisation; that’s what it is. But how can you say all these things

when you believe we are grabbing diamond mines?” Haw, _what_? Champagne

and Grand pianos. Nice, jolly prejudiced _simpletons_; not even able to

imagine that England ought not to have everything there was to be had,

everywhere. Quite right, better for everybody .... but ... wir reiten,

Pieter, reiten .... oh Lord ... _who_ was right?

“Stop a bit, stop a bit. Christianity will not explain. There are other

Christian countries where there is no sign of this thing that is in

England. No. The explanation is very simple. It is that you have had in

England through a variety of causes, not the least of which is your

Protestant Reformation, a relatively very rapid and unrestricted

_secular_ development.”

“What about Germany and Holland?”

“Both quite different stories. There was in England a specially

favourable gathering of circumstances for rapid secularistic

development.”

“Then if we have been made by our circumstances it is no credit to us.”

“I have not said anything about _credit_.”

“But there are people now who think we are dying of the Reformation; not

the break with Rome; but with Catholic history and tradition. No, wait a

minute, it’s interesting. They have discovered, _proved_, that there was

Christianity in Britain, and British Christian Churches, long before the

Romans came. That means that we are as old, and as direct as Rome. The

Pope is nothing but a Roman Bishop. I feel it is an immense relief, to

know we go right back, _ourselves_; when I think of it.”

“All these clericalisms are immaterial to _life_.”

“Then there were two Popes at one time, and there is the Greek church. I

wonder Newman didn’t think of that. Now _he_ is one of your fine English

types, although he looks scared, as if he had seen a ghost. If he had

known about the early British church perhaps he would not have gone over

to Rome.”

“I cannot follow all this. But what is indisputable is, that in every

case of religious authority, secular development has been held back.

Buckle has completely demonstrated this in a most masterly exhaustive

consideration of the civilisations of Europe. Ah it is _marvellous_,

this book, one of your finest decorations; and without any smallest

touch of fanaticism; he is _indeed_ perhaps one of your greatest minds

of the best English type, full of sensibility and fine gentleness.”

Miriam was back, as she listened, in the Chiswick villa, in bed in the

yellow lamplight with a cold, the pages of the Apologia reading

themselves without effort into her molten mind, as untroubled beauty and

happiness, making what Newman sought seem to be at home in herself,

revealing deep inside life a whole new strange place of existence that

was yet familiar, so that the gradual awful gathering of his trouble was

a personal experience, and the moment of conviction that schism was a

deliberate death, a personal conviction. She wondered why she always

forgot that the problem had been solved. Glancing beyond the curve of

her umbrella she caught, with his last words, the sudden confident

grateful shining of Mr. Shatov’s lifted face and listened eagerly.

“It is this one thing,” she lifted the umbrella his way in sudden

contrition, shifting it so that it sheltered neither of them; “Thank you

I am quite well. It is hardly now raining” he muttered at his utmost

distance of foreign intonation and bearing. She peered out into the air,

shutting her umbrella. They had come out of their way, away from the

streets into a quietness. It must be the Inner Circle. They would have

to walk right round it.

“It is this one thing” again it was as if her own voice were speaking,

“this thesis of the _conditions_ of the development of peoples,”

Anglican priests _married_; but not the highest high-Anglican. But they

were always going over to Rome ... “that has made your Buckle so

precious to the Russian intelligentsia. In England he is scarcely now

read, though I have seen by the way his works in this splendid little

edition of World Classics, the same as your Emerson, why did you take

only Emerson? There is a whole row, the most fascinating things.”

“My Emerson was given to me. I didn’t know it came from anywhere in

particular.”

“This Richards must be a most enlightened publisher. I should wish to

possess all those volumes. The Buckle I will certainly take at once and

you shall see. He is of course out of date in the matter of exact

science and this is no doubt part reason why in England he is no more

read. It is a great pity. His mind is perhaps greater than even your

Darwin, certainly with a far wider philosophical range, and of _far_

greater originality. What is wonderful is his actual anticipation, in

idea, without researches, of a large part of what Darwin discovered more

accidentally, as a result of his immense naturalistic researches.”

“Someone will discover some day that Darwin’s conclusions were wrong,

that he left out some little near obvious thing with big results, and

his theory, which has worried thousands of people nearly to death, will

turn out to be one of those everlasting mannish explanations of

everything which explain nothing. I know what you are going to say; a

subsequent reversal of a doctrine does not invalidate scientific method.

I know. But these everlasting theories, and men are so ‘eminent’ and

important about them, are appalling; in medicine, it is simply

_appalling_, and people are just as ill as ever; and when they know

Darwin was mistaken, there will be an end of Herbert Spencer. There’s my

father, really an intelligent man, he has done scientific research

himself and knew Faraday, and he thinks First Principles the greatest

book that was ever written. I have argued and argued but he says he is

too old to change his cosmos. It makes me simply ill to think of him

living in a cosmos made by Herbert Spencer.”

