The picturesque building had been there, just round the corner, all
these years, without once attracting her interested notice. The question
she directed towards it, crossing the road for a nearer view, went
forth, not from herself, but from the presence, close at her side, of
Michael Shatov. During the hour spent in her room, facing the empty
evening, she had been aware of nothing, outside the startling
disturbance of her own movements, but the immense silence he had left.
Driven forth to walk away its hours out of doors, she found,
accompanying her through the green-lit evening squares, the tones and
gestures of his voice, the certainty, that so long as she should
frequent the neighbourhood, she would retain the sense of his
companionship. The regions within her, of unexpressed thought and
feeling, to which he had not reached, were at once all about her as she
made her old, familiar, unimpeded escape through the front door, towards
the blur of feathery green standing in the bright twilight at the end of
the grey street; but beyond these inner zones, restored in a tumult of
triumphant assertion of their indestructibility, the outer difficult
life of expression and association was changed. If, as she feared, he
should finally disappear into the new world towards which, with such
urgent irritated determination, she had driven him, she would, for life,
have reaped a small fund of his Russian courage and indifference.... It
was with his impulse and interest, almost it seemed, actually in his
person, that she drew up in front of the placard at the side of the
strange low ecclesiastical looking porch. But as she read its contents,
he left her, sped into forgetfulness by the swift course of her
amazement. She had come, leaving her room at exactly the right moment,
directly, by appointment, to this spot. Glancing once more for perfect
assurance, at the liberal invitation printed in large letters at the
foot of the heavenly announcement, she went boldly into the porch.
At the top of the shallow flight of grey stone steps up which she passed
almost directly from the ecclesiastical doorway, a large black-draped
figure, surmounted by the sweeping curves of an immense black hat
voluminously swathed in a gauze veil of pale grey, stood bent towards a
small woman standing on the step below her in dingy indoor black. The
large outline, standing generously out below the broad low stone archway
curving above the steps, against the further grey stone of what appeared
to be part of a low ceiled corridor, was in extraordinary contrast to
the graciously bending, surrendered attitude of the figure. Passing
close to the group, Miriam caught a glimpse of large plump features,
bold eyebrows, and firm dark eyes. The whole face, imagined as
unscreened, was rounded, simple and undistinguished; blurred by the
veil, it swam, without edges, a misty full moon. Through the veil came a
voice that thrilled her as she moved on, led by a card bearing an
arrowed instruction, down the grey stone corridor, with the desire for
immediate audible mimicry. The behaviour of the voice was a perfect
confirmation of deliberate intentional blurring of the large face. The
little scanty frugally upstanding woman who had appeared to be of the
artisan class, was either a humorous brick, or a toady, or of the
old-fashioned respectful servant type, to stand it. The superfluous
statement might, at least, even if the voice had become second nature,
she might be thirty, have been delivered at an ordinary conversational
pace. But to make the unimportant comment in the deliberately refined
distressed ladylike voice, with pauses, as if every word were a precious
gift .... She was waiting for some occasion, keeping her manner going,
and the little woman had to stand out the performance.
On her way down the corridor she met a young man with a long neck above
a low collar, walking like an undergraduate, with a rapid lope and a
forward hen-like jerk of the head, but with kind religious looking eyes.
Underneath his conforming manner and his English book and talk-found
thoughts, he was acutely miserable, but never alone long enough to find
it out; never even long enough to feel his own impulses. Two girls came
swiftly by, bare-headed, in reform dresses, talking eagerly in
high-pitched out-turned cultured voices, their uncommunicating selves
watchfully entrenched behind the polite Norman idiom. She carried on
their manner of speech at lightning speed in her mind, watching its
effect upon everything it handled, of damming up, shaping, excluding all
but ready-made thought and opinion. Just ahead was an arched doorway and
a young man with a sheaf of pamphlets standing within it. “It may” she
announced in character to an imaginary companion, “prove necessary to
have some sort of conversational interchange with this individual.”
Certainly it left one better prepared for the interview than saying Good
Lord shall we have to _say_ something to this creature? She got safely
through the doorway, exchanging a slight bow with the young man as he
provided her with a syllabus, and entered a large lofty quietly-lit
room, where a considerable audience sat facing a raised platform more
brightly illuminated, and from which they were confronted by a row of
seated forms. She went down the central gangway, bold in her desire for
a perfect hearing and slipped into a seat in the second row of chairs.
The chairman was taking his place and in the dying down of conversation
she heard a quiet flurry of draperies approaching with delicate
apologetic rhythm up the gangway. It was the tall young woman. She
passed, a veiled figure with bent head and floating scarf, along the
little passage between the front row of the audience and the fern-edged
platform, upon which she presently emerged, taking her place next to a
lady who now rose and came forward, tall and black robed, and whose
face, sharply pointing beneath the shadow of a plumy hat, had the
expression of an eagle searching the distance with calm piercing eyes.
