The spell of the ink-stained table had survived the night. Moving about,
preparing for to-day, she turned continually towards the window-space,
as to an actual presence, and was answered by the rising within her of a
tide of serenity, driving her forward in a stupor of confidence,
impervious to strain and pain. It was as if she had entered a
companionship that now spread like a shield between her and the life she
had so far dealt with unaided ...
The week of working days, standing between her and next Sunday’s
opportunity, was a small space that would pass in a dream; the scattered
variously-developing interests of life outside Wimpole Street changed,
under her eyes, from separate bewildering competitively attractive
scraps of life, to pleasantly related resources, permitted distractions
from an engrossment so secure that she could, without fear of loss, move
away and forget it.
She felt eager to jest. Ranged with her friends she saw their view of
her own perpetually halting scrupulousness and marvelled at their
patient loyalty. She shared the exasperated intolerance of people who
disliked her.... It could be disarmed .... by fresh, surprising
handling.... Because, she asked herself scornfully as she opened the
door to go downstairs, she had corrected Mr. Lahitte’s unspeakable
lecture? No. Sitting over there, forgetting, she had let go ..... and
found something ... and waking again had seen distant things in their
right proportions. But leaving go, not going through life clenched,
would mean losing oneself, passing through, not driving in, ceasing to
affect and be affected. But the forgetfulness was itself a more real
life, if it made life disappear and then show only as a manageable space
and at last only as an indifferent distance ..... a game to be played,
or even not played..... It meant putting life and people second; only
entering life to come back again, _always_. This new joy of going into
life, the new beauty, on everything, was the certainty of coming
back....
She was forgetting something important to the day; the little volume of
stories for her coat pocket. Anxiety at her probable lateness tried to
invade her as she made her hurried search. She beat it back and departed
indifferently, shutting the door of a seedy room in a cheap
boarding-house, neither hers nor another’s, a lodger’s passing abode,
but holding a little table that was herself, alive with her life, and
whose image sprang, set for the day, centrally into the background of
her thoughts as she ran wondering if there were time for breakfast, down
to the dining-room. St. Pancras clock struck nine as she poured out her
tea. Mr. Shatov followed up his greeting with an immediate plunge into
unfamiliar speech which she realized, in the midst of her wonderment
over Mr. Lahitte’s presence at early breakfast, was addressed to
herself. She responded absently, standing at the tea-tray with her
toast.
“You do not take your fish? Ah, it is a pity. It is true it has stood
since half-nine.”
“Asseyez-vous, mademoiselle. I find; the breakfast hour; _charming_. At
this hour one always is, or should be; gay.”
“Mps; if there is time; yes, Sunday breakfast.”
“Still you are gay. That is good. We will not allow philosophy; to
darken; these most happy few moments.”
“There are certain _limits_ to cheerfulness,” bellowed Mr. Shatov. They
had had some mighty collision. She glanced round.
“None; within the purview of my modest intelligence; none. Always would
I rather be; a cheerful coal-heaver; than a philosopher who is learned,
dull, and more depressing than the bise du nord.”
That was meant for Mr. Shatov! The pale sensitive features were
quivering in control .... her fury changed to joy as she leapt between
them murmuring reflectively out across the table that she agreed, but
had met many depressing coal-heavers and knew nothing about philosophers
dull or otherwise. In the ensuing comfortable dead silence she wandered
away marvelling at her eloquence..... _Cats_ said that sort of thing,
with disarming smiles. Was that what was called sarcasm? How fearfully
funny. She had been sarcastic. To a Frenchman. Perhaps she had learned
it from him. Mr. Shatov overtook her as she was getting on to a ’bus at
the corner.
“You do not go walkingly?” he bellowed from the pavement. Poor little
man; left there with his day and his loneliness till six o’clock.
“All right,” she said, jumping off, “we’ll walk. I’ll be late. I don’t
mind.”
