It was strange that it should be the house that had always caught her
eye, as she crossed the square; one of the spots that always made the
years of her London life show as a continuous communion with the rich
brightness of the west-end. The houses round about it were part of the
darker colour of London, creating even in sunlight the beloved familiar
London atmosphere of dun-coloured mist and grime. But this house was a
brilliant white, its windows fringed, during the season, with the gentle
deep velvet pink of ivy-leaf geraniums and having, across the lower half
of its façade, a fine close trellis of green painted wood, up which a
green creeper clambered, neat and sturdy, with small bright polished
leaves making a woodland blur across the diamond patterned mesh of white
and green. There were other creepers in the square, but they hung in
festoons, easily shabby, spoiled at their brightest by the thought of
their stringy bare tendrils hung with shrivelled leaves. These small
green leaves faded and dried and fell crisply, leaving a network of
clean twigs to gleam in the rain, and the trellis bright green against
the white house-front, suggesting summer all the year around.
She went eagerly towards this permanent summer created by wealth, warmed
by the imagined voice of a power that could transform all difficulties,
setting them in a beauty that lived by itself.
The little leaves, seen from the doorstep, shone like bright enamel in
the misty twilight; but their beautiful wild clean-cut shapes, so near,
suddenly seemed helpless, unable to escape, forced to drape the walls,
life-fevered within, to which their stems were pinned..... But there was
a coming in and out...... All people in houses had a coming in and out,
those moments of coming, anew out into endless space. And everywhere at
moments, in houses, was the sense of the life of the whole world flowing
in. Even Jewish houses were porous to the life of the world, and to have
a house, however strangely shaped one’s life, would be to have a vantage
point for breathing in the life of the world...... She stood in a lull,
reprieved, her endlessly revolving problem left behind, the future in
abeyance, perhaps to be shown her by the woman waiting within, set in
surroundings that now called to her jubilantly, proclaiming themselves
to be the only object of her visit. For a moment she found herself back
in her old sense of the marvel of existence, gazing at the miraculous
spectacle of people and things, existing; herself, however, perplexed
and resourceless, within it, everything sinking into insignificance
beside the fact of being alive, having lived on to another moment of
unexplainable glorious happiness. Light-heartedly she rang the bell. The
small movement of her lifted hand was supported, a permitted part of the
whole tremendous panorama; and in that whole she was _England_, a link
in the world-wide being of England and English life. The bell, grinding
out its summons within the house, brought her back within the limits of
the occasion, but she could not drive away the desire to go forward
without return, claiming welcome and acceptance, in a life permanently
set in beauty.
The door flew open revealing a tall resentfully handsome butler past
whom she went confidently announcing her appointment, into an immense
hall, its distances leading in every direction to doors, suggesting a
variety of interiors beyond her experience. She was left standing.
Someone who had come up the steps as the door opened, was being swiftly
conveyed, a short squat polished wealthy old English Jew with curly grey
hair and an eager busy plunging gait, across the hall to the centremost
door. It opened on a murmur of voices and the light from within fell
upon a table just outside, its surface crowded with gleaming top-hats.
Some kind of men’s meeting was in progress. The woman was not in
it...... Had she anticipated, before she married, what it would be,
however she might fortify herself with scorn, to breathe always the
atmosphere of the Jewish religious and social oblivion of women? Had she
had any experience of Jewesses, their sultry conscious femineity, their
dreadful acceptance of being admitted to synagogue on sufferance,
crowded away upstairs in a stuffy gallery, while the men downstairs,
bathed in light, draped in the symbolic shawl, thanked God aloud for
making them men and not women? Had she thought what it must be to have
always at her side a Jewish consciousness, unconscious of her actuality,
believing in its own positive existence, seeing her as human only in her
consecration to relationships?
The returning butler ushered her unannounced through a doorway near at
hand into a room that spread dimly about her in a twilight deepened by a
single core of rosy light at the centre of the expanse. Through a high
curtain-draped archway she caught a glimpse, as she came forward, of a
further vastness, shadowy in undisturbed twilight.
Mrs. Bergstein had risen to meet her, her head obscured in the gloom
above the lamplight, so that only her gown met Miriam’s first sally of
investigation; a refined middle-class gown of thin dull black whose
elbow sleeves and little vee neck were softened at the edge with a ruche
of tulle; the party dress of a middle-aged spinster schoolmistress.
Miriam braced herself in vain against its seductions; it called her so
powerfully to come forth and rejoice. She revelled off, licensed and
permitted, the free deputy of this chained presence, amongst the
enchantments of the great house; the joy of her escapade leaping bright
against the dark certainty that there was no help awaiting her. It was
no longer to be feared that an unscrupulous, successful, brightly
cajoling woman would persuade her that her problem did not exist; but
neither from this woman to whom the fact of life as a thing in itself
never had time to appear, could she hope for support in her own belief
in the unsoundness of compromise.
