REVOLVING LIGHTS
THE WORK OF
DOROTHY M. RICHARDSON
"In the ordinary novel, the novelist stands on the banks of the
river of life chronicling how and when people arise, and how it
is that things happen to them. But Miriam (the central figure of
Dorothy Richardson's work) pulls us with her into the yielding
water."--_Nation._
"The style grows upon one with familiarity; it is continually
illumined by passages of brilliant insight, and its
half-subconscious revelation of personality is wonderfully
attractive."--_Daily Telegraph._
POINTED ROOFS
BACKWATER
HONEYCOMB
THE TUNNEL
INTERIM
DEADLOCK
REVOLVING LIGHTS
DUCKWORTH & CO.
3 HENRIETTA STREET, LONDON, W.C.
REVOLVING LIGHTS
BY
DOROTHY M. RICHARDSON
LONDON: DUCKWORTH & CO.
3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN
First published in 1923.
All rights reserved.
_Printed in Great Britain by_ Butler & Tanner, _Frome and London_
To
F. E. W.
REVOLVING LIGHTS
CHAPTER I
The building of the large hall had been brought about by people who gave
no thought to the wonder of moving from one space to another and up and
down stairs. Yet this wonder was more to them than all the things on
which their thoughts were fixed. If they would take time to realise it.
No one takes time. No one knows it.... But I know it.... These seconds
of knowing, of being told, afresh, by things speaking silently, make up
for the pain of failing to find out what I ought to be doing....
Away behind, in the flatly echoing hall, was the busy planning world of
socialism, intent on the poor. Far away in to-morrow, stood the
established, unchanging world of Wimpole Street, linked helpfully to the
lives of the prosperous classes. Just ahead, at the end of the walk
home, the small isolated Tansley Street world, full of secretive people
drifting about on the edge of catastrophe, that would leave, when it
engulfed them, no ripple on the surface of the tide of London life. In
the space between these surrounding worlds was the everlasting solitude;
ringing as she moved to cross the landing, with voices demanding an
explanation of her presence in any one of them.
"Now _that_," she quoted, to counter the foremost attack, "is a man who
can be trusted to say what he thinks."
That cloaked her before the clamorous silence. She was an observant
intelligent woman; approved. _He_ would never imagine that the hurriedly
borrowed words meant, to her, nothing but a shadow of doubt cast across
the earnest little socialist. But they carried her across the landing.
And here, at the head of the stairs, was the show case of cold Unitarian
literature. Yet another world. Bright, when she had first become aware
of it, with freedom from the problem of Christ, offering, until she had
met its inhabitants face to face, a congenial home. Sending her away, at
a run, from cold humorous intellectuality. She paused in front of the
case, avoiding the sight of the well-known, chilly titles of the books,
to read what had gathered in her mind during the evening.
A group of people who had come out just behind her were going down the
stairs arguing in high-pitched, public platform voices from the surfaces
of their associated minds. Not saying what they thought. Not thinking.
Strong and controlled enough to keep within pattern of clever words.
Most of them had been born to it. Born on the stage of clever words,
which yet meant nothing to them. But to one or two people in the society
these words _did_ mean something....
Nothing came after they had passed but the refrain that had been the
mental accompaniment of her listening throughout the evening, stepping
forth now as part of a high-pitched argumentative to and fro. Her part,
if she could join in and shout them all down. Sounding irrelevant and
yet coming right down to earth, one small part of a picture puzzle set
in place ... a clue.
"Any number of barristers," she vociferated in her mind, going on down
the shallow stair, "take up JOURNALISM. Get into Parliament. On the
_strength_ of being both educated and _articulate_. Weapons, giving an
unfair advantage. The easy touch of prominence. Only a good nervous
system wanted. They are psychologists. Up to a point. Enough to convince
nice busy people, rushing through life without time to bethink
themselves. Enough to alarm and threaten and cajole. They can raise
storms; in newspapers. And brandish about by _name_, at their centres,
like windmills, kept going by the wind of their psychological
cheap-jackery. Yes, sir. Psychological cheap-jackery.... Purple-faced
John Bull paterfamilias. Paterfamiliarity. Avenging his state by hitting
out.... With an eye for a pretty face....