“_Wait._ Excuse me but that is all too easy. In matter of science the

conclusions of Darwin will _never_ be displaced. It is as the alphabet

of biology, as Galilei is of Astronomy. More. These researches even need

not be made again. They are for all time verified. Herbert Spencer I

agree has carried too far in too wholesale a manner conclusions based on

Darwin’s discoveries; conclusions may lead to many inapplicable

theories, that is immaterial; but Darwin himself made no such theories.

There is no question of _opinion_ as to his discoveries; he supplies

simply unanswerable _facts_.”

“I think it’s Huxley who makes me angry with Darwinism. He didn’t find

it out, and he went swaggering about using it as a weapon; _frightfully_

conceited about it. That Thomas Henry Huxley should come off best in an

argument was quite as important to him as spreading the Darwinian

theory. I _never_ read anything like his accounts of his victories in

his letters.”

“That is most certainly not the spirit of Darwin, who was a most gentle

creature...... But you really surprise me in your attitude towards the

profession of law.”

“I don’t know anything whatever about laws; but I have met lawyers,

barristers and solicitors, and I think they are the most ignorant,

pig-headed people in the world. They have no minds at all. They don’t

affect _me_. But if I were ever before a judge I should shoot him. They

use cases to show off their silly wit, sitting thinking of puns; and

people are put to death.”

“You are in this matter both prejudiced and unjust, believe me. You

cannot in any case make individuals responsible in this matter of

capital punishment. That is for all humanity. I see you are like myself,

a dreamer. But it is bad to let what might be, blind you to _actuality_.

To the great actuality, in this case, that in matters of justice between

man and man _England_ has certainly led the civilised world. In France,

it is true, there is a certain special generosity towards certain types

of provoked crime; but France has not the large responsibilities of

England. The idea of abstract justice, is stronger in England than

anywhere. But what you do not see is that in confessing ignorance of

your law you pay it the highest possible tribute. You do not know what

individual liberty is because you know nothing of any other condition.

Ah you cannot conceive what strangeness and wonder there is for a

Russian in this spectacle of a people so free that they hold their

freedom as a matter of course.”

_Decked._ Distinguished. Marked among the nations, for unconscious

qualities. What _is_ England? What do the qualities mean?

“I’m not interested in laws. If I knew what they were I should like to

break them. Trespassers will be prosecuted always makes me furious.”

“That is merely a technical by-law. That is just one of your funny

English high-churchishnesses this trespassers ...... ah I must tell you

I was just now in the Hyde Park. There was a meeting, ah it was indeed

wonderful to me all these people freely gathered together! There was

some man addressing them, I could not hear, but suddenly a man near me

on the outskirt of the crowd shouted in full voice “Chamberlain is a

damned _liar_!” Yes, but wait for your English laughter. That is not the

whole. There was also quite near me, a very big John Bull _bobby_. He

turned to pass on, with a _smile_. Ah that indeed for a Russian was a

most _wonderful_ spectacle.”

“We ought to be hurrying,” said Miriam, burning with helpless pity and

indignation, “you will be late for dinner.”

“That is true. Shall you not also take dinner? Or if you prefer we can

dine elsewhere. The air is most pure and lovely. We are in some Park?”

“Regent’s Park” she said hastily, breathing in its whole circumference,

her eyes passing, through the misty gloom, amongst daylit pictures of

every part. He had not known even where he was; completely foreign, a

mind from an unknown world, obliviously at her side. A headlong urgency

possessed her; the coming back to London had not yet been; perhaps this

time she would miss it; already she was tired with thought and speech.

Incoherently improvising an appointment she hurried along, her mind set

excitedly towards Tansley Street. There was always some new thing

waiting there when she returned from an absence; she could hear about it

and get over her greetings and out for an hour by herself. She increased

her pace until Mr. Shatov panted for breath as he plunged along by her

side. The random remarks she made to cover her thoughts hurtled about in

the darkness, stabbing her with vindictive unhelpful comments on her

English stiffness, embarrassing her gait and increasing her angry

fatigue. He responded in breathless shouts as if they were already in

the crowded streets. They reached pavement, big houses loomed up out of

the mist, the gates were just ahead. We had better rather at once take

an omnibus, he shouted as they emerged into the Euston Road and a blue

umbrella bus passed heavily by. She hurried forward to catch it at the

corner. That goes only to _Gower_ Street, thundered his following voice.

She was in amongst the crowd at the corner and as again the bus lumbered

off, inside it in the one remaining seat.

