With a parting glance at Mr. Shatov’s talked-out indolent vacuity, she
plunged, still waiting in the attitude of conversation, into a
breathless silence. She would make no more talk. There should be silence
between them. If he broke it, well and good; in future she would take
measures to curtail the hours of conversation leading, now that she was
at home in possession of the Russian life and point of view, only to one
or other of his set of quoted opinions, beyond which he refused to move.
If not, the quality of their silence would reveal to her what lay behind
their unrelaxed capacity for association. The silence grew, making more
and more space about her, and still he did not speak. It was
dismantling; unendurable. With every moment they both grew smaller and
smaller, moving quickly towards the quenching of all their interchange.
But there was no doubt now. The question was there between them, for
equal contemplation. His easy indolence had fled; his usual pallor
heightened, and he sat regarding her with an unhesitating personal gaze.
Her determination closed about him, blocking his way, filling the room.
He _must_ emerge, admit. He must at least _see_, as she saw, if it were
only the extent of their dependence on each other. He knew his need.
Perhaps she fulfilled it less than she thought? Perhaps it was hers
alone ...... His multiplied resources made hers humiliatingly greater.
The shrine of her current consciousness stood before her; the roots of
her only visible future planted for ever within it. Losing it, she would
be left with her burden of being once more scattered and unhoused.
He rose, bringing her to her feet, and stood before her ready to go or
stay as she should choose, heaping up before her with an air of gently
ironic challenge, the burden of responsibility; silently offering her
one of his borrowed summaries, some irrelevant and philosophic worldly
wisdom. But it was what he felt. There was something he feared. Alone,
he would not have initiated this scene. She faltered, driven back and
disarmed by the shock of an overwhelming pity ...... unexpected terrible
challenge from within, known to no one, to be accepted or flouted on her
sole eternal responsibility.... In a torture of acceptance she pressed
through it and returned remorseless to her place, flooded as she moved
by a sudden knowing of wealth within herself now being strangely
quarried.
The long moment was ending; into its void she saw the seemings of her
grown life pass and disappear. His solid motionless form, near and equal
in the twilight, grew faint, towered above her, immense and invisible in
a swift gathering swirling darkness bringing him nearer than sight or
touch. The edges of things along the margin of her sight stood for an
instant sharply clear and disappeared leaving her faced only with the
swirling darkness shot now with darting flame. She ceased to care what
thoughts might be occupying him, and exulted in the marvel. Here already
rewarding her insistence, was payment in royal coin. She was at last, in
person, on a known highway, as others, knowing truth alive. She stared
expostulation as she recognised the celebrated nature of her experience,
hearing her own familiar voice as on a journey, in amazed expostulation
at the absence everywhere of simple expression of the quality of the
state ..... a voyage, swift and transforming, a sense of passing in the
midst of this marvel of flame-lit darkness, out of the world in glad
solitary confidence with wildly, calmly beating morning heart.
The encircling darkness grew still, spread wide about her; the moving
flames drew together to a single glowing core. The sense of his presence
returned in might. The rosy-hearted core of flame was within him, within
the invisible substance of his breast. Tenderly transforming his
intangible expansion to the familiar image of the man who knew her
thoughts she moved to find him and marvel with him.
His voice budded gently, but with the same quality that had flung her
back solid and alone into the cold gloom.
“We must consider” ... what did he think had happened? He had kissed a
foreign woman. Who did he think was hearing him? .... “what you would do
under certain circumstances.” The last words came trembling, and he sat
down clearly visible in the restored blue twilight; waiting with willing
permanence for her words.
“I should do nothing at all, under any circumstances.”
“Do not forget that I am Jew.”
Looking at him with the eyes of her friends Miriam saw the Russian,
standing free, beyond Europe, from the stigma of “foreigner.” Many
people would think, as she had in the beginning, that he was an
intellectual Frenchman, different to the usual “Frenchman”; a big-minded
cosmopolitan at any rate; a proud possession. The mysterious fact of
Jewishness could remain in the background ...... the hidden flaw ... as
there was always a hidden flaw in all her possessions. To her, and to
her adventure, its first step now so far away, an accepted misery
powerless to arrest the swift rush of the transforming moments, it need
make no difference.