The little man had no _axe_ to grind. That was the only test. An
Englishman, and a barrister, and yet awake to foreign art. His opaque
English temperament not weakened by it; but worn a little transparent.
He would be silent in an instant before a superior testimony.
He did not count on anything. When Socialism came, he would be placed in
an administrative post, and would fill it quietly, working harder than
ever.
He brought the future nearer because he already moved within it; by
being aware of things most men did not consider; aware of
_relationships_: possibly believing in God, certainly in the soul.
Modern man, individually, is in many respects less capable than
primitive man. Evolution is related development. Progress towards social
efficiency. Benjamin Kidd.
"These large speculations are most-fatiguing."
"No. When you see truth in them they are refreshing. They are all there
is. All I live for now, is the arrival in my mind, of fresh
generalisations."
"That is good. But remember also that these things cost life."
"What does it matter what they cost? A shape of truth makes you at the
moment want to die, full of gratitude and happiness. It fills everything
with a music to which you _could_ die. The next piece of life comes as a
superfluity."
"Le superflu; chose nécessaire."
At the foot of the stairs stood the yellow street-light, framed in the
oblong of the doorway. She went out into its shelter. The large grey
legal buildings that stood by day a solid, dignified pile against the
sky, a whole remaining region of the pride of London, showed only their
lower façades, near, gentle frontages of mellow golden light and soft
rectangular shadow, just above the brightly gilded surface of the
deserted roadway. For a moment she stood listening to the reflection of
the fostering light and breathing in the dry warm freshness of the
London night air.
The illuminated future faded. The street lights of that coming time
might throw their rays more liberally, over more beautiful streets. But
something would be lost. In a world consciously arranged for the good of
everybody there would be something personal ... without foundation ...
like a nonconformist preacher's smile. The pavements of these streets
that had grown of themselves, flooded by the light of lamps rooted like
trees in the soil of London, were more surely pavements of gold than
those pavements of the future?
They offered themselves freely; the unfailing magic that would give its
life to the swing of her long walk home, letting her leave without
regret the earlier hidden magic of the evening, the thoughts that had
gathered in her mind whilst she listened, and that had now slipped away
unpondered, leaving uppermost the outlines of the lecture to compete
with the homeward walk. The surrounding golden glow through which she
could always escape into the recovery of certainty, warned her not to
return upon the lecture. But she could not let all she had heard
disappear unnoted, and postponed her onward rush, apologising for the
moments about to be spent in conning over the store of ideas. In an
instant the glow had gone, miscarried like her private impressions of
the evening. The objects about her grew clear; full of current
associations; and she wondered as her mind moved back across the linked
statements of the lecture, whether these were her proper concern, or yet
another step upon a long pathway of transgression. She was grasping at
incompatible things, sacrificing the bliss of her own uninfluenced life
to the temptation of gathering things that had been offered by another
mind. Things to which she had no right?
But all the things of the mind that had come her way had come unsought;
yet finding her prepared; so that they seemed not only her rightful
property, but also in some way, herself. The proof was that they had
passed her sisters by, finding no response; but herself they had drawn,
often reluctant, perpetually escaping and forgetting; out on to a path
that it sometimes seemed she must explore to the exclusion of everything
else in life, exhaustively, the long way round, the masculine way. It
was clearly not her fault that she had a masculine mind. If she must pay
the penalties, why should she not also reap the entertainments?
Still, it was _strange_, she reflected, with a consulting glance at the
returning brilliance, that without any effort of her own, so very many
different kinds of people and thoughts should have come, one after the
other, as if in an ordered sequence, into the little backwater of her
life. What for? To what end was her life working by some sort of inner
arrangement? To turn, into a beautiful distance outspread behind her as
she moved on? What then?