They swept quickly along, looking ahead in silence. Presently he began
to sing. Miriam dropped her eyes to the pavement, listening. How
unconsciously wise he was. How awful it would have been if she had gone
on the omnibus. Here he was safe, healing and forgetting. There _was_
some truth in the Frenchman’s judgment. It wasn’t that he was a dull
philosopher. Lahitte was utterly incapable of measuring his big sunlit
mind; but there was something, in his manner, or bearing, something that
many people would not like, an absence of gaiety; it was true, the
Frenchman’s quick eye had fastened on it. Who wanted gaiety? There was a
deep joyfulness in his booming song that was more than gaiety. His rich
dark vitality challenged the English air as he plunged along, beard
first, without thoughts, his eyebrows raised in the effort of his eager
singing. He was quite unaware that there was no room for singing more
than below one’s breath, however quickly one walked, in the Euston Road
in the morning.
She disposed herself to walk unconcernedly past the row of lounging
overalled figures. Sullen hostile staring would not satisfy them this
morning. The song would rouse them to some open demonstration. They were
endless; muttering motionlessly to each other in their immovable
lounging. Surely he must feel them. “Go ’ome” she heard, away behind....
“Blooming foreigner;” close by, the tall lean swarthy fellow, with the
handsome grubby face. That he _must_ have heard. She fancied his song
recoiled, and wheeled sharply back, confronting the speaker, who had
just spat into the middle of the pavement.
“Yes,” she said, “he is a foreigner, and he is my friend. What do you
_mean_?” The man’s gazing face was broken up into embarrassed awkward
youth. Mr. Shatov was safely ahead. She waited, her eyes on the
black-rimmed expressionless blue of the eyes staring from above a rising
flush. In a moment she would say, it is abominable and simply
_disgraceful_, and sweep away and never come up this side of the road
again. A little man was speaking at her side, his cap in his hand. They
were all moving and staring. “Excuse me miss,” he began again in a
quiet, thick, hurrying voice, as she turned to him. “Miss, we know the
sight of you going up and down. Miss he ain’t good enough forya.”
“Oh” said Miriam, the sky falling about her. She lingered a moment
speechless, looking at no one, sweeping over them a general disclaiming
smile, hoping she told them how mistaken they all were and how nice she
thought them, she hurried away to meet Mr. Shatov waiting a few yards
off. The _darlings_. In all these years of invisible going up and
down...
“Well?” he laughed, “what is this?”
“British workmen. I’ve been lecturing them.”
“On what?”
“In general. Telling them what I think.”
“Excellent. You will yet be a socialist.” They walked on, to the sound
of his resumed singing. Presently the turning into Wimpole Street was in
sight. His singing must end. Dipping at a venture she stumbled upon
material for his arrest.
“It it nay-cessary; _deere_ bruthren;” she intoned dismally in a clear
interval “to obtain; the m_Ahstery_; o-ver-the _Vile_; bhuddy.”
“What? What?” he gurgled delightedly, slackening his pace. “Please say
this once more.”
Summoning the forgotten figure, straining out over the edge of the
pulpit she saw that there was more than the shape and sound of his
abruptly ending whine. She saw the incident from Mr. Shatov’s point of
view and stood still to laugh his laugh; but it was not her kind of
joke.
“It was in a University church, presided over by a man they all say has
a European reputation; it was in Lent; this other man was a visitor, for
Lent. That was the beginning of his sermon. He began at once, with a
yell, flinging half out of the pulpit, the ugliest person I have ever
seen.”
“Hoh,” shouted Mr. Shatov from the midst of immense gusts of laughter,
“that is a most supreme instance of unconscious ironic commentary. But
really, please you shall say this to me once more.”
If she said, you know he was quite sincere, the story would be spoiled.
This was the kind of story popular people told. To be amusing must mean
always to be not quite truthful. But the sound. She was longing to hear
it again. Turning to face the way they had come she gave herself up to
howling the exhortation down the empty park-flanked vista.
“It is a chef d’oeuvre,” he sighed.
He ought not to be here she irritably told herself, emerging as they
turned and took the few steps to her street, tired and scattered and
hopelessly late, into the forgotten chill of her day. It was all very
well for him with his freedom and leisure to begin the first thing in
the morning with things that belonged to the end of the day.... She took
swift distracted leave of him at the corner and hurried along the length
of the few houses to her destination. Turning remorsefully at the
doorstep to smile her farewell, she saw the hurrying form of Mr. Hancock
crossing the road with grave appraising glance upon the strange figure
bowing towards her bareheaded in the wind from the top of the street. He
had seen her loitering, standing still, had heard her howls. Mercifully
the door opened behind her, and she fled within .... the corner of the
very street that made him, more than any other street, look foreign,
and, in the distance, disgraceful......