“Perhaps it shall be better I should go away.”
Where? Into the world of people, who would seem to him not different to
herself, see his marvellous surrendered charm, catch him, without
knowing who or what he was. Who else could know “Mr. Shatov”?
“Do you want to go away?”
“I do not. But it must be with you to decide.”
“I don’t see why you should go _away_.”
“Then I shall stay. And we shall see.”
The summer lay ahead, unaltered; the threat of change gone from their
intercourse. To-morrow they would take up life again with a stability;
years at their disposal. The need for the moment was to have him out of
sight, kill the past hour and return to the idea of him, already keeping
her standing, with relaxed power of attention to his little actual
pitiful obstructive form, in an independent glow, an easy wealth of
assurance towards life whose thronging images, mysteries of cities and
crowds, single fixed groups of known places and inexorable people were
alight and welcoming with the sense of him. She bade him a gentle
good-night and reached her room, unpursued by thought, getting to bed in
a trance of suspension, her own life left behind, façades of life set
all about her, claiming in vain for troubled attention, and sank at once
into a deep sleep.
Putting on her outdoor things next morning, left in the drawing-room
while she snatched her breakfast, she was immensely embarrassed to find
him standing silently near. The woman facing her in the mirror as she
put on her hat was the lonely Miriam Henderson, unendurably asked to
behave in the special way. For he was standing eloquently silent and the
hands arranging her hat trembled reassuringly. But what was she to do?
How turn and face him and get back through the room and away to examine
alone the surprises of being in love? Her image was disconcerting, her
clothes and the act of rushing off to tiresomely engrossing work
inappropriate. It was paralysing to be _seen_ by him struggling with a
tie. The vivid colour that rushed to her cheeks turned her from the
betraying mirror to the worse betrayal of his gaze. But it was enough
for the moment, which she faced out, downcast, yet joyful in giving what
belonged to his grave eyes.
“We cannot be as boy and girl” he said gently, “but we may be very
happy.”
Overwhelmed with the sense of inadequate youth Miriam stared at his
thought. A fragment of conversation flashed into her mind. Jewish girls
married at eighteen, or never. At twenty-one they were old maids......
He was waiting for some sign. Her limbs were powerless. With an immense
effort she stretched forth an enormous arm and with a hand frightful in
its size and clumsiness, tapped him on the shoulder. It was as if she
had knocked him down, the blow she had given resounding through the
world. He bent to catch at her retreating hand with the attitude of
carrying it to his lips, but she was away down the room, her breath
caught by a little gurgle of unknown laughter.
He was at the end of the street in the evening, standing bright in the
golden light with a rose in his hand. For a swift moment, coming down
the shaded street towards the open light she denied him, and the rose.
He had bought a rose from some flower-woman’s basket, an appropriate act
suggested by his thoughts. But his silent, most surrendered, most
child-like gesture of offering, his man’s eyes grave upon the rose for
her, beneath uplifted childlike plaintive brows, went to her heart, and
with the passing of the flower into her hand, the gold of the sunlight,
the magic shifting gleam that had lain always day and night, yearlong in
tranquil moments upon every visible and imagined thing, came at last
into her very hold. It _had_ been love then, all along. Love _was_ the
secret of things.
They wandered silently, apart, along the golden-gleaming street. She
listened, amidst the far-off sounds about them, to the hush of the great
space in which they walked, where voices, breaking silently in from the
talk of the world, spoke for her, bringing out, to grow and expand in
the sunlight, the thoughts that lay in her heart. They had passed the
park, forgetting it, and were enclosed in the dust-strewn narrowness of
the Euston Road. But the dust grains were golden, and her downcast eyes
saw everywhere, if she should raise them, the gleam of roses flowering
on the air, and when, their way coming too soon towards its familiar
end, they turned, with slow feet, down a little alley, dark with voices,
the dingy house-fronts gleamed golden about her, the narrow strip of sky
opened to an immensity of smiling spacious blue, and she still saw, just
ahead the gleam of flowers and heard on a breath purer than the air of
the open country, the bright sound of distant water.