For many days they spent their leisure wandering in the green spaces of
London, restored to Miriam with the frail dream-like wonder they had
held in her years of solitude, deepened to a perpetual morning
brightness. She recalled, in the hushed reconciliation of the present,
while they saw and thought in unison, breaking their long silences with
anecdotes, re-living together all they could remember of childhood,
their long exhausting, thought-transforming controversies. And as her
thoughts had been, so now, in these same green places were her memories
transformed.
She watched, wondering, while elderly relatives, hated and banished,
standing, forgotten like past nightmares, far away from her independent
London life, but still powerful in memory to strike horror into her
world, came forth anew, food as she breathlessly spoke their names and
described them, for endless speculation. With her efforts to make him
see and know them, they grew alive in her hands, significant and
attractive as the present, irrecoverable, gone, lonely and pitiful,
conquered by her own triumphant existence in a different world, free
from obstructions, accompanied, understood. Between the movements of
conversation from figure to figure, a thread of reflection wove itself
in continuous repetition. Perhaps to all these people, life had once
looked free and developing. Perhaps, if she went their way, she might
yet share their fate. Never. She was mistress of her fate; there was
endless time. The world was changed. They had never known freedom or the
endlessness of the passing moment. Time for them had been nothing but
the continuous pressure of fixed circumstances.
Distant parts of London, whither they wandered far through unseen
streets, became richly familiar, opening, when suddenly they would
realise that they were lost, on some scene, stamped as unforgettably as
the magic scenes of holiday excursions. They lingered in long
contemplation of all kinds of shop windows, his patient unmoved
good-humour while she realised his comparative lack of tastes and
preferences, and held forth at length on the difference between style
and quality, and the products of the markets, his serene effrontery in
taking refuge at last behind the quaintest little tales, satirical, but
dreadfully true and illuminating, disarmed her impatience and sent her
forward in laughter. He seemed to have an endless supply of these little
tales, and told them well, without emphasis, but each one a little
drama, perfectly shaped and staged. She collected and remembered and
pondered them, the light they shed on unfamiliar aspects of life,
playing comfortingly over the future. If Judges and Generals and
Emperors and all sorts of people fixed and labelled in social life were
really absurd, then social life, with him, might be not merely
unaffrighting, but also amusing. At the same time she was affronted by
his inclusion of English society in his satirical references. There
were, she was sure, hidden and active, in all ranks in England, a
greater proportion of people than in any country of his acquaintance,
who stood outside his criticism.
She avoided the house, returning only when the hour justified a swift
retreat from the hall to her room; escape from the dimly-lit privacy of
the deserted drawing-room. Not again could she suffer his nearness,
until the foreigner in him, dipped every day more deeply into the well
of English feeling, should be changed. When she was alone, she moved,
thoughtless, along a pathway that led backwards towards a single memory.
Far away in the distance, coming always nearer, was the summer morning
of her infancy, a permanent standing arrested, level with the brilliance
of flower-heads motionless in the sunlit air; no movement but the
hovering of bees. Beyond this memory towards which she passed every day
more surely, a marvellous scene unfolded. And always with the unfolding
of its wide prospects, there came a beautifying breath. The surprise of
her growing comeliness was tempered by a sudden curious indifference.
These new looks of hers were not her own. They brought a strange
publicity. She felt, turned upon her, the welcoming, approving eyes of
women she had contemptuously neglected, and upon her own face the
dawning reflection of their wise, so irritating smile. She recognised
them, half fearfully, for they alone were the company gathered about her
as she watched the opening marvel. She recognised them for lonely
wanderers upon the earth. They, these women, then were the only people
who _knew_. Their smile was the smile of these wide vistas, wrought and
shaped, held back by the pity they turned towards the blind life of men;
but it was _alone_ in its vision of the spaces opening beyond the world
of daily life.
The open scene, that seemed at once without her and within, beckoned and
claimed her, extending for ever, without horizons, bringing to her
contemplating eye a moving expansion of sight ahead and ahead, earth and
sky left behind, across flower-spread plains whose light was purer and
brighter than the light of day. Here was the path of advance. But
pursuing it she must be always alone; supported in the turmoil of life
that drove the haunting scene away, hidden beyond the hard visible
horizon, by the remembered signs and smiles of these far-off lonely
women.