For days she read the first two stories in the little book, carrying it
about with her, uneasy amongst her letters and ledgers unless it were in
sight. The project of translation vanished in an entranced consideration
at close quarters of some strange quality coming each time from the
printed page. She could not seize or name it. Both stories were sad,
with an unmitigated relentless sadness, casting a shadow over the
spectacle of life. But some spell in their weaving, something abrupt and
strangely alive, remaining alive, in the text, made a beauty that
outlived the sadness. They were _beautiful_. English people would not
think so. They would only see tragedy of a kind that did not occur in
the society they knew. They would consider Andrayeff a morbid foreigner,
and a liking for the stories an unhealthy pose. Very well. It was an
unhealthy pose. The strange beauty in the well known sentences that yet
were every time fresh and surprising, was an unshareable secret.
Meanwhile the presence of the little book exorcised the everyday sense
of the winding off of days in an elaborate unchanging circle of toil.
To Michael Shatov she poured out incoherent enthusiasm. Translate,
translate, he cried; and when she assured him that no one would want to
read, he said, each time, no matter; this work will be good for you. But
when at last suddenly in the middle of a busy morning, she began turning
into rounded English words the thorny German text, she eluded his
enquiries and hid the book and all signs of her work even from herself.
Writing she forgot, and did not see the pages. The moment she saw them,
there was a sort of half-shame in their exposure, even to the light of
day. And always in transcribing them a sense of guilt. Not, she was
sure, a conviction of mis-spending her employer’s time. Had not they
agreed in response to her graceless demands in the course of that first
realisation of the undeveloping nature of her employments, that she
should use chance intervals of leisure on work of her own? But even
abusing this privilege, writing sudden long absorbing letters in the
best part of the morning with urgent business waiting all round her, had
brought no feeling of guilt; only a bright enclosing sense of
dissipation; a sort of spreading, to be justified by the shortness of
her leisure, of its wild free quality over a part of the too-long day.
It was in some way from the work itself that this strange gnawing
accusation came, and as strangely, each time she had fairly begun, there
came, driving out the sense of guilt, an overwhelming urgency; as if she
were running a race.
Presently everything in her life existed only for the sake of the
increasing bunch of pencilled half-sheets distributed between the leaves
of her roomy blotter. She thanked her circumstances, into whose shape
this secret adventure had stolen unobserved and sunk, leaving the
surface unchanged, and finding, ready for its sustaining, an energy her
daily work had never tapped, from the depth of her heart. In the
evenings she put away the thought of her pages lest she could find
herself speaking of them to Mr. Shatov.
But they would arrive suddenly in her mind, thrilling her into
animation, lighting up some remote part of her consciousness from which
would come pell-mell, emphatic and incoherently eloquent, statements to
which she listened eagerly, Mr. Shatov, too, reduced to a strangely
silenced listener, and dropping presently off along some single side
issue, she would be driven back by the sheer pain of the effort of
contraction, and would impatiently bring the sitting to an end and seek
solitude. It was as if she were confronted by some deeper convinced self
who did, unknown to her, take sides on things, both sides, with equal
emphasis, impartially, but with a passion that left her in an
enhancement of longing to discover the secret of its nature. For the
rest of the evening this strange self seemed to hover about her, holding
her in a serenity undisturbed by reflection.
Sometimes the memory of her work would leap out when a conversation was
flagging, and lift her as she sat inert, to a distance whence the dulled
expiring thread showed suddenly glowing, looping forward into an endless
bright pattern interminably animated by the changing lights of fresh
inflowing thoughts. During the engrossing incidents of her day’s work
she forgot them completely, but in every interval they were there; or
not there; she had dreamed them....