In rousing ringing grievous tones she begged to be allowed to precede
the chairman with an important announcement. Miriam inwardly groaned as
the voice chid tragically on, demanding a realisation on the part of
all, of the meaning for London of the promised arrival in its midst of a
world-famed authority in Greek letters. She felt the audience behind her
quelled into absolute stillness, and took angry refuge in the cover of
her syllabus. “The Furthermore Settlement” she read, printed boldly at
the head of the page. It was one of those missions; to bring culture
amongst the London poor ..... “devoted young men from the Universities.”
Those girls in the corridor, wrapped in their code, were doing
“settlement work.” They did not look philanthropic. What they loved most
was the building, the grey stone corridors and archways, and being away
from home on a prolonged adventure, free to weave bright colours along
the invisible edges of life. She could not imagine them ever becoming in
the least like the elderly philanthropists on the platform. But they
were not free. The place was a sort of monastery of culture. If they
wore habits they would be free and deeply inspiring. But they went about
dressed longingly in the colours of sunlit landscapes, and lived their
social life with ideas. There was something monastic about the lofty
hall, with its neutral tinted walls and high-placed windows. But the
place was modern and well-ventilated, even sternly chilly. Turning on
her shoulder to examine the dutiful audience, she was startled by its
effect of massed intellectuality. These people were certainly not the
poor of the neighbourhood. By far the larger number were men, and
wherever she looked she met faces from which she turned quickly away
lest she should smile her pleasure. Even those that were heavy with
stoutness and beards had the same lit moving look of kindly adventurous
thought. They were a picked gathering; like the Royal Institution; but
more glowing. She turned back to the platform in high hope amidst the
outburst of applause greeting the retirement of the distressful lady and
deepening to enthusiasm as there emerged timidly from behind one of the
large platform screens a tall figure in evening dress, a great grown-up
boy, with a large fresh face and helpless straight hanging arms and
hands. He sat big and fixed, like an idol, whilst the chairman standing
bowing over his table hurriedly remarked that an introduction was
superfluous, and gazed at the audience with large moist blue eyes that
seemed permanently open and expressionless and yet to pray for
protection, or permission to retreat once more behind his screen. Miriam
pitied him from the bottom of her heart and saw with relief when he rose
that he produced a roll of papers for which a little one-legged
ecclesiastical reading desk was conveniently waiting. He was going to
read. But he placed his papers with large incapable fingers and she
feared they would flutter to the ground, till he turned and took one
fumbling expressionless step clear of the little desk and standing just
as he was, his arms hanging once more heavy and helpless at his side,
his eyes motionlessly fixed neither on the distance nor on any part of
the audience, as if sightlessly focussing everything before him, began,
without movement, or warning gesture, to speak. With the first sound of
his voice, Miriam surrendered herself to breathless listening. It
sounded out, at conversational pitch, with a colourless serenity that
instantly explained his bearing, revealing him beyond the region either
of diffidence or temerity. It was a voice speaking to no one, in a world
emptied of everything that had gone before.
“The progress of philosophy” went the words, in letters of gold across
the dark void “is by a series of systems; that of science by the
constant addition of small facts to accumulated knowledge.” In the
slight pause Miriam held back from the thoughts flying out in all
directions round the glowing words, they would come again, if she could
memorise the words from which they were born, coolly, registering the
shape and length of the phrases and the leading terms. Before the voice
began again she had read and re-read many times; driving back an
exciting intruder trying, from the depths of her mind to engage her on
the subject of the time-expanding swiftness of thought.
“A system” pursued the voice “very generally corrects the fallacy of the
preceding system, and leans perhaps in the opposite direction.” She
flushed warm beneath the pressure of her longing to remain cool......
“Thus the movements of philosophic thought may be compared to the
efforts of a drunken man to reach his home.” The blue eyes remained
unaltered, while the large fresh face expanded with a smiling radiance.
He was a darling. “He reels against the wall to his right and gains an
impetus which sends him staggering to the left and so on; his progress
being a series of zigzags. But in the end he gets home. And we may hope
that philosophy will do the same, though the road seems at times
unnecessarily broad.”
He turned back to his papers, leaving his sentence on the air in an
intense silence through which Miriam felt the eager expectancy of the
audience flow and hang waiting, gathered towards the fresh centre
whence, unless he suddenly vanished, would come, through the perfect
medium of the unobstructive voice, his utmost presentation of reasons
for the tantalising hope.
At the end of the lecture she sat hurriedly sorting and re-sorting what
she had gleaned; aware that her attention had again and again wandered
off with single statements that had appealed to her, longing to
communicate with other members of the audience in the hope of filling up
the gaps. Perhaps the questions would bring back some of the things she
had missed. But no one seemed to have anything to ask. The relaxation of
the hearty and prolonged applause, had given way to the sort of silence
that falls in a room after vociferous greetings, when the anticipated
occasion vanishes and the gathered friends become suddenly
unrecognisably small and dense. She looked at the woman at her side and
caught a swift responsive glance that shocked her, clear blue and white
and remote in limpid freshness though it was, with its chill
understanding familiarity. Something had gone irrevocably from the
evening and from herself. The strange woman was exactly like somebody
.... a disguise of somebody. Shattering the silence came a voice from
the back of the hall. “If the lecturer _thinks_, and seems to deprecate
the fact, that theology deals with metaphysical problems in an
_unmetaphysical_ way, that is, from the point of view of metaphysic, in
an _unscientific_ way ....” compared to Dr. McHibbert’s his voice was
like the voice of an intoxicated man arguing to himself in a railway
carriage ..... “may we not _say_ that when metaphysic takes upon itself
to criticise the validity of _scientific_ conceptions, it does so, from
the point of view of _science_ in an unscientific way?”