In the dimly lit little interior, moving along through the backward

flowing mist-screened street lights, she dropped away from the circling

worlds of sound, and sat thoughtless gazing inward along the bright

kaleidoscopic vistas that came unfailing and unchanged whenever she was

moving, alone and still, against the moving tide of London. When the bus

pulled up for a moment in a block, she searched the gloom-girt forms

within her view. The blue light of the omnibus lamp lit up faces

entangled in visible thoughts, unwillingly suffering the temporary

suspension of activity, but in the far corner there was one, alive and

aware, gazing untrammelled at visions like her own, making them true,

the common possession of all who would be still. Why were these people

only to be met in omnibuses and now and again walking sightless along

crowded streets? Perhaps in life they were always surrounded with people

with whom they did not dare to be still. In speech that man would be a

little defensive and cynical. He had a study, where he went to get away

from everything, to work; sometimes he only pretended to work. He did

not guess that anyone outside books, certainly not any _women_ anywhere

.... the bus rumbled on again; by the time it reached Gower Street she

had passed through thoughtless ages. The brown house and her room in it

called to her recreated. Once through the greetings awaiting her, she

would be free upstairs amongst its populous lights and shadows; perhaps

get in unseen and keep her visions untouched through the evening. She

would have an evening’s washing and ironing. Mr. Shatov would not expect

her to-night.

Mrs. Bailey, hurrying through the hall to dinner, came forward dropping

bright quiet cries of welcome from the edge of her fullest mood of

excited serenity, gently chiding Miriam’s inbreaking expectant

unpreparedness with her mysterious gradual way of imparting bit by bit,

so that it was impossible to remember how and when she had begun, the

new thing; lingering silently at the end of her story to disarm

objections before she turned and flitted, with a reassuring pleading

backward smile, into her newly crowded dining-room. A moment later

Miriam was in the drawing-room, swiftly consulting the profile of a

tweed-clad form bent busily writing at the little table under the gas.

The man leapt up and faced her with a swift ironic bow, strode to the

hearth-rug and began to speak. She remained rooted in the middle of the

room amplifying her impression as his sentence went on, addressed not to

her, though he occasionally flung a cold piercing glance her way, but to

the whole room, in a high, narrowly-rounded, fluting tone as if he were

speaking into a cornet. His head had gone up above the level of the

brighter light but it looked even more greyish yellow than before, the

sparse hair, the eyes, the abruptly branching moustache moving most

remarkably with his fluting voice, the pale tweed suit, all one even

yellowish grey, and his whole reared up, half soldierly form, at bay, as

if the room were full of jeering voices. His long declamation contained

all that Mrs. Bailey had said and told her also that the lecture was

about Spanish literature. London was extraordinary. A Frenchman,

suddenly giving a lecture in English on Spanish literature; at the end

of next week. He wound up his tremendous sentence by telling her that

she was a secretary, and must excuse his urgency, that he required the

services of an English secretary and would now, with her permission read

the first part of the lecture that she might tell him whenever his

intonation was at fault. That would be _immensely_ interesting and easy

she thought, and sat down on the music stool while he gathered up his

sheaf of papers and explained that foreign intonation was the always

neglected corner-stone of the mastery of a foreign tongue.

In a moment he was back again on the hearth-rug, beginning his lecture

in a tone that was such an exaggeration of his conversational voice, so

high-pitched and whistlingly rounded, so extremely careful in

enunciation that Miriam could hear nothing but a loud thin hooting, full

of the echoes of the careful beginnings and endings of English words.

The first sentence was much longer than his address to her and when it

ended she did not know how or where to begin. But he had taken a step

forward on the hearth-rug and begun another sentence, on a higher pitch,

with a touch of anger in his voice. She checked a spasm of laughter and

sat tense, trying to ignore the caricature of his style that gambolled

in her mind. The sentence, even longer than the first, ended

interrogatively with a fling of the head. It was _tragic_. She was

quick, quicker than anyone she knew, in catching words or meanings

through strange disguises. An audience would be either furious or

hysterical.

“You don’t want to _threaten_ your audience” she said very quietly in a

low tone, hoping by contrast to throw up his clamour.

“I dew not threaten,” he said with suave patience, “doubtless hew are

misled. It is a great occasion; and a great subject; of hwich I am

master; in these circumstances a certain bravura is imperative. Hew du

not propose that I should _plead_ for Cervantes for example? I will

continue.”

The sentences grew in length, each one climbing, through a host of

dependent clauses, small sharp hammer blows of angry assertion, and

increasing in tone to a climax of defiance flung down from a height that

left no further possibility but a descent to a level quiet deduction ...

and _now_ dear brethren ...... but the succeeding sentence came fresh to

the attack, crouching, gathering up the fury of its forerunner, leaping

forward, dipping through still longer dependent loops, accumulating,

swelling and expanding to even greater emphasis and volume. She gave up

all hope of gathering even the gist of the meaning; he seemed to be

saying one thing over and over again. You protest too much ..... don’t

_protest_; don’t _gesticulate_ ...... the English don’t gesticulate

...... but he used no gesticulations; he was aware; that was a

deliberate attempt to be English. But his whole person was a gesture,

expanding, vibrating.