* * * * *
Between them and their second week stood a promised visit to the Brooms;
offering itself each time she surveyed it, under a different guise. But
when, for their last evening together, he surprised her, so little did
he ever seem to plan or reflect, with stall tickets for the opera she
was overwhelmed by the swift regardless pressure of events. Opera, for
ever outside her means and forgotten, descending thus suddenly upon her
without space for preparation of mind, would seem to be wasted. Not in
such unseemly haste could she approach this crowning ornament of social
life. She was speechless, too, before the revelation of his private
ponderings. She knew he was indifferent, even to the theatre, and that
he could not afford this tremendous outlay. His recklessness was
selfless; a great planning for her utmost recreation. In her
satisfaction he was to be content. Touched to the heart she tried to
express her sense of all these things, much hampered by the dismayed
anticipation of failure, on the great evening, to produce any satisfying
response. She knew she would dislike opera; fat people, with huge
voices, screaming against an orchestra, in the pretence of expressing
emotions they had never felt. But he assured her that opera was very
beautiful, Faust perhaps the most beautiful and charming of all, and
drew her attention to the massed voices. To this idea she clung, in the
interval, for enlightenment.
But after spending all her available funds on an evening blouse and
borrowing a cloak from Jan she found herself at the large theatre
impressed only by the collected mass of the audience. The sense of being
small and alone, accentuated by the presence of little Mr. Shatov,
neatly in evening dress at her side, persisted, growing, until the
curtain rose. So long as they had wandered about London and sat together
in small restaurants, the world had seemed grouped about them, the vast
ignored spectator of a strange romance. But in this huge enclosure,
their small, unnoticed, unquestioned presences seemed challenged to
account for themselves. All these unmoved people, making the shut-in air
cold with their unconcern, even when they were hushed with the strange
appealing music of the overture, were moving with purpose and direction
because of their immense unconsciousness. Where were they going? What
was it all about? What, she asked herself, with a crowning pang of
desolation, as the curtain went relentlessly up, were he and she to be
or do in this world? What would they become, committed, identified, two
small desolate, helpless figures, with the crowding mass of unconscious
life?
“I find something of grandeur in the sober dignity of this apartment. It
is mediæval Germany at its best.”
“It is very dark.”
“Wait, wait. You shall see life and sunshine, all in the most beautiful
music.”
The sombre scene offered the consolation, suddenly insufficient, that
she had found in the past in sliding idly into novels, the restful sense
of vicarious life. She had heard of a wonderful philosophy in Faust, and
wondered at Mr. Shatov’s claim for its charm. But there was, she felt,
no space, on the stage, for philosophy. The scene would change, there
was “charm” and sunshine and music ahead. This scene itself was changing
as she watched. The old man talking to himself was less full of meaning
than the wonderful German interior, the pointed stonework and high,
stained windows, the carved chairs and rich old manuscripts. Even as he
talked, the light from the night-sky, pouring down outside on a
beautiful old German town, was coming in. And presently there would be
daylight scenes. The real meaning of it all was scenes, each with their
separate, rich, silent significance. The scenes were the story, the
translation of the people the actual picture of them as they were by
themselves behind all the pother...... She set herself, drifting in
solitude away from the complications of the present, to watch Germany.
The arrival of Mephistopheles was an annoying distraction suggesting
pantomine. His part in the drama was obscured by Mr. Shatov’s whispered
eulogies of Chaliapin, “the only true Mephistopheles in Europe.” It
certainly seemed right that the devil should have “a most profound bass
voice.” The chanting of angels in Paradise, she suggested, could only be
imagined in high clear soprano, whereat he maintained that women’s
voices unsupported by the voices of men were not worth imagining at all.
“Pippa passes. It is a matter of opinion.”
“It is a matter of fact. These voices are without depth of foundation.
What is this Pippa?”
“And yet you think that women can rise higher, and fall lower, than
men.”
She walked home amidst the procession of scenes, grouped and blending
all about her, free of their bondage to any thread of story, bathed in
music, beginning their life in her as memory, set up for ever amongst
her store of realities. It _had_ been a wonderful evening, opera _was_
wonderful. But the whole effect was threatened, as it stood so lovely
all about her in the night air, by his insistence upon a personal
interpretation, surprising her in the midst of the garden scene and
renewed now as they walked, by little attempts to accentuate the
relationship of their linked arms. Once more she held off the threatened
obliteration. But the scenes had retreated, far away beyond the darkness
and light of the visible street. With sudden compunction she felt that
it was she who had driven them away, driven away the wonders that were
after all his gift. If she had softened towards him, they would have
gone, just the same.... It was too soon to let them work as an
influence.