This Miriam felt, was terribly unanswerable. But the hushed platform was
alive with the standing figure almost before the muffling of the last
emphatic word told that the assailant had re-assumed his seat.
“I think I have said” his face beaming with the repressed radiance of an
invading smile, was lifted towards the audience, but the blue eyes
modestly addressed the frill of green along the platform edge, “that
metaphysic, with respect to some of the conceptions of science, while
admitting that they have their uses for practical purposes, denies that
they are exactly true. Theology does not deny the problems of
metaphysic, but answers them in a way metaphysic cannot accept.”
“In that case _Theology_” began a rich, reverberating clerical voice
.....
“This is veggy boring” said the woman.
He was going to claim, thought Miriam, noting the evidence of foreign
intelligence in her neighbour’s pronunciation, that religion, like
metaphysic and science, had a right to its premises and denied that
metaphysic was adequate for the study of the ultimate nature of reality,
exactly as metaphysic denied that science was adequate.
“Yes, isn’t it” she murmured, a little late, through the deep caressing
thunder of the clerical voice, wondering how far she had admitted her
willingness to be at the disposal of anyone who found, in these
tremendous onslaughts, nothing but irrelevance.
“If one could peacefully fall asleep until the summing up.”
She spoke out quite clearly, moving so that she was half turned towards
Miriam, and completely exposed to her, as she sat with an elbow on the
back of her chair and her knees comfortably crossed, in all her slender
grey-clad length, still set towards the centre of the platform. Miriam
unwillingly searched her curious effect of making in the atmosphere
about her, a cold, delicate, blue and white glare. She had seemed, all
the evening, a well-dressed presence. But her little oval hat, entirely
covered with a much washed piece of cream coloured lace and set back
from her forehead at the angle of an old-fashioned flat lace cap, had
not been bought at a shop, and the light grey garment so delicate in
tone and expression, open at the neck, where creamy lace continued the
effect of the hat, was nothing but a cheap rain-cloak. Either she was
poor, and triumphing over her poverty with a laborious depressing
ingenuity, or she was one of those people who deliberately do everything
cheaply. There was something faintly horrible, Miriam felt, about the
narrowness of her escape from dowdiness to distinction.... Washable lace
was the simplest possible solution of the London hat problem. No
untravelled Englishwoman would have thought of it...... Behind the
serenity of her smooth white brow, behind her cold wide clearly ringed
sea-blue eyes, was the dominant intelligence of it all, the secret of
the strange atmosphere, that enveloped her whole effect; so strong and
secure that it infected her words and movements with a faint robust
delicate levity. In most women the sum of the tangible items would have
produced the eye-wearying, eye-estranging pathos of the spectacle of
patience fighting a lost battle, supplied so numerously all over London
by women who were no longer young; or at least a consciously resigned
cheerfulness. But she sat there with the enviable cool clear radiant
eyes of a child that is held still and unsmiling by the deep
entrancement of its mirth.
The chairman had risen and suddenly quelled the vast voice in the midst
of its rising tide of tone, with the reminder that there would be
opportunity for discussion a little later. A question rang out, short
and sharp, exploding, as if released automatically by the renewal of
stillness, so abruptly that Miriam missed its significance. The woman
laughed instantly, a little clear tinkling gleeful sound, hesitatingly
supported here and there amongst the forward rows of chairs by stirrings
and small sounds of amusement. Miriam glowed with shame. It had been a
common voice; perhaps some lonely uninstructed man, struggling with
problems that were as terrible to him as to anyone; in the end
desperately getting round them, by logical somersaults, so funny, that
these habitually cultured minds could see only the absurdity. Her heart
beat with gratitude as the lecturer, with gentle respectful gravity,
paraphrased at some length an extract from the earlier part of his
address. She was once more recalled by the voice at her side. Turning
she found the unchanged face still set towards the platform. She
answered the question in a low toneless voice that yet sounded more
disturbing than the easy smooth conversational tone of her neighbour.
She talked on, questioning and commenting, in neat inclusive phrases,
and Miriam, turned towards her, reading the history of the duel of
audience and lecturer in the flickerings across her face, of amusement
or of scorn, responded freely, delighting in a converse that was more
wonderful, with its background of cosmic discussion, than even the
untrammelled exchange of confidences with a stranger on a bus. Presently
there was a complete stillness.
“If there are no more questions” said the chairman, rising.
“I should just _like_” broke in a ringing cheerful voice quite near at
hand, “to ask Dr. McHibbert _why_ if he considers that metaphysic is of
no use in a man’s life, he finds it worth _while_, to _pursue_ such a
fruitless study?”