“You mean by intonation only the intonation of single words, not of the

whole?”

“Precisely. Correctness of accent and emphasis is my aim. But you imply

a criticism” he fluted, unshaken by his storm.

“Yes. First you must not pronounce each word quite so carefully. It

makes them _echo_ into each other. Then of course if you want to be

quite English you must be less emphatic.”

“I must assume an air of indifference?”

“An English audience will be more likely to understand if you are slower

and more quiet. You ought to have gaps now and then.”

“Intervals for yawning. Yew shall indicate suitable moments. I see that

I am fortunate to have met-hew. I will take lessons, for this lecture,

in the true frigid English dignity.”

The door opened, admitting Mr. Shatov.

“Mr.--a--Shatov; will be so good; as to grant five minutes; for the

conclusion of this interview.” He walked forward bowing with each

phrase, hiding the intruder and bowing him out of the room. The little

dark figure reappeared punctually, and he rose with a snap of the

fingers. “The English” he declaimed at large, “have an excellent phrase;

hwich says, time is money. This phrase, good though it is, might be

improved. Time is let out on usury. So, for the present, I shall leave

yew.” He turned on the sweeping bow that accompanied his last word and

stepped quickly with a curious stiff marching elegance down the room

towards Mr. Shatov as though he did not see him, avoiding him at the

last moment by a sharp curve. Outside the closed door he rattled the

handle as if to make sure it was quite shut.

Miriam sought intently for a definition of what had been in the room

.... a strange echoing shadow of some real thing ... there was something

real ... just behind the empty sound of him ... somewhere in the rolled

up manuscript so remarkably in her hands, making a difference in the

evening brought in by Mr. Shatov. Hunger and fatigue were assailing her;

but the long rich day mounting up to an increasing sense of incessant

life crowding upon her unsought, at her disposal, could not be snapped

by retirement for a solitary meal. He walked quickly to the hearth-rug,

bent forward and spat into the empty grate.

“_What_ is this fellow?”

She broke through her frozen astonishment, “I have just undertaken a

perfectly frightful thing” she said, quivering with disgust.

“I find him insufferable.”

“The French sing their language. It is like a recitative, the tone goes

up and down and along and up and down again with its own expression; the

words have to fit the tune. They have no single abrupt words and

phrases, the whole thing is a _shape_ of _tones_. It’s extraordinary.

All somehow arranged; in a pattern; different patterns for the

expression of the different emotions. In their English it makes the

expression swallow up the words, a wind driving through them

continuously ... liaison.”

“It is a musical tongue certainly.”

“That’s it; music. But the individual is not there; because the tunes

are all arranged for him and he sings them, according to rule. The

Academy. The purity of the French language. I’m getting so interested.”

“I find this Lahitte a most _pretentious_ fellow.”

“He is not in the least what I expected a Frenchman to be like. I can’t

understand his being so fair.”

“What is it you have undertaken?”

He was suddenly grave and impressed by the idea of the lecture ......

why would it be such good practice for her to read and correct it?

Her answer plunged him into thought from which he branched forth with

sudden eagerness ... a French translation of a Russian book revealing

marvellously the interior, the self life, of a doctor, through his

training and experience in practice. It would be a revelation to English

readers and she should translate it; in collaboration with him; if she

would excuse the intimate subjects it necessarily dealt with. He was off

and back again with the book and reading rapidly while she still

pondered his grave enthusiasm over her recent undertaking. In comparison

with this idea of translating a book, it seemed nothing. But that was

only one of his wild notions. It would take years of evenings of hard

work. Meanwhile someone else would do it. They would work at it

together. With Saturdays and Sundays it would not take so long ..... it

would set her standing within the foreign world she had touched at so

many points during the last few years, and that had become, since the

coming of Mr. Shatov, more and more clearly a continuation of the first

beginnings at school..... alors un faible chuchotement se fit entendre

au premier ..... à l’entrée de ce bassin, des arbres .... se fit

entendre .... alors un faible chuchotement se fit entendre ... all one

word on one tone ... it must have been an extract from some dull

mysterious story with an explanation or deliberately without an

explanation; then a faint whispering was audible on the first floor;

that was utterly different. It was the shape and sound of the sentences,

without the meaning that was so wonderful--alors une faible parapluie se

fit entendre au premier--Jan would scream, but it was just as wonderful

...... there must be some meaning in having so passionately loved the

little book without having known that it was selections from French

prose; in getting to Germany and finding there another world of

beautiful shape and sound, apart from people and thoughts and things

that happened ... Durch die ganze lange Nacht, bis tief in den Morgen

hinein ..... it was opening again, drawing her in away from the tuneless

shapeless--

“Are you listening?”

“Yes, but it hasn’t begun.”

“That is true. We can really omit all this introduction and at once

begin.”

As the pages succeeded each other her hunger and fatigue changed to a

fever of anxious attention.