Absurd, too, to try to invent life which did not come of itself. He had
desisted and was away, fallen into his thoughtful forgetful singing,
brumming out shreds of melody that brought single scenes vividly
penetrating the darkness. She called him back with a busy repentance,
carelessly selecting from her thronging impressions a remark that
instantly seemed meaningless.
“Yes” he said heartily, “there is, absolutely, something echt,
kern-gesund about these old-German things.”
That was it. It had all meant, really, the same for him; and he knew
what it was that made the charm; admitting it, in spite of his strange
deep dislike of the Germans. Kern-Gesundheit was not a sufficient
explanation. But the certainty of his having been within the charm made
him real, a related part of the pageant of life, his personal engaging
small attribute her own undivided share. On the doorstep, side by side
with his renewed silent appeal, she turned and met, standing free, his
gentle tremulous salutation.
For a moment the dark silent house blazed into light before her. She
moved forward, as he opened the door, as into a brightness of light
where she should stand visible to them both, in a simplicity of golden
womanhood, no longer herself, but his Marguerite, yet so differently
fated, so differently identified with him in his new simplicity, going
forward together, his thoughts and visions as simple as her own in the
life now just begun, from which their past dropped away grey and cold,
the irrelevant experience of strangers.
But the hall was dark and the open dining-room door showed blank
darkness. She led the way in; she could not yet part from him and lose
the strange radiance surrounding herself. They ought to go forward now,
together, from this moment, shedding a radiance. To part was to break
and mar, forever, some essential irrecoverable glory. They sat side by
side on the sofa by the window. The radiance in which she sat crowned, a
figure visible to herself, recognisable, humble and proud and simple,
back in its Christian origin, a single weak small figure, transfixed
with light, dreadfully trusted with the searing, brightly gleaming dower
of Christian womanhood, was surrounded by a darkness unpenetrated by the
faint radiance the high street lamps must be sending through the thick
lace curtains. This she thought is what people mean by the golden dream;
but it is not a dream. No one who has been inside it can ever be the
same again or quite get out. The world it shows is the biggest world
there is. It is _outer_ space where God is and Christ waits. “I am very
happy, do you feel happy?” The small far-off man’s voice sounded out,
lost in the impenetrable darkness. Yet it was through him, through some
essential quality in him that she had reached this haven and starting
place, he who had brought this smiting descent of certainties which were
to carry her on her voyage into the unknown darkness, and since he could
not see her smile, she must speak.
“I think so,” she said gently. She must, she suddenly realised, never
tell him more than that. His happiness was, she now recognised, hearing
his voice, different to hers. To admit and acclaim her own would be the
betrayal of a secret trust. If she could dare to lay her hand upon him,
he might know. But they were too separate. And if he were to touch her
now, they would again be separated for longer than before, for always.
“Good-night,” she said, brushing his sleeve with the tips of her
fingers, “dear, funny little man.”
He followed her closely but she was soon away up the familiar stairs in
the darkness, in her small close room, and trying to chide herself for
her inadequate response, while within the stifling air the breath of
sunlit open spaces moved about her.
But in the morning when the way to King’s Cross Station was an avenue of
sunlight, under a blue sky triumphant with the pealing of church bells,
his sole conversation was an attempt to induce her to reproduce the
epithet. The small scrap of friendliness had made him happy! No one, it
seemed, had ever so addressed him. His delight was all her own. She was
overcome by the revelation of her power to bless without effort. The
afternoon’s visit now seemed a welcome interval in the too swift
succession of discoveries. In the cool noisy shelter of the station,
Sunday holiday-makers were all about them. He was still charmingly
preening himself, set off by the small busy crowd, his eye wandering
with its familiar look, a childlike contemplation of the English
spectacle. To Miriam’s unwilling glance it seemed for observation a
fruitless field; nothing exhibited there could challenge speculation.