“_Don’t answer_” said the woman in clear penetrating tones.
“Don’t answer; don’t answer,” repeated in the immediate neighbourhood
two or three masculine voices. The lecturer, sitting bent forward, his
friendly open brow yielded up to the invading audience, his big hands
clasped capaciously between his knees, sent a blue glance swiftly in her
direction, hesitated a moment, and then sat silent, smiling broadly down
at his clasped hands.
“Isn’t he a perfect _darling_,” murmured Miriam while the chairman
declared the lecture open for discussion and she gathered herself
together for close attention.
“There will be nothing worth heahghing till he sums up” said her
companion and went on to ask her if she meant to attend the next
lecture. Miriam perceived that unless she chose to escape forcibly, her
companion had her in a close net of conversation. She glanced and saw
that her face was already that of a familiar associate, no longer
spurring her to trace to its source the strange impression that at first
it had given her of being a forgotten face, whose sudden return,
unrecognisably disguised, and yet so recognisable, filled her with a
remembered sentiment of dislike.
“Rather” she said and then, watching the opening prospect of the long
series of speeches, and protected by the monotonous booming of a
pessimistic male voice “I’m so awfully relieved to find that science is
only half true. But I _can’t_ see why he says that metaphysic is no
practical use. It would make _all_ the difference every moment, to know
for certain that mind is more real than matter.”
“Pahghfaitement.”
Dr. McHibbert’s voice interrupted her, damming up the urgent flow of
communications. She watched him, listening without attention.
“He’s like a marvellously intelligent bolster” she said tonelessly “but
with a heart and a soul. He certainly has a soul.”
Flattered by a soft chuckle of amusement, she added in a low murmuring
man’s voice “the objectors are like candle-lit turnip ghosts,” and was
rewarded by the first direct glance from the blue eyes, smiling,
assuring her that she was acceptable. The ghost of the remembered face
was laid. Whoever it was, if in reality it were to reappear in her life,
she would be able to overcome her aversion by bold flirtation.
When the lecturer at last rose to reply, the guiding phrases of his
discourse were the worn familiar keys of a past experience. Used for the
second time at the doors of the chambers they had opened within the
background of life, they grated, hesitating, and the heavy sound threw
the bright spaces into shadow and spread a film of doubt over Miriam’s
eagerness to escape and share her illumination with people waiting
outside in the surrounding gloom. The light would return and remain for
her. But it was something accomplished unaccountably. The mere
reproduction of the magic phrases, even when after solitary peaceful
contemplation she should have reassembled them in their right relations
and their marvellously advancing sequence, would not carry her hearers
along the road she had travelled. The something that held them together,
lively and enlivening, was incommunicable.
“Don’t huggy away. The audience will take a considerable time to
disperse.”
Miriam desired only to escape into the night. Just outside, in the
darkness, was the balm that would disperse her disquietude. The
grey-clad woman held it suspended in the hot room, piling mountainously
up. But they sat enclosed, a closely locked party of two. Conversation
was going on all over the room. This woman with her little deprecating
frown at the idea of immediate departure, had the secret of the
congregational aspect of audiences. Miriam sat still, passively
surrendering to the forcible initiation into the new role of lingerer,
to the extent of floundering through absent-minded responses.
“What?” she said suddenly, turning full round. Something had thrilled
upon the air about her, bringing the whole evening to a head.
“Haldane’s Pathway to Reality” repeated the woman as their eyes met.
Miriam was held by the intense radiance of the blue eyes. Light,
strangely cool and pure, flowed from the still face. She was beautiful,
with a curious impersonal glowless beauty. The light that came from her
was the light of something she saw, habitually.
“But I ought not to recommend you to read. You ought to spend all your
free time in the open air. Moreover, it’s very stiff reading.”
Miriam rose, beleaguered and flinching. How did people find out about
books? Where did they get them from? This woman could not afford to buy
big expensive volumes...... Why did her quick mind assume that the
difficulty of the book would be a barrier, and not see that it was the
one book she was waiting for, even if it were the stiffest and dryest in
the world?...... But the title was unforgettable; one day she would come
across the book somewhere and get at its meaning in her own way.
“Well; we may meet next week, if we are both early; I shall be early.”
She rose enlivening her grey cloak with the swift grace of her movements
and together they proceeded down the rapidly emptying room.
“My name is Lucie Duclaux.”
The shock of this unexpected advance arrested Miriam’s rapid flight
towards the harbour of solitude. She smiled a formal acknowledgment,
unable and entirely unwilling to identify herself with a name. Her
companion, remaining close in her neighbourhood as they threaded their
way amongst talking groups along the corridor, said nothing more, and
when they reached the doorway Miriam’s determination to be free, kept
her blind and dumb. She was aware of an exclamation about the rain. That
was enough. She would not risk a parting intimate enough to suggest
another meeting, with anyone who at the sight of rain, belaboured the
air and the people about her, with an exclamation that was, however
gracious and elegant, a deliberate assault, condemning her moreover of
the possession of two voices...... Gathering up her Lucie Duclaux cloak,
the woman bowed swiftly and disappeared into the night.