With each fresh attack on the text, the sense of guilt grew stronger;
falling upon her the moment, having read the page of German, she set to
work to apply the discoveries she had made. It was as if these
discoveries were the winning, through some inborn trick of intelligence
not her own by right of any process of application or of discipline, of
an unfair advantage. She sought within her for a memory that might
explain the acquisition of the right of escape into this life within,
outside, securely away from, the life of everyday. The school memories
that revived in her dealings with her sentences were the best, the most
secret and the happiest, the strands where the struggle to acquire had
been all a painless interested adventuring. The use of this strange
faculty, so swift in discovery, so relentless in criticism, giving
birth, as one by one the motley of truths urging its blind movements,
came recognizably into view, to such a fascinating game of acceptance
and fresh trial, produced in the long run when the full balance was
struck, an overweight of joy bought without price.
There was no longer unalleviated pain in the first attack on a fresh
stretch of the text. The knowledge that it could by three stages,
laborious but unchanging and certain in their operation, reach a life of
its own, the same in its whole effect, and yet in each detail so
different to the original, radiated joy through the whole slow process.
It was such a glad adventure, to get down on the page with a blunt stump
of pencil in quivering swift thrilled fingers the whole unwieldy literal
presentation, to contemplate, plunging thus roughshod from language, to
language, the strange lights shed in turn upon each, the revelation of
mutually enclosed inexpandible meanings, insoluble antagonisms of
thought and experience, flowing upon the surface of a stream where both
were one; to see, through the shapeless mass the approaching miracle of
shape and meaning.
The vast entertainment of this first headlong ramble down the page left
an enlivenment with which to face the dark length of the second journey,
its separate single efforts of concentration, the recurring conviction
of the insuperability of barriers, the increasing list of discarded
attempts, the intervals of hours of interruption, teased by problems
that dissolved into meaninglessness, and emerged more than ever densely
obstructive, the sudden almost ironically cheerful simultaneous arrival
of several passable solutions; the temptation to use them, driven off by
the wretchedness accompanying the experiment of placing them even in
imagination upon the page, and at last the snap of relinquishment, the
plunge down into oblivion of everything but the object of contemplation,
perhaps ill-sustained and fruitful only of a fury of irritated
exhaustion, postponing further effort, or through the entertaining
distraction of a sudden irrelevant play of light, turned to an
outbranching series of mental escapades, leading, on emergence, to a
hurried scribbling, on fresh pages, of statements which proved when read
later with clues and links forgotten, unintelligible; but leading
always, whether directly in one swift movement of seizure, or only at
the end of protracted divings, to the return, with the shining fragment,
whose safe placing within the text made the pages, gathered up in an
energy flowing forward transformingly through the interval, towards the
next opportunity of attack, electric within her hands.
The serene third passage, the original banished in the comforting
certainty that the whole of it was represented, the freedom to handle
until the jagged parts were wrought into a pliable whole, relieved the
pressure of the haunting sense of trespass, and when all was complete it
vanished into peace and a strange unimpatient curiosity and interest.
She read from an immense distance. The story was turned away from her
towards people who were waiting to read and share what she felt as she
read. It was no longer even partly hers; yet the thing that held it
together in its English dress was herself, it had her expression, as a
portrait would have, so that by no one in her sight or within range of
any chance meeting with herself might it ever be contemplated. And for
herself it was changed. Coming between her and the immediate grasp of
the text were stirring memories; the history of her labour was written
between the lines; and strangely, moving within the whole, was the
record of the months since Christmas. On every page a day or group of
days. It was a diary.... Within it were incidents that for a while had
dimmed the whole fabric to indifference. And passages stood out,
recalling, together with the memory of overcoming their difficulty, the
dissolution of annoyances, the surprised arrival on the far side of
overwhelming angers....
The second story lay untouched, wrapt in its magic. Contemplating the
way, with its difference, it enhanced the first and was enhanced by it,
she longed to see the two side by side and found, while she hesitated
before the slow scattering process of translation, a third that set her
headlong at work towards the perfect finished group. There was no
weariness in this second stretch of labour. Behind her lay the first
story, a rampart, of achievement and promise, and ahead, calling her on,
the one that was yet to be attempted, difficult and strange, a little
thread of story upon a background of dark thoughts, like a voice heard
through a storm. Even the heaviest parts of the afternoon could be used,
in an engrossed forgetfulness of time and place. Time pressed. The year
was widening and lifting too rapidly towards the heights of June when
everything but the green world, fresh gleaming in parks and squares
through the London swelter, sweeping with the tones of spring and summer
mingled amongst the changing trees, towards September, would fade from
her grasp and disappear.