Mrs. Bergstein bowed, murmured a greeting and indicated a little settee
near the low chair into which she immediately subsided, her face still
in shadow, the shape of her coiffure so much in keeping with the dress
that Miriam could hardly refrain from departing then and there. She sat
down, a schoolgirl waiting for judgment against which she was armed in
advance, and yet helpless through her unenvious, scornful admiration.
“I was much interested by your letter” said Mrs. Bergstein.
The interview was at an end. There was no opening in the smooth close
surface represented by the voice, through which questions could be
driven home. She was smitten into silence where the sound of the voice
echoed and re-echoed, whilst she fumbled for a suitable phrase, clinging
to the memory of the statement, still somewhere, which she had come, so
desperately, to hear and carry away and set down, a ray of light in the
darkness of her revolving thoughts. A numb forgetfulness assailed her,
threatening the disaster of irrelevance of speech or behaviour coming
from the tides of expression she felt beating below it. She forced a
murmured response from her lips, and the tumult was stilled to an echo
that flung itself to and fro within, answering the echo of the woman’s
voice on the air. She had caught hold and contributed. It was now the
turn of the other to go on and confirm what she had revealed......
“Music is so _beautiful_--so _elevating_.” “That depends upon the
music.” Never said. Kept treacherously back for the sake of things that
might be lost in a clashing of opinions ... the things they never
thought of in exercising their benevolence, and demanding in return
acceptance of their views ... the light of a whole world condensed in
the bright old town, the sweet chiming sound of it, coming in at the
windows, restoring childhood, the expanses of leisure made by their
small hard circle, a world of thoughtless ideas, turning a short
week-end into a life, lived before, familiar, building out in the nerves
a glorious vitality.....
It was the same voice, the English lady’s voice, bringing all
Christendom about her, all the traditions within which, so lately, she
had felt herself committed steadfastly to tread. But there was something
left out of it, a warmth was missing, it had not in it the glow that was
in those other women’s voices, of kindliness towards the generous things
they had secretly, willingly renounced. It had, instead, something that
was like a cold clean blade thrusting into an intelligible future,
something inexorable, founded not upon fixed ideas, but upon ideas,
single and cold. This woman would not make concessions; she would always
stand, uncompromisingly, in face of everyone, men and women, for the
same things, clear cut, delicate and narrowly determining as her voice.
“You are considering the possibility of embracing the Jewish faith?”
“Well, _no_,” said Miriam startled into briskness by the too quickly
developing accumulation of speech. “I heard that you had done so; and
wondered, how it was possible, for an Englishwoman.”
“You are a Christian?”
“I don’t know. I was brought up in the Anglican Church.”
“Much depends upon the standpoint from which one approaches the very
definite and simple creed of Judaism. I myself was a Unitarian, and
therefore able to take the step without making a break with my earlier
convictions.”
“I see,” said Miriam coldly. Fate had deceived her, holding in reserve
the trick of this simple explanation. She gazed at the seated figure.
The glow of her surroundings was quenched by the chill of a perpetually
active _reason_.... Science, ethics, withering common-sense playing over
everything in life, making a harsh bareness everywhere, seeing nothing
alive but the cold processes of the human mind; having Tennyson read at
services because poetry was one of the superior things produced by
humanity...... She wondered whether this woman, so exactly prepared to
meet a Jewish reform movement, had been helplessly born into
Unitarianism, or had taken it up as she herself had nearly done.
“Much of course depends upon the synagogue through which one is
admitted.” Ah; she _had_ felt the impossibilities. She had compromised
and was excusing her compromise.
“Of course I have heard of the reform movement.” .. The silence quivered
with the assertion that the reformers were as much cut off from Judaism
as Unitarianism from Anglican Christianity. To enter a synagogue that
made special arrangements for the recognition of women was to admit that
women were dependent on recognition. The silence admitted the dilemma.
Mrs. Bergstein had passed through these thoughts, suffering? Though she
had found a way through, following her cold clear reason, she still
suffered?
“I think I should find it impossible to associate with Jewish _women_.”
“_That_ is a point you must consider very carefully indeed.” The room
leapt into glowing reality. They _were_ at one; Englishwomen with a
common incommunicable sense. Outcasts...... Far away, within the warm
magic circle of English life, sounded the careless easy slipshod voices
of Englishmen, she saw their averted talking forms, aware in every line,
and protective, of something that Englishwomen held in their hands.
“Don’t you find” she began breathlessly, but calm even tones drove
across her eagerness: “What is your fiancé’s attitude towards religion?”
“He is not exactly religious and not fully in sympathy with the reform
movement because he is a Zionist and thinks that the old ritual is the
only link between the persecuted Jews and those who are better placed;
that it would be treachery to break with it as long as any are
persecuted........ Nevertheless, he is willing to renounce his Judaism.”
The Queen, who is religious, puts love before religion, for woman. Her
Protestantism. He for God only, she for God in him and able to change
her creed when she marries. A Catholic _couldn’t_. And she would call
Catholics idolators. _She_ is an idolator; of men.