The girls had understood that the evening had been a vital experience.
But they had sat far away, seeming to be more than ever enclosed in
their attitude of tolerant amusement at her doings; more than ever
supporting each other in a manner that told, with regard to herself, of
some final unanimous conclusion reached and decision taken, after much
discussion, once for all. In the old days they would have thought
nothing of her dropping in at eleven o’clock at night, with no reason
but that of just dropping in. But now, their armoury of detached
expectancy demanded always that she should supply some pretext.
To-night, feeling that the pretext was theirs, everyone’s, news too
pressing to wait, she had rushed in unprepared, with something of her
old certainty of welcome. It was so simple. It _must_ be important to
Jan that what Hegel meant was only just beginning to be understood. If
Jan’s acceptance of Haeckel made her sad, here was what she wanted; even
though McHibbert said that we have no right to believe a theory because
we could not be happy unless it were true...... All the same a theory
that makes you miserable can’t be altogether true ...... _Miserable_;
not sorry. Everything depends upon the kind of man who sets up the
theory ..... Pessimists can find as good reasons as optimists ..... but
if the optimist is cheerful because he is healthy and the pessimist
gloomy because ... everything is a matter of temperament. Neither of
them sees that the fact of there being anything anywhere is more
wonderful than any theory about the fact ...... making optimists and
pessimists look exactly alike ...... then why was philosophy so
fascinating?
“You will lose your colour, my child, and get protuberances on your
brow.”
“What then?”
St. Pancras clock struck midnight as she reached home. The house was in
darkness. She went noiselessly up the first two flights and forward,
welcomed, towards the blue glimmer of street lamps showing through the
open drawing-room door. It was long since she had seen the room empty.
His absence had restored it to her in its old shadowy character; deep
black shadows, and spaces of faint blue light that came in through the
lace curtains, painting their patterned mesh on the sheen of the
opposite walls. The old familiar presence was there in the hush of the
night, dissolving the echoes of the day and promising, if she stayed
long enough within it, the emergence of to-morrow, a picture, with long
perspectives, seen suddenly in the distance, alone upon a bare wall. She
stood still, moving rapidly into the neutral zone between the two days,
further and further into the spaces of the darkness, until everything
disappeared, and all days were far-off strident irrelevances, for ever
unable to come between her and the sound of the stillness and its touch,
a cool breath, passing through her unimpeded.
She could not remember whether she had first seen him rise or heard the
deep tones coming out of the velvety darkness.
“No, you did not startle me. I’ve been to a lecture,” she said sinking
in a sleep-like stupor into a chair drawn up beyond the light of the
window, opposite his own, across which there struck a shaft of light
falling, now that he was again seated, only on his face. Miriam gazed at
him from within the sheltering darkness, fumbling sleepily for the way
back to some lucid recovery of the event of her evening.
“Ah. It is a pity I could not be there.” His words broke into the
stillness, an immensity of communication, thrown forward through their
unrestricted sitting, in the darkness, where, to bridge, before
to-morrow, the gap made by his evening’s absence, he had waited for her.
She sat silent, her days once more wound closely about her, an endless
hospitable chain.
“Tell me of this lecture.”
“Philosophy.”
“Tsa. It is _indeed_ a pity.”
“It is a series” ... are you sitting there already involved in
engagements ... cut off; changed ...
“Excellent. I shall most certainly come.” He was looking freely ahead.
His evening had not interested him .... he had gone and come back, his
horizons unenlarged .... but not seeing the impression he had made on
those people; the steps they would take.
“It would be splendid for you. The lecturer’s English _wonderful_. The
way the close thought made his sentences, fascinated me so much, that I
often missed the meaning in listening to the rhythm; like a fugue.”
Aren’t you _glad_ you’ve enlarged your horizons? Don’t you know what
people are ... what you, a person, are to people? Are you a person? In a
blankness, life streamed up in spirals, vanishing, leaving nothing ....
“That is not bad. Ah I should not have paid this visit. It was also in
some respects most painful to me.” Poor little man, poor little lonely
man white-faced and sensitive, in a world without individuals; grown and
formed and wise without realising an individual; never to realise.
Audible within the darkness was a singing, hovering on spaces of warm
rosy light.
“You must not regret your visit.”
“Regret no; it was much as I anticipated. But it is disheartening, this
actual witnessing.” They were disposed of in some way; in one piece; he
would have a formula.
“What are they like?”
“Quite as I expected; good simple people, kind and hospitable. I have
been the whole evening there. Ah but it is sad for me this first meeting
with English Jews.”
“Perhaps you can make Zionists of them.”
“That is absolutely impossible.”
“Did you talk to them about Zionism?”
“It is useless to talk to these people whose first pride is that they
are _British_.”
“But they’re _not_.”
“You should tell them so. They will tell you they are British of the
Jewish persuasion. Ah it has revolted me to hear them talk of this war,
the British Empire, and the subject races.”
“I know; disgusting; but very British. But the British Empire has done a
good deal for the Jews and I suppose the Jews feel loyal.”