On each face, so naïvely engrossed with immediate arranged circumstance,
character, opinion, social conditions, all that might be expected under
the small tests of small circumstances, was plainly written in
monotonous reiteration. Moving and going, they could go, with all their
busy eagerness, no further than themselves. At their destinations other
similar selves awaited them, to meet and send them back, unchanged; an
endless circling. Over their unchanging, unquestioned world, no mystery
brooded with black or golden wings. They would circle unsurprised until
for each one came the surprise of death. It was all they had. They were
dreadful to contemplate because they suggested only death, unpondered
death. Her eye rested for relief upon a barefooted newspaper boy running
freely about with his cry, darting head down towards a shouted
challenge.
“Before you go” Mr. Shatov was saying. She turned towards his suddenly
changed voice, saw his pale face, grave, and working with the
determination to difficult speech; saw him, while she stood listening to
the few tense phrases in painful admiration of his courage, horribly
transformed, by the images he evoked far away, immovable in the sunshine
of his earlier days. The very trembling of his voice had attested the
agonising power of his communication. Yet behind it all, with what a
calmness of his inner mind, had he told her, now, only now, when they
were set in the bright amber of so many days, that he had been lost to
her, forever, long ago in his independent past. The train was drawing
in. She turned away speechless.
“Miriam, Miriam” he pleaded in hurried shaken tones close at her side,
“remember, I _did not know_ that you would come.”
“Well, I must go,” she said briskly, the words sounding out to her like
ghostly hammer-blows upon empty space. Never again should her voice
sound. The movement of getting into the train brought a nerve-crisping
relief. She had taken the first step into the featureless darkness
where, alone, she was to wait, in a merciful silence, forever.
“I shall meet you this evening,” said his raised voice from the
platform. He stood with bowed head, his eyes gravely on her
unconsidering gaze, until the train moved out. She set her teeth against
the slow movement of the wheels, grinding it seemed, smoke-befouled,
deliberate, with awful circling relentlessness over her prostrate body,
clenched together for the pang, too numb to feel it if only it would
come, but left untouched.
The crushing of full realisation, piling up behind her numbness, must
pass over her. There was not much time. The train was carrying her
steadily onward, and towards conversation with the unconscious Brooms.
She tried to relax to its movement, to hold back from the entanglements
of thought and regard the day as an interval outside the hurrying
procession of her life. A way opened narrowly ahead, attainable by one
rending effort, into a silence, within which the grey light filtering
through the dingy windows on to the grime-greyed floor offered itself
with a promise of reassurance. It was known to her; by its unvexed
communion with her old self. One free breath of escape from the visions
she was holding clutched for inspection, and herself would be given back
to her. This awful journey would change to an eternity following
serenely on a forgotten masquerade. She would not lose her knowing that
all solitary journeys go on forever, waiting through intervals, to renew
themselves. But the effort, even if she could endure the pain of it,
would be treachery until she had known and seen without reservations the
whole meaning of the immovable fact. The agony within her must mean that
somewhere behind the mere statements, if she could but get through and
discover it, there must be a revelation that would set the world going
again; bring back the vanquished sunlight. Meanwhile life must pause,
humanity must stay hushed and waiting while she thought. A grey-shod
foot appeared on her small empty patch of floor. With the fever of pain
that flooded her she realised that she could go neither forward nor
back. Life pinned her motionless, in pain. Her eye ran up and found the
dreaming face of a girl; the soft fresh lineaments of childhood, shaped
to a partial awareness by some fixed daily toil, but still, on all she
saw, the gleam she did not know could disappear, did not recognise for
what it was, priceless and enough. She would never recognise it. She was
one of those women men wrap in lies, persisting unchanged through life,
revered and yet odious in the kindly stupidity of thoughts fixed
immovably on unreality, the gleam gone, she knew not why, and yet
avenged by her awful unconscious production of the kind of social life
to which men were tied, compelled to simulate life in her obstinate,
smiling fool’s .... hell. The rest of the people in the carriage were
aware, in the thick of conscious deceits; playing parts. The women,
strained and defaced, all masked watchfulness, cut off from themselves,
weaving romances in their efforts to get back, the men betraying their
delight in their hidden opportunities of escape by the animation behind
the voice and manners they assumed for the fixed calculable periods of
forced association; ready to distract attention from themselves and
their hidden treasures by public argument, if accident should bring it
about, over anything and everything.
At least she saw. But what was the _use_ of not being deceived? How in
the vast spread of humanity expose the sham? How escape, without
surrendering life itself, treacherous countenancing of the fiendish
spectacle? What good would death do? What did “Eine fur Viele” do?