For instance, the sudden appearance of the revolutionaries just at this
moment, seemed so apt. She had always wanted to meet revolutionaries,
yet had never gone forth to seek them. Since her contact with
socialists, she had been more curious about them than ever. And here
they were, on their way to her, just as the meaning and some of the
limitations of socialism were growing distinct. Yet it was absurd to
suppose that their visit to England, in the midst of their exciting
career, should have been timed to meet her need. Nor would they convince
her. The light that shone about them was the anticipation of a momentary
intense interest that would leave her a step farther on the lonely
wandering that so distracted her from the day's work, and kept her
family and the old known life at such an immeasurable distance. It was
her ruling devil who had just handed her, punctually on the eve of their
arrival, material for conversation with revolutionaries.
But it also seemed to be the mysterious friend, her star, the queer
strange _luck_ that dogged her path always reviving happiness, bringing
a sudden joy when there was nothing to account for it, plunging her into
some new unexpected thing at the very moment of perfect hopelessness. It
was like a game ... something was having a game of hide and seek with
her. She winked, smiling, at the returned surrounding glow, and turned
back to run up and down the steps of the neglected argument.
It was clear in her mind. Freed from the fascinating distraction of the
little man's mannerisms, it spread fresh light, in all directions,
tempering the golden light of the street; showing, beyond the outer
darkness of the night, the white radiance of the distant future. Within
the radiance, troops of people marched ahead, with springing footsteps;
the sound of song in their ceaselessly talking voices; the forward march
of a unanimous, light-hearted humanity along a pathway of white morning
light.... The land of promise that she would never see; not through
being born too soon, but by being incapable of unanimity. All these
people had one mind. They approved of each other and were gay in unity.
The spectacle of their escape from the shadows lessened the pain of
being left behind. Perhaps even a moment's contemplation of the future
helped to bring it about? Every thought vibrates through the universe.
Then there was absolution in thought, even from the anger of
everlastingly talking people, contemptuous of silence and aloofness. And
there was unity with the future.
The surrounding light glowed with a richer intensity. Flooded through
her, thrilling her feet to swiftness.
If the revolutionaries could be with her now, they would find in her
something of the state towards which they were violently straining? They
would pause and hover for a moment, with half envious indulgence. But
sooner or later they would say things about robust English health; its
unconsciousness of its surroundings.
The _mystery_ of being English. Mocked at for stupidity and envied for
having something that concerned the mocking people of the two continents
and challenged them to discover its secret.
But by to-morrow night she would have nothing but the little set of
remembered facts, dulled by the fatigue of her day's work. These would
save her, for the one evening, from appearing as the unintelligent
Englishwoman of foreigner's experience. But they would also keep out the
possibility of expressing anything.
Even the bare outlines of socialism, presented suddenly to unprepared
English people, were unfailing as a contribution to social occasions.
They forced everyone to look at the things they had taken for granted in
a new light, and to remember, together with the startling picture, the
person who first drew it for them. But to appear before these Russians
talking English socialism was to be nothing more than a useful person in
uniform.
What _was_ the immediate truth that shone, independent of speculation,
all about her in the English light; the only thing worth telling to
enquiring foreigners?
It was there at once when she was alone, or watching other people as an
audience, or as an uncommitted guest, expressing in a great variety of
places different sets of opinions. It was there radiant, obliterating
her sense of existence, whenever she was in the midst of things kept
going by other people. It could be given her by a beggar, purposefully
crossing a street ... not 'pitiful,' as he was so carelessly called--but
something that shook her with gratitude to the roots of her being. But
the instant she was called upon there came the startled realisation of
being in the world, and the sense of nothingness, preceding and
accompanying every remark she might make.
One opinion self-consciously stated made the light go down. Immediate
substitution of the contrary, produced a chill followed by darkness....
_Men_ called out these contradictory statements, each one with his way
of having only one set of opinions.
How powerful these Russians were, in advance, making her count herself
up. If she saw much of them she would fail and fade into nothing under
the Russian test. If there were only one short interview she might
escape unknown, and knowing all the things about Russian revolutionaries
that Michael Shatov had left incomplete.