“That is true. But what they do not see is that they are not, and never
can be, British; that the British do not accept them as such.”
“That’s true I know; the general attitude; but there are no
disabilities. The Jews are free in England.”
“They are free; to the honour of England in all history. But they are
nevertheless Jews and not Englishmen. Those Jews who deny, or try to
ignore this have ceased to be Jews without becoming Englishmen. The
toleration for Jews, moreover, will last only so long as the English
remain in ignorance of the immense and increasing power and influence of
the Jew in this country. Once that is generally recognised, even England
will have its antisemitic movement.”
“_Never._ England can assimilate anything. Look at the races that have
been built into us in the past.”
“No nation can assimilate the Jew.”
“What about inter-marriages?”
“That is the minority.”
“If it was right to make a refuge for the Jews here it is still right
and England will never regret it.”
“Believe me it is not so simple. Remember that British Jewry is
perpetually and increasingly reinforced by immigration from those
countries where Jews are segregated and ever more terribly persecuted.
At present there is England, both for the Jewish speculator and the
refugee pauper. But for those who look at _facts_, the end of this
possibility is in sight. The time for the closing of this last door is
approaching.”
“I don’t believe England will ever do it. How can they? Where will the
Jews go? It’s impossible to think of. It will be the end of England if
we begin that sort of thing.”
“It may be the beginning of Jewish nationality. Ah at least this visit
has reawakened all the Zionist in me.”
“It is a glorious idea.” His evening _had_ been eventful; sending him
back to the freshness of the days at Basel. It was then, she thought, at
the moment he was bathed in the unceasing beauty of the surroundings,
and immersed within it, in inextinguishable association with the
students of the photographs, poised blissfully irresponsible in a
permanent boundless beguilement, himself the most untouched of all, the
most smoothly rounded, and elastically surrendered with his
deep-singing, child-like confident face, that he had been touched and
shaped and sent forth; his future set towards a single separate thing,
the narrowest, strangest, most unknown of movements, far away from the
wide European life that had flowed through his mind.
“It is a dream, far-off. In England hardly even that.” There was a
blankness before him. Unconscious of his youth, and his radiating charm,
distilled from the modern world; Frenchman, Russian, philosophical
German-brained, he sat there white-faced, an old old Jew, immeasurably
old, cut off, alone with his conviction, facing the blank spaces of the
future. Why could he not be content to be a European? She swayed,
dragging at the knot. In his deeply saturated intelligence there still
was a balance on the side from which he had declared to his father, that
he was first a man; then a Jew. By the accidents of living, this might
be cherished. The voices of the night cried out against the treachery.
She glanced remorsefully across at him and recognised with a sharp pang
of pity, in his own eyes, the well-known eyes wide open towards the
darkness where she sat invisible, the look he had described ...
wehmütig; in spite of his sheltered happy prosperous youth it was there;
he _belonged_ to those millions whose sufferings he had revealed to her,
a shadow lying for ever across the bright unseeing confidence of Europe,
hopeless. And now, at this moment, standing out from their midst the
strange beautiful Old Testament figure in modern clothes; the fine
beautifully moulded Hebrew head, so like his own.....
“But it _is_ extraordinary; that just when everything is at its worst,
this idea should have arisen...... It’s all very well for people to
laugh at Micawber.”
“Who is this man?”
“The man who is always waiting for something to turn up. Things _do_
turn up, exactly at the right moment. It doesn’t mean fatalism. I don’t
believe in laisser-aller as a principle; but there is something _in_
things, something the people who make plans and think they are thinking
out everything in advance, don’t know; their oblivion of it, while they
go busily on knowing exactly what they are going to do and why, even at
picnics, is a terrible thing. And somehow they always fail.”
“They do not by any means always fail. In all concerted action there
must be a plan. Herzl is certainly a man with a plan.”
“Yes but it’s different; his idea _is_ his plan. It isn’t _clever_. And
now that it is here it seems so simple. Why was it never put forward
before?”
“The greatest ideas are always simple; though not in their resultants.
This dream however, has always been present with Jews.”
“Of course. The Zionist Movement, coming now, when it is most wanted, is
not altogether Herzl. It’s that strange thing, the thing that makes you
stare, in history. A sort of shape ......”
“It is the collective pressure of life; an unseen movement. But if you
feel this what now becomes of your individualism? Eh?” He chuckled his
delight .... passing so easily and leisurely to personal things.
“Oh the shape doesn’t affect the _individual_, in himself. There’s
something behind all those outside things that goes on independently of
them, something much more wonderful.”
“You are wrong. What you call the shape, affects most profoundly every
individual in spite of himself.”
“But he must be an individual to be affected at all, and no two people
are affected in the same way ...... after this evening I’m more of an
individualist than before. It is _relief_ to know that science is a
smaller kind of truth than philosophy. The real difficulty is not
between science and religion at all, but between religion and
_philosophy_. Philosophy seems to think science assumes too much to
begin with and can never get any further than usefulness.”
“Science can afford to smile at this.”
“And that religion is philosophically unsound, though modern religious
controversy is metaphysical.”
“_All_ controversy depends from differences in estimation of term
significations.”