“Well? Is not that a masterly analysis? You see. That should be

translated for your Wimpole Street.”

“I don’t know. We are not like that. It would never occur to an English

doctor to write for the general public anything that could shake its

confidence in doctors. Foreigners are different. They think nothing of

revealing and discussing the most awful things. It’s pessimism. They

_like_ pessimism.”

“It is a serious mistake to regard enlightenment as pessimism.”

“I don’t believe in Continental luminaries.”

“Your prejudices are at least frank.”

“I had forgotten the author was Russian. That idea of the rush of mixed

subjects coming to the medical student too quickly one after the other

for anything to be taken in, is awful, and perfectly true. Hosts of

subjects, hosts of different theories about all of them; no general

ideas ..... Doctors have to specialise when they are boys and they

remain ignorant all their lives.”

“This is not only for doctors. You have touched the great problem of

modern life. No man can, to-day, see over the whole field of knowledge.

The great Leibnitz was the last to whom this was possible.”

To be ignorant always, knowing one must die in ignorance. What was the

use of going on? Life looked endless. Suddenly it would seem short.

“Wait till you’re fifty and the years pass like weeks.” You would begin

to see clearly all round you the things you could never do. Never go to

Japan. Already it was beginning. No college. No wanderjahre......

Translating books might lead to wanderjahre.

“It’s certainly a book that ought to be translated.” At least there

could be no more “Eminent men.” There might always be someone at work

somewhere who would suddenly knock him down like a ninepin.

“Well you shall see. I will read you a passage from later, that you may

judge whether you will care. I must tell you it deals of intimate

matters. You must excuse.”

It was not only that he thought she might object. He also realised that

the English reserves between them were being swept away. It was strange

that a free Russian should have these sensibilities. He read his extract

through, bringing it to a close in shaken tones, his features

sensitively working.

Everyone ought to know...... It ought to be shouted from the house-tops

that a perfectly ordinary case leaves the patient sans connaissance et

nageant dans le sang.

“It’s very interesting,” she said hurriedly, “but in English it would be

condemned as unsuitable for general reading.”

“I thought that possible.”

“The papers would solemnly say that it deals with subjects that are

better veiled.”

“Indeed it is remarkable. John Bull is indeed the perfect ostrich.”

“Oh those men who write like that don’t want them veiled from

_themselves_.”

“I will tell you more than that. The Paris pornographia _lives_ on its

English patrons.”

“Oh no; I’m sure it doesn’t.”

“On the contrary I assure you this is a fact. Any French bookseller will

tell you. I see that this distresses you. It is not perhaps in every

case so base as would appear. There is always even in quite deliberate

French obscenity a certain _esprit_. These subjects lend themselves.”

“Oh they don’t care about the esprit. It’s because they think they are

being improper. They like to be what they call men of the world, in

possession of a fund of things they think can’t be talked about; you can

see their silly thoughts by the way they glance at each other; it’s all

about nothing. What _is_ obscenity? And the other half of them is

_ladies_, who shout things by always carefully avoiding them; or, if

they are “racey,” flatter men’s topics by laughing in a pretended

hilarious embarrassment, hitting them as it were, and rushing on to

something else, very animated by a becoming blush. I never realised that

before. But that’s the secret. What _is_ obscenity?”

“You have touched a most interesting problem of psychology.”

“Besides Paris is full of Americans.”

“It is the same proposition. They are the cousins of the English.”

“I think the American ‘man of the world’ is much more objectionable. He

is so horribly raw that he can’t help boasting openly, and the American

woman flatters him, openly. It’s extraordinary. I mean the kind of

heavy-featured fat middle-aged American woman who doesn’t smoke and

thinks that voting would be unseemly for women. It used to make me

simply ill with fury..... Dr. Bunyan Hopkinson’s brother came over for

July and August two years ago. He was appalling. With a bright fair

beard, and a most frightful twang; the worst I’ve ever heard. He used to

talk incessantly, as if the whole table were waiting for his ideas. And

knew everything, in the most awful superficial newspaper way. They have

absolutely no souls at all. I never saw an American soul. The Canadians

have. The Americans, at least the women, have reproachful ideals that

they all agree about. So that they are all like one person; all the same

effect. But wasn’t it _screaming_, Bunyan Hopkinson’s brother was called

_Bacchus_. Yes. Did you ever hear anything so screaming? Isn’t that

enough? Doesn’t it explain everything? He was a doctor too. He sat next

to an elderly woman who was always scolding and preaching. She had an

enormous American figure, and Guelph eyelids and Guelph cheeks coming

down below her chin making great lengthways furrows on either side of

it. But when Dr. Bacchus began to talk about Paris she would listen

respectfully. He used always to be offering to show other men round

Paris. There’s no-one alive, he would say, can show me anything in

Parrus night-life I’ve not seen. _Ah_, she would say, anyone can see

you’re a man of the _world_, doctor. It spoils the very idea of those

little cabarets and whatever awful haunts there may be in Paris to think

of Americans there, seeing _nothing_.”