Their scornful revolutionary eyes watched her glance about amongst her
hoard of contradictory ideas. Statements about different ways of looking
at things were irrelevancies that perhaps with Russians might be
abandoned altogether. Yet to appear before them empty-handed, hidden in
her earlier uninfluenced personality, would be not to meet them at all.
Personal life to them was nothing, could be summed up in a few words,
the same for everybody. They lived for an idea.
She offered them a comprehensive glimpse of the many pools of thought in
which she had plunged, rising from each in turn, to recover the bank and
repudiate; unless a channel could be driven, that would make all their
waters meet. They laughed when she cried out at the hopelessness of
uniting them. "All these things are nothing."
But a revolutionary is a man who throws himself into space. In Russia
there is nowhere else to throw himself? That would do as an answer to
their criticisms of English socialism. She could say also that
conservatives are the best socialists; being liberal-_minded_. Most
socialists were narrow and illiberal, holding on to liberal ideas. The
aim of the Lycurgans, alone amongst the world's socialists, was to show
the English aristocracy and middle classes that they were, still,
socialists.
There _were_ things in England. But they struggled at cross purposes,
refusing to get into a shape that would draw one, _whole_, along with
it. But there were things in England with truth shining behind them.
English people did not shine. But something shone behind them. Russians
shone. But there was nothing behind them. There were things in England.
She offered them the contents of books. They were as real as the pools
of experience. Yet they, too, were irreconcilable.
A little blue-lit street; lamps with large round globes, shedding
moonlight; shadows, grey and black. She had somehow got into the
west-end--a little west-end street, giving out its character. She went
softly along the middle of the blue-lit glimmering roadway, narrow
between the narrow pavements skirting the high façades, flat and grey,
broken by shadowy pillared porticoes; permanent exits and entrances on
the stage of the London scene; solid lines and arches of pure grey
shaping the flow of the pageant, and emerging, when it ebbed away, to
stand in their own beauty, conjuring back the vivid tumult to flow in
silence, a continuous ghostly garland of moving shapes and colours,
haunting their self-sufficient calm.
Within the stillness she heard the jingling of hansoms, swinging in
morning sunlight along the wide thoroughfares of the west-end; saw the
wide leisurely shop-fronts displaying in a restrained profusion,
comfortably within the experienced eye half turned to glance from a
passing vehicle, all the belongings of west-end life; on the pavements,
the trooping succession of masked life-moulded forms, their unobservant
eyes, aware of the resources all about them, at gaze upon their
continuous adventure, yesterday still with them as they came out, in
high morning light, into the adventure of to-day. Campaigners, sure of
their weapons in the gaily decked mêlée, and sure every day of the
blissful solitude of the interim times.
For as long as she could remember she had known something of their
secret. During the years of her London life she had savoured between
whiles the quality of their world, divined its tests and passwords,
known what kept their eyes unseeing and their speech clipped to a
jargon.
Best of all was the illumination that had come with her penetration of
the mystery of their attitude towards direct _questions_. There was
something here that had offered her again and again a solution of the
problem of social life, a safeguard of individuality. Here it was once
more, a still small voice urging that every moment of association would
be transformed if she would only remember the practice the technique
revealed by her contemplation of this one quality. Always to be solid
and resistent; unmoved. Having no opinions and only one enthusiasm--to
be unmoved. Momentary experiments had proved that the things that were
about her in solitude could be there all the time. But forgetfulness
always came. Because most people brought their worlds with them, their
opinions, and the set of things they believed in; forcing in the end
direct questions and disagreements. And most people were ready to answer
questions, showing by their angry defence of their opinions that they
were aware, and afraid, of other ways of looking at things. But these
society people did not seem to be aware of anything but their one world.
Perhaps that was why their social method was not able to hold her for
long together.
