It was not only that it was her own perhaps altogether ignorant and lazy
and selfish way of reading _everything_ so that she grasped only the
sound and the character of the words and the arrangement of the
sentences, and only sometimes a long time afterwards, and with once read
books never, anything, except in books on philosophy, of the author’s
meaning .... but always the author; in the first few lines; and after
that, wanting to change him and break up his shape or going about for
days thinking everything in his shape.....
It was that there was nothing there. If there had been anything, reading
so attentively, such an odd subject as Spanish literature, she would
have gathered some sort of vague impression. But in all the close pages
of cramped cruel pointed handwriting she had gleaned nothing at all. Not
a single fact or idea; only Mr. Lahitte; a voice like an empty
balloon...... The lecture was a fraud. _He_ was. How far did he know
this? Thinking of the audience, those few who could learn quickly enough
to follow his voice, waiting and waiting for something but strings of
superlatives, the same ones again and again, until the large hall became
a prison and the defiant yellow-grey form a tormenter, and their
impatience and restlessness turned to hatred and despair, she pitied
him. Perhaps he had not read Spanish literature. But he must have
consulted numbers of books about it, and that was much more than most
people did. But what could she do? She glanced at her little page of
notes.... Break up sentences. Use participles instead of which. Vary
adjectives. Have gaps and pauses here and there. Sometimes begin further
off. What is picaresque? They had been written enthusiastically, seeming
like inspirations, in the first pages, before she had discovered the
whole of the nothingness. Now they were only alterations that were not
worth making; helping an imposition and being paid for it......
Stopford Brooke ... lecturing on Browning ... blissful moonface with a
fringe of white hair, talking and talking, like song and prayer and
politics, the past and the present showing together, Browning at the
centre of life and outside it all over the world, and seeing forward to
the future. Perfect quotations, short and long, and the end with the
long description of Pompilia ...... rising and spreading and ceasing,
not ending ... standing out alive in the midst of a world still shaped
by the same truths going on and on. “A marvellous piece of analysis.” He
had been waiting to say that to the other young man.
Introduce their philosophies of life, if any, she wrote; introduce
quotations. But there was no time; quotations would have to be
translated. Nothing could be done. The disaster was completely arranged.
There was no responsibility. She gathered the accepted pages neatly
together and began pencilling in improvements.
...... The pencilled sentences made a pleasant wandering decoration. The
earlier ones were forgotten and unfamiliar. Re-read now, they surprised
her. How had she thought of them? She had not thought of them. She had
been closely following something, and they had come, quietly, in the
midst of engrossment; but they were like a photograph, funny in their
absurd likeness, set there side by side with the photograph of Mr.
Lahitte. They were alive, gravely, after the manner of her graver self.
It was a curious marvel, a revelation irrevocably put down, reflecting a
certain sort of character ..... more oneself than anything that could be
done socially, together with others, and yet not herself at all, but
something mysterious, drawn uncalculatingly from some fund of common
consent, part of a separate impersonal life she had now unconsciously
confessed herself as sharing. She remained bent motionless in the
attitude of writing, to discover the quality of her strange state. The
morning was raw with dense fog; at her Wimpole Street ledgers she would
by this time have been cramped with cold; but she felt warm and tingling
with life as if she had been dancing, or for a long while in happy
social contact; yet so differently; deeply and serenely alive and
without the blank anxious looking for the continuance of social
excitement. This something would continue, it was in herself,
independently. It was as if there were someone with her in the room,
peopling her solitude and bringing close around her all her past
solitudes, as if it were their secret. They greeted her; justified.
Never again, so long as she could sit at work and lose herself to awake
with the season forgotten and all the circumstances of her life coming
back fresh leaping, as if narrated from the fascinating life of someone
else, would they puzzle or reproach her.
She drew her first page of general suggestions written so long ago that
they already seemed to belong to some younger self, and copied them in
ink. The sound of the pen shattered the silence like sudden speech. She
listened entranced. The little strange sound was the living voice of the
brooding presence. She copied each phrase in a shape that set them like
a poem in the middle of the page, with even spaces between a wide
uniform margin; not quite in the middle; the lower margin was wider than
the upper; the poem wanted another line. She turned to the manuscript
listening intently to the voice of Mr. Lahitte pouring forth his
sentences, and with a joyous rush penetrated the secret of its style. It
was _artificial_. There was the last line of the poem summing up all the
rest. Avoid, she wrote, searching; some word was coming; it was in her
mind, muffled, almost clear; avoid--it flashed through and away, just
missed. She recalled sentences that had filled her with hopeless fury,
examining them curiously, without anger. Avoid ornate alias. So _that_
was it! Just those few minutes glancing through the pages standing by
the table while the patient talked about her jolly, noisy, healthy,
thoroughly _wicked_ little kid, and now remembering every point he had
made ..... extraordinary. But this was life! These strange unconsciously
noticed things, living on in one, coming together at the right moment,
part of a _reality_.
Rising from the table she found her room strange, the new room she had
entered on the day of her arrival. She remembered drawing the cover from
the table by the window and finding the ink-stains. There they were in
the warm bright circle of mid-morning lamplight, showing between the
scattered papers. The years that had passed were a single short interval
leading to the restoration of that first moment. Everything they
contained centred there; her passage through them, the desperate
graspings and droppings, had been a coming back. Nothing would matter
now that the paper-scattered lamp-lit circle was established as the
centre of life. Everything would be an everlastingly various joyful
coming back. Held up by this secret place, drawing her energy from it,
any sort of life would do that left this room and its little table free
and untouched.