“They have certainly a most remarkable naivety.”

“I’ve to-day seen your Queen. She’s just a vurry _hoamely_ little old

lady.”

“What? What is that?”

“Then they _were_ funny.” She searched her memory to make him go on

giggling. It was extraordinary too, to discover what impressions she had

gathered without knowing it, never considering or stating them to

herself. He was getting them. If she ever stated them again they would

be stale; practised clever talk; _that_ was how talk was done ... saying

things over and over again to numbers of people, each time a little more

brilliantly and the speaker a little more dead behind it. Nothing could

be repeated.

“That was the same year. Mrs. Bailey had a splendid August. Eighteen

Americans. I used to go down to meals just to be in the midst of the

noise. You never heard anything like it in your life. If you listened

without trying to distinguish anything it was _marvellous_, in the

bright sunshine at breakfast. It sent you up and up, into the sky, the

morning stars singing together. _No._ I mean there was something

_really_ wonderful about it. It reminded me of the effect that almost

comes when people decide to have a Dutch concert. You know. All singing

different songs at the same time. It’s _always_ spoilt. People begin it

prepared not to hear the whole effect. I did. I did not realise there

would be a wonderful whole. And always just as the effect is beginning,

two or three people break down because they cannot hold their songs, and

some laugh because they are prepared only to laugh, and the unmusical

people put their fingers to their ears, because they can never hear

_sound_, never anything but a tune. Oh it would be so wonderful, if only

it could be really _held_, everyone singing for all they were worth.”

“Have you heard that the Shah preferred of a whole concert, only the

tuning of the orchestra?”

“I know. That’s always supposed to be a joke. But the tuning of an

orchestra, if there is enough of it at once, _is_ wonderful. Why not

_both_? It’s the appalling way people have of liking only one thing.

Liking ‘good’ music and disapproving of waltzes. The Germans don’t.”

“But when I thought of one of my sisters, I used to want to die. If she

had been there we should both have yelled, without moving a muscle of

our faces. Harriett is perfect for that. We learnt it in church. But

when she used to twist all the fingers of her gloves into points, under

the seat, and then show them to me suddenly, in the Litany” ....

“What? What is this? No. Tell me. You were very happy with your

sisters.”

“That’s all. She waggled them, suddenly.”

“A happy childhood is perhaps the _most_-fortunate gift in life.”

“You don’t know you’re happy.”

“That is not the point. This early surrounding lingers and affects all

the life.”

“It’s not quite true that you don’t know. Because you know when you are

quite young how desperately you love a place. The day we left our first

home I remember putting marbles in my pocket in the nursery, not

minding, only thinking I should take them out again by the _sea_, and

downstairs in the garden I suddenly realised, the sun was shining on to

the porch and bees swinging about amongst the roses, and I ran back and

kissed the warm yellow stone of the house, sobbing most bitterly and

knowing my life was at an end.”

“But you were six years old. That is what is important. You do not

perhaps realise the extent of the remaining of this free life of garden

and woods with you.”

“I know it is there. I often dream I am there and wake there, and for a

few minutes I could draw the house, the peaked shapes of it, and the

porches and french windows and the way the lawns went off into the

mysterious parts of the garden; and I feel then as if going away were

still to come, an awful thing that had never happened. Of course after

the years in the small house by the sea, I don’t remember the house,

only the sea and the rocks, the house at Barnes grew in a way to be the

same, but I never got over the suddenness of the end of the garden and

always expected it to branch out into distances, every time I ran down

it. I used to run up and down to make it more.......” He was no longer

following with such an intentness of interest. There ought to have been

more about those first years. Now, no one would ever know what they had

been......

“But you know, although nothing the Americans say is worth hearing,

there is something wonderful about the way they go on. The way they all

talk at once, nobody listening. It’s because they all know what they are

going to say and everyone wants to say it first. They used to talk in

parties; a set of people at one part of the table all screaming together

towards a set at another part, and other people screaming across them at

another set. The others began screaming back at once, endless questions,

and if two sets had seen the same thing they all screamed together as

soon as it was mentioned. I never heard one person talking alone; not in

that August set. And there was one woman, a clergyman’s wife, with a

little pretty oval face and the most perfect muslin dresses which she

did not appreciate, who used to begin as soon as she came in and go on

right through the meal, filling up the gaps in her talk with gasps and

exclamations. Whenever any place was mentioned she used to turn and put

her hand over her husband’s mouth till she had begun what she wanted to

say, jumping up and down in her chair.”

“Is it _possible_?”

“I know now why they all have such high piercing voices. It comes from

talking in sets. But I always used to wonder what went on behind; in

their own minds.”

“Do not wonder. There is no arrière-boutique in these types. They are

most simple.”