Mrs. Bergstein was amazed at his willingness. Envious...... _I am a Jew,
a ‘head’ man incapable of ‘love’...... It is your eyes. I_ _must see
them always...... I know now what is meant by love...... I am even
willing to renounce my Judaism...... Michael_ to think and say that. I
am crowned, for life; by a sacrifice I cannot accept. He must keep his
Judaism...... You _must_ marry me...... The discovery, flowing through
the grey noisy street, of the secret of the ‘mastery’ idea; that women
can only be sure that a man is sure when----
“There is then _no_ common religious feeling between you?”
She had moved. The light fell upon her. She was about _forty_. She had
come forth, so late, from the secret numbness of her successful
independent life, and had not found what she came to seek. She was still
alone in her circling day. At the period of evening dress she put on a
heavy gold bracelet, ugly, a heavy ugly shape. Her face was pinched and
drawn; before her lay the ordeal of belated motherhood. Vulgarly
violating her refined endurance had come this incident. Dignified
condemnation spoke from her averted eyes. She had said her say and was
desiring that there should be no further waste of time.
Miriam made no sound. In the stillness that followed the blow she faced
the horrible summary, stricken to her feet, her strength ebbing with her
thoughts into the gathering swirling darkness. She waited for a moment.
But Mrs. Bergstein made no sign. Imponderable, conscious only of the
weight of her body about her holding her to the ground beneath her feet,
she went away from the room and the house. In the lamplit darkness her
feet carried her joyously forward into the freshness of the tree-filled
air. The large square lying between her and the street where he was
waiting seemed an immensity. She recovered within it the strange
unfailing freedom of solitude in the sounding spaces of London and
hurried on to be by his side generally expressive of her rejoicing. The
world’s condemnation was out of sight behind her. But he would ask, and
whatever she said, the whole problem would be there afresh, insoluble.
He would never see that it had been confirmed, never admit anything
contemptible in their association...... It was because there was no
contempt in him that she was hurrying. But alone again with him, the
troubled darkness behind her would return with its maddening influence.
She was fleeing from it only towards its darkest centre.
_The Mayflower Press, Plymouth, England._ William Brendon & Son,
Ltd.
THREE
LOVING
LADIES
BY THE
HON. MRS. DOWDALL
Author of
“The Book of Martha,” “Susie,” etc.
The “three loving ladies” are Susie and her two grown-up
daughters, and the novel, written in Mrs. Dowdall’s own
vein of happy gossip, tells of their life in the various
social sets of a provincial city. It is amusing, but there is
always clever insight behind its smiles.
Crown 8vo. 9s. net.
HUNGER
BY
KNUT HAMSUN
Author of
“The Growth of the Soil,” “Pan,” etc.
In 1920, Knut Hamsun won the Nobel Prize for literature.
“Hunger” is unquestionably among his greatest novels: a
remarkably vivid portrayal of the effect of want of food on a
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FROM
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BY
MARGARET LOCKYER
This novel tells the story of a young man from Croätia, who
leaves Austria in 1912 to support his own race among the
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women working and loving, out of the range of guns, but under
the tensity of feeling that holds a war-swept country.
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THE
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BY
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Transcriber’s Notes
The original spelling and punctuation were mostly preserved. In
“Deadlock”, Dorothy Richardson continued to experiment with punctuation,
in particular with leaving out commas and an unconventional use of
suspension points and quotation marks. Therefore, punctuation was mostly
left unchanged.
A few obvious typographical errors were silently corrected. Further
careful corrections, some after consulting other editions, are listed
here (before/after):
[p. 44]:
... “There’s isn’t much prospect there” recited ...
... “There isn’t much prospect there” recited ...
[p. 44]:
... “That it so” assented Mrs. Bailey; “but I see ...
... “That is so” assented Mrs. Bailey; “but I see ...
[p. 79]:
... beloved corridor of her solitary pacings, out into ...
... beloved corridor of her solitary pacings, out into the ...
[p. 115]:
... them set, at varying angles, inquestioningly towards ...
... them set, at varying angles, unquestioningly towards ...
[p. 131]:
... of effort to define in her small perfection. The list ...
... of effort to define her small perfection. The list ...
[p. 165]:
... lingers and effects all the life.” ...
... lingers and affects all the life.” ...
[p. 185]:
... confronting the speaker, who has just spat into the ...
... confronting the speaker, who had just spat into the ...
[p. 221]:
... voices...... Gathering up her Marie Duclaux ...
... voices...... Gathering up her Lucie Duclaux ...
[p. 222]:
... Neither of them see that the fact of ...
... Neither of them sees that the fact of ...
[p. 233]:
... may remain there. Science is a large element in our ...
... many remain there. Science is a large element in our ...
[p. 256]:
... not occur to him that this serenity, in which was ...
... not occur to him that this serenity, in which were ...
[p. 274]:
... The small far-off man’s voice sounded out, lost the ...
... The small far-off man’s voice sounded out, lost in the ...
[p. 283]:
... a misery as wide at the world, was her own dream ...
... a misery as wide as the world, was her own dream ...
[p. 287]:
... “Miriam. Remember I am no more than man. ...
... “Miriam. Remember I am no more that man. ...