"Is this the way to Chippenham?" But _everyone_ delights in telling the
way. It brings the teller out into adventure; with his best self and his
best moments all about him. The surroundings are suddenly new with life,
and beautiful like things seen in passing, on a journey. English people
delight because they are adventurous. They prolong the moment, beaming
and expanding, and go on their way refreshed. Foreigners, except perhaps
Germans, answer differently. Obsequiously; or with a studied politeness
that turns the occasion into an opportunity for the display of manners;
or indifferently, with a cynical suggestion that they know what you are
like, and that you will be the same when you reach your destination.
They are themselves, without any fulness or wonder. English people are
always waiting to be different, to be fully themselves. Strangers, to
them, are gods and angels.
But it is another kind of question that is meant, the question that is a
direct attack on the unseeing gaze; a speech to the man at the wheel.
That is where, without knowing it, these people are philosophers. What
Socrates saw, answered all his questions; and his counterings of the
young men's questions were invitations to them to look for themselves.
The single world these people see is, to them, so unquestionable that
there is no room for question. Nothing can be communicated except the
latest news; and scandal; information about people who have gone outside
the shape. But, to each other, even their statements are put in the form
of questions. "Fine day, what?" So that everyone may be not questioned,
but questioner. It is also a sort of apology for falling into speech at
all.
It was Michael Shatov's amused delight in her stories of their method
that had made her begin to cherish them as a possession. Gradually she
had learned that irritation with their apparent insolence was jealousy.
Within her early interested unenvious sallies of investigation amongst
the social élite of the Wimpole Street patients, or as a fellow guest
amongst the Orlys' society friends, there had been moments of longing to
sweep away the defences and discountenance the individual. But gradually
the conviction had dawned that with the genuine members of the clan this
could not be done. Their quality went right through, shedding its
central light, a brightness that could not be encircled, over the whole
of humanity. They disarmed attack, because in their singleness of nature
they were not aware of anything to defend. They had no contempts; not
being specially intellectual; and, crediting everyone with their own
condition, they reached to the sources of nobility in all with whom they
came in contact. It was refreshment and joy merely to be in the room
with them. But also it was an arduous exercise. They brought such a wide
picture and so long a history. They were England. The world-wide spread
of Christian England was in their minds; and to this they kindled, more
than to any personal thing.
The existence of these scattered few, explained those who were only
conventional approximations....
To-night, immersed in the vision of a future that threatened their
world, she found them one and all bright figures of romance. She sped as
her footsteps measured off the length of the little street, into the
recesses, the fair and the evil, of aristocratic English life, and
affectionately followed the small bright freely moving troupe as it
spread in the past and was at this moment spreading, abroad over the
world, the unchangeable English quality and its attendant conventions.
The books about these people are not satisfactory.... Those that show
them as a moral force, suggest that they are the fair flower of a
Christian civilisation. But a Christian civilisation would be abolishing
factories.... Lord Shaftesbury ... Arnold's barbarian idea made a
convincing picture, but it suggested in the end, behind his back, that
there was something lacking in the Greeks. Most of the modern books
seemed to ridicule the English conventions, and choose the worst types
of people for their characters.
But in _all_ the books about these people, even in novelettes, the chief
thing they all left out, was there. They even described it, sometimes so
gloriously that it became _more_ than the people; making humanity look
like ants, crowding and perishing as a vast scene. Generally the
surroundings were described separately, the background on which
presently the characters began to fuss. But they were never sufficiently
shown as they were to the people when there was no fussing; what the
floods of sunshine and beauty indoors and out meant to these people as
single individuals, whether they were aware of it or not. The 'fine'
characters in the books, acting on principle, having thoughts, and
sometimes, the less likeable of them, even ideas, were not shown as
being made strong partly by endless floods of sunshine and beauty. The
feeble characters were too much condemned for clutching, to keep, at any
price within the charmed circle....
The antics of imitators, all down the social scale, were wrongly
condemned.
But _here_, in this separate existence, _was_ a shape that could draw
her, whole, along with it ... and here suddenly, warmly about her in its
evening quiet, was the narrow winding lane of Bond Street.... Was this
bright shape, that drew her, the secret of her nature ... the clue she
had carried in her hand through the maze?