“They don’t like us. They think we are frigid; not cordial, is one of

their phrases.”

“That is a most superficial judgment. Stay! I have a splendid idea. We

will leave for the present this large book. But why should you not

immediately translate a story of Andrayeff? They are quite short and

most beautiful. You will find them unlike anything you have read. I have

them here. We will at once read one.”

“I must go out; it will soon be too late.”

“You have had no dinner? Ach, that is _monstrous_. Why did you not tell

me?...... It is half eleven. There is yet time. We will go to my dumme

August in the East-end.”

In her room, Miriam glanced at the magic pages, hungrily gathering

German phrases, and all the way to Aldgate, sitting back exhausted in

her corner she clung to them, resting in a ‘stube’ with ‘Gebirge’ all

round it in morning and evening light. When they reached their

destination she had forgotten she was in London. But the station was so

remote and unknown to her that it scarcely disturbed her detachment. The

wide thoroughfare into which they emerged was still and serene within

its darkness behind the spread veil of street sounds, filled with the

pure sweet air of adventure. The restaurant across the road was a little

square of approaching golden light. It was completely strange. There was

a tang of coarse tobacco in the air, but not the usual restaurant smell.

There were no marble-topped tables; little square wooden-legged tables,

with table-covers of red and blue chequered cotton; pewter flagons,

foreigners, Germans, sturdy confident Germans sitting about. It was

Germany.

“Well? Is it not perfectly dumme August?” whispered Mr. Shatov as they

took an empty corner table, commanding the whole room. There was a

_wooden_ partition behind them, giving out life. Her fatigue left her.

“Für mich ist es absolut als wär ich in Hannover.”

“At least here you shall have an honest meal. Kellner!”

She did not want to eat; only to sit and hear the deep German voices all

round her and take in, without observation, kindly German forms.

“Simply you are too tired. We will have at least some strong soup and

Lager.”

The familiar smooth savoury broth abolished the years since she had left

Germany. Once more she was finding the genuine honest German quality

reflected in the completeness of their food; all of it even the bread,

savoury and good through and through, satisfying in a way no English

food was satisfying, making English food seem poor, ill-combined, either

heavy and dull, or too exciting. She saw German kitchens, alles rein und

sauber, blank poliert, large bony low-browed angry-voiced German

servants in check dresses and blue aprons, everlastingly responsibly at

work.

And here was Lager, the Lager of the booming musical German cafés. She

was sure she would not like it. He was taking for granted that she was

accustomed to beer, and would not know that she was having a tremendous

adventure. To him it did not seem either shocking or vulgar. Protected

by his unconsciousness she would get perhaps further than ever before

into the secret of Germany. She took a small sip and shuddered. The

foamy surface was pleasant; but the strange biting bitterness behind it

was like some sudden formidable personal attack.

“That is the first time I’ve tasted beer,” she said, “I don’t like it.”

“You have not yet tasted it. You must swallow, not sip.”

“It makes your throat sore. It’s so bitter. I always imagined beer was

sweet.”

“There is perhaps something a little acid in this imported Lager; but

the bitterness is most good. It is this biting quality that is a most

excellent apératif. We will have also honey cakes.”

The light, not too sweet, porous crisp mealiness of the little cakes was

German altogether. Mr. Shatov was whispering busily. She feared he would

be heard. There was not much conversation in the room; large deep solid

sentences reverberated through it with a sound of thoughtfulness, as

though the speakers were preoccupied, like travellers, talking with

their eyes turned inward upon their destination. All of them appeared

serious and sober.

“Just as we crossed the frontier one big fat German roused up and said

in an _immense_ rolling voice. ‘Hier kann man wenigstens vernunftiges

_Bier_ haben!’”

“Ssh! They will hear.”

“What then? They are here nearly all Jews.”

“Jews? But they are nearly all _fair_!”

“There may be a few Germans. But many Jews are fair. But you have not

told me what you think of this story.”

“Oh I can _see_ the man and hear his voice” ...... Nearly all the people

in the room were dark. It was the man sitting near, with the large fresh

fair German face who had made her imagine the room was full of Germans.

But there were no hooked noses; no one in the least like Shylock. What

_were_ Jews? How did he know the room was full of them? Why did the idea

cast a chill on the things she had brought in with her? She drew the

little book from her pocket and took a long draught of Lager. It was

still bitter, but the bitterness was only an astringent tang in the

strange cool lively frothy tide; a tingling warmth ran through her

nerves, expanding to a golden glow that flowed through the room and held

her alight within itself, an elastic impalpable bodiless mind. Mr.

Shatov was sitting far away at her side, in his eyes a serene communion

with his surroundings. It was not his usual restaurant manner; it was

strange ...... pewter was right; Lager was a bright tumult, frothing and

flowing easily over the smooth dull metal.