Brought home the truth to one man, who probably after the first shock,
soon came to the conclusion that she had been mad.
She talked through lunch to the Brooms with such an intensity of
animation that when at last the confrontation was at an end and the
afternoon begun in the shelter of the dim little drawing-room, she found
Grace and Florrie grouped closely about her, wrapped and eager for more.
She turned, at bay, explaining in shaken unmeditated words that the
afternoon must be spent by her in thinking out a frightful problem, and
relapsed, averted swiftly from their sensitive faces, suddenly pale
about eyes that reflected her distress, towards the open door of the
little greenhouse leading miserably into the stricken garden. They
remained motionless in the chairs they had drawn close to the little
settee where she sat enthroned, clearly prepared so to sit in silent
sympathy while she gazed at her problem in the garden. She sat tense,
but with their eyes upon her she could not summon directly the items of
her theme. They appeared transformed in words, a statement of the case
that might be made to them, ‘anyone’s’ statement of the case, beginning
with “after all”; and leaving everything unstated. Applied to her own
experience they seemed to have no meaning at all. Summaries were no
good. Actual experience must be brought home to make anything worth
communicating. “When he first kissed me” started her mind “those women
were all about him. They have come between us forever.” She flushed
towards the garden. The mere presence in her mind of such vileness was
an outrage on the Broom atmosphere. She could not again face the girls.
For some time she sat, driving from point to point in the garden the
inexorable fact that she had reached a barrier she could not break down.
She could, if she were alone, face the possibility of dashing her life
out against it. If she were to turn back from it, she would be rent in
twain, and how then, base and deformed could she find spirit to face
anyone at all? At last, still with her eyes on the garden, she told
them, she must go and think in the open air. They cherished and indulged
her in their unaltered way and she escaped, exempted from coming back to
tea.
Suppose, said the innumerable voices of the road, as she wandered down
it relieved and eager in the first moments of freedom, he had not told
you? It was sincere and fine of him to tell. Not at all. He wanted to
have an easy mind. He has only explained what it was that came between
us at the first, and has been waiting ever since to be there again....
“Remember; I _did not know_ you would come.”
Why did men not know? That was the strange thing. Why did they make
their first impressions of women such as would sully everything that
came after? That was the extraordinary thing about the average man and
many men who were not average at all. Why?
The answer must be there if she could only get through to it. Some
immovable answer. The wrong one perhaps, but sufficient to frame an
irreversible judgment. There was an irreversible judgment at the heart
of it all that would remain, even if further fuller truer reasons were
reached later on. Anything that could take the life out of the sunlight
was wrong. Every twist and turn of the many little side roads along
which she made her way told her that. It was useless to try to run away
from it. It remained, the only point of return from the wilderness of
anger into which with every fresh attempt at thought, she was
immediately flung. The more angry she grew the further she seemed to
move from the possibility of finding and somehow expressing, in words
that had not sounded in her mind before, the clue to her misery.
She reached the park at tea-time. Its vistas were mercifully empty. She
breathed more freely within its greenery. Hidden somewhere here, was
relief for the increasing numbness of her brain and the drag of her
aching heart. The widening sky understood and would presently, when she
had reached the statement that lay now, just ahead, offer itself in the
old way, for companionship. Wandering along a little path that wound in
and out of a thicket of shrubs, she heard a subdued rumble of voices and
came in a moment upon two men, bent-headed in conversation side by side
on a secluded seat. They looked up at her and upon their shiny German
faces, and in the cold rheumy blue eyes beneath their unconscious
intelligent German foreheads, was the horrible leer of their talk.
Looking up from it, scanning her in the spirit of the images of life
they had evoked in their sequestrated confidential interchange, they
identified her with their vision. She turned back towards the wide empty
avenues. But there was no refuge in them. Their bleak emptiness
reflected the thoughtless lives of English men. Behind her the two
Germans were immovably there, hemming her in. They were the answer.