“That’s why arguments are so maddening; even small discussions; people
go rushing on, getting angrier and angrier, talking about quite
different things, especially men, because they never want to get at the
truth, only to score a point.”
“You are unjust; many men put truth before any other consideration
whatsoever. It is not only unjust, it is most bad for you to hold this
cynical estimation.”
“Well, men arguing always look like that to women. That’s why women
always go off at a tangent; because they reply not to what men _say_ but
to what they _mean_, which is to _score a point_, which _anybody_ can
do, with practice, and while they hold on to the point they mean to
score, they are revealed, under all sorts of circumstances, all sorts of
things about them are as plain as a pike-staff, to a woman, and the
results of these things; so that she suddenly finds herself saying
something that sounds quite irrelevant, but isn’t.”
“Nevertheless there is honourable controversy, and most fruitful.”
“There are people here and there with open minds. Very few.”
“The point is not the few, but that they _are_.”
“The few just men, who save the city.”
“Exactly.”
“But even existence is not quite certain.”
“_What_ is this?”
“Descartes _said_, my existence is certain; that is a fallacy.”
“If this is a fallacy for metaphysic, so much the worse for metaphysic.”
“That is argumentum ad hominem.”
“I am not afraid of it.”
“But what can you put in place of metaphysic?”
“Life is larger.”
“I know. I know. I know. Something exists. Metaphysic admits that. I
nearly shouted when Dr. McHibbert said that. It’s enough. It answers
everything. Even to have seen it for a moment is enough. The first time
I thought of it I nearly died of joy. Descartes should have said “I am
aware that there _is_ something, therefore I am.” If I am, other people
are; but that does not seem to matter. That is their own affair.”
“Beware of solipsism.”
“I don’t care what it is called. It is certainty. You _must_ begin with
the individual. There we are again.” There was an end to the
conversation that could not be shared. The words of it already formed,
intangibly, waited, ready to disappear, until she should be alone and
could read them on a clear background. If she stayed they would
disappear irrevocably. She rose, bidding him a hurried good-night,
suddenly aware of the busily sleeping household, friendly guardian of
this wide leisurely night-life. He too was aware and grateful, picking
his way cautiously through the shadows of the large room, sheltered from
his loneliness, invisibly enclosed by the waiting incommunicable
statement that yet left him, accusing him of wilful blindness, so
cruelly outside.
* * * * *
“Materialism” scribbled Miriam eagerly “has the recommendation of being
a Monism, and therefore a more perfect explanation of the universe than
a Dualism can be...... And Matter forms one great whole, persisting
through many ages. Mind appears in the form of separate individuals,
isolated from each other by Matter, and each ceasing, so far as
observation goes, after a very few years. Also the changes which we can
observe Mind to make in Matter are comparatively insignificant, while a
very slight change in Matter will either destroy mind, or, at least,
remove it from the only circumstances in which we can observe its
existence. All these characteristics make matter appear much more
powerful and important than mind.”
“I consider this a very strong reasoning” muttered Mr. Shatov.
“Ssh. Wait.” He was sitting intent, with an awakened youthful student’s
face, meeting, through her agency, in England, a first-class
intelligence. He would hear the beautiful building up, strophe and
antistrophe, of the apparently unassailable argument, the pause, and
then, in the same shapely cadences, its complete destruction, for ever,
the pleasant face smiling at the audience above the ruins, like a child
who has just shattered a castle of bricks.
“Idealism was weakened by being supposed to be bound up with certain
theological doctrines which became discredited. All these things account
for the great strength of materialism some years ago. There has been a
reaction against this, but the extent of the reaction has been
exaggerated.”
“Quite so.”
“Wait, wait.”
“It still remains the belief to which most people tend on first leaving
an unreflecting position. And many remain there. Science is a large
element in our lives now, and if we try to make science serve as
metaphysic, we get materialism. Nor is it to be wished--even by
idealists--that materialism should become too weak. For idealism is
seldom really vigorous except in those who have had a serious struggle
with materialism...... It would be very difficult to disprove
materialism, if we once accepted the reality of matter as a thing in
itself. But, as we saw when considering dualism, such a reality of
matter is untenable. And this conclusion is obviously more fatal to
materialism than it was to dualism. And again, if materialism is true,
all our thoughts are produced by purely material antecedents. These are
quite blind, and are just as likely to produce falsehood as truth. We
have thus no reason for believing any of our conclusions--including the
truth of materialism, which is therefore a self-contradictory
hypothesis.”
“I find this too easily stated.”
Then God is _proved_ .....
“You weren’t here _before_. Philosophy is not difficult. It is common
sense systematised and clarified.” .... wayfaring men, though fools,
shall not err therein. It is not what people think but what they know.
Thought is words. Philosophy will never find words to express life; the
philosopher is the same as the criminal?
“He seems to say spirit when he means _life_.”
“What _is_ life?”