Translating the phrases made them fall to pieces. She tried several

renderings of a single phrase; none of them would do; the original

phrase faded, and together with it just beyond her reach, the right

English words. Scraps of conversation reached her from all over the

room; eloquent words, fashioned easily, without thought, a perfect

flowing of understanding, to and fro, without obstruction. No heaven

could be more marvellous. People talked incessantly because in silence

they were ghosts. A single word sounded the secret of the universe

...... there is a dead level of intelligence throughout humanity. She

listened in wonder whilst she explained aloud that she had learned most

of her French by reading again and again for the sake of the long even

rhythm of its sentences, one book; that this was the only honest way to

acquire a language. It was like a sea, each sentence a wave rolling in,

rising till the light shone through its glistening crest, dropping, to

give way to the next on-coming wave, the meaning gathering,

accumulating, coming nearer with each rising falling rhythm; each

chapter a renewed tide, monotonously repeating throughout the book in

every tone of light and shade the same burden, the secret of everything

in the world.

“I cannot appreciate these literary preciosities; but I am quite sure

that you are wrong in confining yourself to this one French book. This

mystical philosophy is énervant. There are many French books you should

read before this man. Balzac for instance.”

She wanted to explain that she used to read novels but could not get

interested in them after Emerson. They showed only one side of people,

the outside; if they showed them alone, it was only to explain what they

felt about other people. Then he would say Levin, Levin. But she could

not attend to all this. What she had meant to say in the beginning, she

now explained, was that her German, neglected so long, grew smaller and

smaller, whilst, most inconveniently, her reputation for knowing German

grew larger and larger. Mr. Wilson might have said that.....

“The Lager is doing you immensely much good.”

Speech did something to things; set them in a mould that was apt to come

up again; repeated, it would be dead; but perhaps one need never repeat

oneself? To say the same things to different people would give them a

sort of fresh life; but there would be death in oneself as one spoke.

Perhaps the same thing could be said over and over again, with other

things with it, so that it had a different shape, sang a different song

and laughed all round itself in amongst different things.

Intoxication ... a permanent intoxication in and out amongst life, all

the time with an increasing store of good ideas about things; in time,

about everything. A slight intoxication began it, making it possible to

look at things from a distance, in separate wholes and make discoveries

about them. It was being somewhere else, and suddenly looking up, out of

completion, at distant things, that brought their meanings and the right

words.

“But you must at once finish. They are closing. It is now midnight.”

It did not matter. Nothing was at an end. Nothing would ever come to an

end again...... She passed, talking emphatically, out into the wide

dimly-lit sky-filled east-end street, and walked unconscious of fatigue,

carrying Mr. Shatov along at his swiftest plunge, mile after mile, in a

straight line westward along the opening avenue of her new permanent

freedom from occasions. From detail to detail, snatched swiftly by the

slenderest thread of coherence, she passed in easy emphatic talk,

covering the bright endless prospect of her contemplation, her voice

alive, thrilling with joyful gratitude, quivering now and again as it

moved, possessed and controlled by the first faint dawning apprehension

of some universal password, from one bright tumultuously branching thing

to another, with a gratitude that poured itself out within her in a rain

of tears. Mr. Shatov followed her swift migrations with solid responsive

animation; he seemed for the first time to find no single thing to

object to or correct; even restatement was absent, and presently he

began to sing......

“It is a Russian song with words of Poushkin and music of Rubinstein. Ah

but it requires Chaliapin. A most profound bass. There is nothing in

singing so profoundly moving as pure basso; you should hear him. He

stands _alone_ in Europe.”

The thronging golden multitudes moved to the tones of this great

Russian voice, the deepest in the world, singing out across Europe from

beyond Germany. With faltering steps, just begun, whilst now and for

ever she passionately brooded on distant things, she was one of this

elect shining army..... “wandering amongst the mountains, the highest

notes if they leap up pure and free, in soprano, touch the sky.”

“That is true. But in concerts, the strength and most profound moving

quality come from the bass. Ah you should hear a Russian male choir.

There is not in Europe such strength and flexibility and most

particularly such marvel of unanimity, making one single movement of

phrase in all these many voices together. There is singing in the great

Russian churches, all colourful and with a splendour of ornate

decoration, singing that the most infidel could not hear unmoved.”

The Russian _voice_ was melancholy poetry in itself; somewhere within

the shapely rough strength of the words, was a pleading tender

melancholy.

The Bloomsbury Squares were changed. It was like seeing them for the

first time; before they had taken hold; and for the last time, for their

spell was turning into memory. Already they were clearly seen

backgrounds of which in the cold winter moonlight she could, as her

feet, set in a pathway that spread throughout the world, swiftly

measured them, coolly observe the varying proportions and character.

Offence was removed from the tones of visitors who had in the past, in

her dumb outraged presence, taken lightly upon their lips the sacred

names. Within them the echo of her song mingled with the silent echoes

of the footfalls and voices of these enchanted busy passengers.