Sitting hidden there, in the English park, they were the whole
unconscious male mind of Europe surprised unmasked. Thought out and
systematised by them, openly discussed, without the cloudy reservations
of Englishmen, was the whole masculine sense of womanhood. One image;
perceived only with the body, separated and apart from everything else
in life. Men were _mind_ and _body_, separated mind and body, looking
out at women, below their unconscious men’s brows, variously moulded and
sanctified by thought, with one unvarying eye. There was no escape from
its horrible blindness, no other life in the world to live .... the leer
of a prostitute was .... reserved .... beautiful, suggesting a daily
life lived independently amongst the impersonal marvels of existence,
compared to the headlong desirous look of a man. The greed of men was
something much more awful than the greed of a prostitute. She used her
last strength to wrench herself away from the hopeless spectacle and
wandered impatient and thoughtless in a feverish void. Far away from
this barren north London, the chosen perfect stage for the last
completion of a misery as wide as the world, was her own dream world at
home in her room, her strange unfailing self, the lovely world of lovely
things seen in silence and tranquillity, the coming and going of the
light, the myriad indescribable things of which day and night, in
solitude, were full, at every moment; the marvellous forgetfulness of
sleep, followed by the smiling renewal of inexhaustible _sameness_ ....
thought flashed in, stabbing her weakness with the reminder that
solitude had failed and from its failure she had been saved by the
companionship of a man; of whom until to-day she had been proud in a
world lit by the glory and pride of achieved companionships. But it was
an illusion, fading and failing more swiftly than the real things of
solitude ..... there was no release save in madness; a suddenly
descending merciful madness, blotting everything out. She imagined
herself raging and raving through the park, through the world, attacking
the indifferent sky at last with some final outbreaking statement,
something, somewhere within her she _must_ say, or die. She gazed
defiance upwards at the cloudless blue. The distant trees flattened
themselves into dark clumps against the horizon. Swiftly she brought her
eyes back to the diminishing earth. Something must be said; not to the
sky, but in the world. She grew impatient for Mr. Shatov’s arrival. If
only she could convey to him all that was in her mind, going back again
and again endlessly to some central unanswerable assertion, the truth
would be out. Stated. At least one man brought to book, arrested and
illuminated. But what was it? That men are not worthy of women. He would
agree, and remain pleading. That men never have, never can, understand
the least thing about even the worst woman in the world? He would find
things to say. She plunged back groping for weapons of statement,
amongst the fixities of the world, there from the beginning, and
pressing at last with their mocking accomplishment, against her small
thread of existence. Long grappling in darkness against the inexorable
images, she fell back at last upon wordless repudiation, and again the
gulf of isolation opened before her. The struggle was not to be borne.
It was monstrous, unforgivable, that it should be demanded of her. Yet
it could not be given up. The smallest glance in the direction of even
the simulation of acceptance, brought a panic sense of treachery that
flung her back to cling once more to the vanishing securities of her own
untouched imagination.
When at last he appeared, the sight of the familiar distinctive little
figure plunging energetically along, beard first, through the north
London Sunday evening crowd drifting about the park gates, their sounds
quenched by the blare of the Salvation Army’s band marching townwards
along the battered road, for one strange moment while a moving light
came across the gravel pathway at her feet, decking its shabby fringe of
grass with the dewy freshness of some remembered world far away and
unknown to this trampling blind north London, she asked herself what all
the trouble was about. What after all had changed? Not herself, that was
clear. Walking in fevered darkness had not destroyed the light. But he
had joined her, pulling up before her with white ravaged face and hands
stretched silently towards her.
“For pity’s sake don’t touch me,” she cried involuntarily and walked on,
accompanied, examining her outcry. It was right. It had a secret
_knowledge_. They rode in silence on tram and bus. Below them on the
dimly-lit pavements people moved, shadows broken loose and scattered in
the grey of night. Gaslit, talking faces succeeded each other under the
street lamps; not one speaking its thoughts; no feeling expressed that
went even as deep as the screening chatter of words in the mind. But
presently all about her, as she sat poised for the length of the journey
between the dead stillness within her and the noise of the silence
without, a world most wonderful was dawning with strange irrelevance,
forcing her attention to lift itself from the abyss of her fatigue. Look
at us, the buildings seemed to say, sweeping by massed and various and
whole, spangled with light. We are here. We, are the accomplished
marvel. Buildings had always seemed marvellous; and in their moving,
changing aspects an endless fascination, except in North London, where
they huddled without distinction, defaced in feature and outline by a
featureless blind occupancy. But to-night, it was North London that was
revealing the marvel of the mere existence of a building. North
Londoners were not under the spell; but it was there. Their buildings
rising out of the earth where once there had been nothing, proclaimed it
as they swept dreaming by, making roadways that were like long thoughts,
meeting and crossing and going on and on, deep alleyways and little
courts where always was a pool of light or darkness, pouring down from
their secret communion with the sky a strange single reality upon the
clothed and trooping multitude below. And all the strange unnoticed
marvel of buildings and clothes, the even more marvellously strange
unnoticed clothing of speech, all existing alone and independent outside
the small existence of single lives and yet proclaiming them ..... an
exclamation of wonder rose to her lips, and fell back checked, by the
remembered occasion, to which for an instant she returned as a stranger
seeing the two figures side by side chained in suspended explanations
that would not set them free, and left her gazing again, surrendered,
addressing herself with a deepening ease of heart to the endless
friendly strength flowing from things unconsciously brought about. It
brought a balm that lulled her almost to sleep, so that when at last
their journey was at an end she found herself wordless and adrift in a
tiresome pain, that must be removed only because it blotted out marvels.