“Moreover presentationism is incompatible with the truth of general
propositions--and therefore with itself, since it can only be expressed
by a general proposition. And closer analysis shows that it is
incompatible even with particular propositions, since these involve both
the union of two terms and the use of general ideas.” People know this
faintly when they say things; not _why_; but faintly everyone knows that
nothing can be said. Then why listen any more? Because if you know,
exactly, that nothing can be said and the expert reasons for it, you
know for certain in times of weakness, how much there is that might be
expressed if there were any way of expressing it ...... But there was no
need to listen any more since God was proved by the impossibility of his
absence, like an invisible star. No one seemed at all disturbed; the
lecturer least of all. Perhaps he felt that the effects of real
realisation would be so tremendous that he could not face them. The
thought of no God made life simply silly. The thought of God made it
embarrassing. If a hand suddenly appeared writing on the wall, what
would he do? He would blush; standing there as a competitor, fighting
for his theories, amongst the theories of other men. Yet if there were
no philosophers, if the world were imagined without philosophy, there
would be nothing but theology, getting more and more superstitious.
Everybody was so _calm_. The calmness of insanity. Nobody quite all
there. Yet intelligent. _What_ were they all thinking about, wreathed in
films of intelligent insanity; watching the performance in the intervals
of lives filled with words that meant nothing ...... breath was more
than words; the fact of breathing ... but everyone was in such a hurry.
“I would ask” ... one horrified glance revealed his profile quivering as
he hesitated. A louder, confident, dictatorial English voice had rung
out simultaneously from the other side of the hall. He would have to sit
down, shaken by his brave attempt. But to the whole evening, the deep
gentle tones had been added, welling through and beyond the Englishman’s
strident, neat proclamation, and containing, surely everyone must hear
it, so much of the answer to the essential question. The chairman
hesitated, turned decisively and the other man sat down.
“What the lecturer makes of the psycho-physical parallelism?”
He drove home his question on a note of reproachful expostulation and
sat down drawn together, with bent head and eye downcast, but listening
intently with his serenely singing child’s brow. Miriam was instantly
sorry that his words had got through, their naked definiteness changing
the eloquent tone, sharpening it to a weapon, a borrowed weapon.
“That’s it” she breathed, hoping the lecturer’s answer would throw some
light on the meaning of the fascinating phrase, floating before her,
fresh from far-off philosophical battle-fields, bright from centuries of
contemplation, flashing out now, to-day, in Europe triumphantly, in
desperate encounters. The lecturer was on his feet, gleaming towards
their centre of the audience his recognition of the clean thrust.
“The correlation between physical and mental gives an empirical support
to materialism.” That _couldn’t_ be spirited away. The scientists
_swore_ there was no break; so convincingly; perhaps they would yet win
and prove it. “But it is necessary to distinguish between metaphysic and
psychology. Psychology, like physical science, is to be put to the score
of our knowledge of matter.”
“In which he doesn’t believe” scoffed Miriam, distractedly poised
between Mr. Shatov’s drama and the prospect opening within her mind.
“I find this a most arbitrary statement.”
“Yes, _rather_” murmured Miriam emphatically, and waited for a moment as
if travelling with him along his line of thought. But he was recovering,
had recovered, did not seem to be dwelling or moving in any relation to
what he had said, appeared to be disinterestedly listening to the next
question.
“Besides” she said, “the empirical method is a most important method,
and jolly” .....
“Poor chap; what a stupidity is this question.” Miriam smiled
solicitously, but she had travelled back enraptured across nine years to
the day, now only yesterday, of her first meeting with her newly
recovered word. Jevons. From the first the sienna brown volume had been
wonderful, the only one of the English books that had any connection
with life; and that day, Sunday afternoon prep in the dining-room, with
the laburnum and pink may outside the window changing as she read from a
tantalising reproach to a vivid encirclement of her being by all the
spring scenes she had lived through, coming and going, the sight and
scent and shimmering movement of them, as if she moved, bodiless and
expanded, about in their midst. Something about the singing, lifting
word appearing suddenly on the page, even before she had grasped its
meaning, intensified the relation to life of the little hard motionless
book, leaving it, when she had read on, centred round the one statement;
the rest remaining in shadow, interesting but in some strange way
ill-gotten.
The recovery of the forgotten word at the centre of “the philosophical
problems of the present day” cast a fresh glow of reality across her
schooldays. The efforts she had so blindly made, so indolently and
prodigally sacrificing her chances of success in the last examination,
to the few things that had made the world shine about her, had been in
some way right, with a shapeliness and fruitfulness of their own. Her
struggles with Jevons had been bread cast upon the waters ...... how
differently the word now fell into her mind, with “intuition” happily at
home there to keep it company. If materialism could be supported
empirically, there was something in it, something in matter that had not
yet been found out...... Meantime philosophy proved God. And Hegel had
not brushed away the landscape. There was God _and_ the landscape.
“Materialism isn’t dead _yet_” she heard herself say recklessly.
“More. Chemistry will yet carry us further than this kind of
metaphysical surmising.”
Taking part, even being with someone who took part in the proceedings,
altered them. Some hidden chain of evidence was broken. Things no longer
stood quietly in the air for acceptance or rejection. The memory of the
evening would be a memory of social life, isolated revelations of
personality.