He began at once, standing before her, relating in simple unbroken
speech the story of his student days, without pleading or extenuation;
waiting at the end for her judgment.
“And that first photograph that I liked, was before; and the other,
after.”
“That is so.”
“In the first there is someone looking out through the eyes; in the
other that someone has moved away.”
“That is so. I agree.”
“Well, can’t you see? Never to come back. Never to come back.”
“Miriam. Remember I am no more that man. I was in suffering and in
ignorance. It would have been better otherwise. I agree with you. But
that is all past. I am no more that man.”
“Can’t you see that there is no past?”
“I confess I do not understand this.”
“It is crowding all round you. I felt it. Don’t you remember? Before I
knew. It comes between us all the time. I know now. It’s not an idea; or
prudishness. It’s more solid than the space of air between us. I can’t
get through it.”
“Remember I was suffering and _alone_.” Somewhere within the vibrating
tones was the careless shouting of his boyhood; that past was there too;
and the eager lifting voice of his earlier student days, still sometimes
alive in the reverie of his lifted singing brows. The voice had been
quelled. In his memory as he stood there before her was pain, young
lonely pain. Within the life thrown open without reservation to her
gaze, she saw, confronting her determination to make him suffer, the
image of unhealed suffering, still there, half stifled by his blind
obedience to worldly ignorant advice, but waiting for the moment to step
forward and lay its burden upon her own unwilling heart, leaving him
healed and free. Tears sprang to her eyes, blotting him out, and with
them she sprang forth into a pathless darkness, conscious far away
behind her, soon to be obliterated on the unknown shores opening ahead,
but there gladly in hand, of a debt, signed and to be honoured even
against her will, by life, surprised once more at this darkest moment,
smiling at her secretly, behind all she could gather of opposing reason
and clamourous protests of unworthiness. “Poor boy” she gasped,
gathering him as he sank to his knees, with swift enveloping hands
against her breast. The unknown woman sat alone, with eyes wide open
towards the empty air above his hidden face. This was man; leaning upon
her with his burden of loneliness, at home and comforted. This was the
truth behind the image of woman supported by man. The strong companion
was a child seeking shelter; the woman’s share an awful loneliness. It
was not fair.
She moved to raise and restore him, at least to the semblance of a
supporting presence. But with a sudden movement he bent and caught a
fold of her dress to his lips. She rose with a cry of protest, urging
him to his feet.
“I know now,” he said simply, “why men kneel to women.” While in her
heart she thanked heaven for preserving her to that hour, the dreadful
words invested her in yet another loneliness. She seemed to stand tall
and alone, isolated for a moment from her solid surroundings, within a
spiral of unconsuming radiance.
“No one ought to kneel to anyone,” she lied in pity, and moved out
restlessly into the room. We are real. As others have been real. There
is a sacred bond between us now, ratified by all human experience. But
oh the cost and the demand. It was as if she were carrying in her hands
something that could be kept safe only by a life-long silence.
Everything she did and said in future must hide the sacred trust. It
gave a freedom; but not of speech or thought. It left the careless
dreaming self behind. Only in ceaseless occupation could it hold its
way. Its only confidant would be God. Holding to it, everything in life,
even difficulties, would be transparent. But seen from the outside, by
the world, an awful mysteriously persistent commonplace. It was not fair
that men did not know the whole of this secret place and its compact.
Why was God in league only with women?