It would explain my love for kingly old Hanover, the stately ancient
house in Waldstrasse; the way the charm of the old-fashioned well-born
Pernes held me so long in the misery of North London; the relief of
getting away to Newlands, my determination to remain from that time
forth, at any cost, amidst beautiful surroundings...? Though life has
drawn me away these things have stayed with me. They were with me
through the awful months.... If _she_ had been able to escape into the
beauty of outside things, it would not have happened.
It was not the fear of being alone with the echoes of the tragedy that
made me ill in suburban lodgings, but the small ugliness and the empty
crude suburban air; the knowledge that if I stayed and forgot its
ugliness in happiness it would mould me unawares. My drifting to the
large old house in grey wide Bloomsbury was a movement of return.
Then I am attached forever to the spacious gentle surroundings in which
I was born? Always watching and listening and feeling for them to
emerge? My social happiness dependent upon the presence of some
suggestion of its remembered features, my secret social ambition its
perfected form in circumstances beyond my reach?...
No. There was something within her that could not tolerate either the
people or the thoughts existing within that exclusive world. In the
silences that flowed about its manifold unvarying expressions, she would
always find herself ranging off into lively consciousness of other ways
of living, whose smiling mystery defied its complacent patronage.... It
drew only her nature, the ease and beauty loving soul of her physical
being, and that only in critical contemplation. She would never desire
to bestir herself to achieve stateliness.
So that the faraway moment of being driven forth seemed to bear two
meanings. It was life's stupid error, a cruel blind destruction of her
helpless youth. At this moment if it were possible she would reverse it
and return. During all these years she had been standing motionless,
fixed tearfully in the attitude of return. The joy she had found in her
invisible life amongst the servants was the joy of remaining girt and
ready for the flight of return, her original nature stored up and hidden
behind the adopted manner of her bondage.
Or it was life's wisdom, the swift movement of her lucky star,
providence pouncing. And providence, having seized her indolent blissful
protesting form and flung it forth with a laugh, had continued to pamper
her with a sense of happiness that bubbled unexpectedly out in the midst
of her utmost attempts to achieve misery by a process of reason.
It is my strange bungling in misery that makes everyone seem far off. A
perpetual oblivion not only of my own circumstances, but, at the wrong
moments, of those of other people, makes me disappoint and shock them,
suddenly disappearing before their eyes in the midst of a sympathy that
they had eagerly seemed to find satisfying and rare.... A light
frivolous elastic temperament? A helpless going to and fro between two
temperaments. A solid charwomanly commonplace kindliness, spread like a
doormat at the disposal of everybody, and an intermittent perfect
dilettantism that would disgust even the devil?
That was _his_ temperament? The quality that had made him gravitate,
unaided, towards exclusive things, was also in her. But weaker, because
it was less narrow? He had thrown up everything for leisure to wander in
the fields of art and science and philosophy; shutting his eyes to the
fact of his diminishing resources. She, with no resources at all, had
dropped to easy irresponsible labour to avoid being shaped and branded,
to keep her untouched strength free for a wider contemplation than he
would have approved, a delight in everything in turn, a _plebeian_
dilettantism, aware and defensive of the exclusive things, but unable to
restrict herself to them, unconsciously from the beginning resisting the
drawing of lines and setting up of oppositions? More and more
consciously ranged on all sides simultaneously. More _catholic_. That
was the other side of the family. But if with his temperament and his
sceptical intuitive mind, she had also the nature of the other side of
the family what a hopeless problem.... If she belonged to both, she was
the sport of opposing forces that would never allow her to alight and
settle. The movement of her life would be like a pendulum. No wonder
people found her unaccountable. But being her own solitary companion
would not go on forever. It would bring in the end, somewhere about
middle age, the state that people called madness.... Perhaps the lunatic
asylums were full of people who had refused to join up? There were happy
people in them? "Wandering" in their minds. But remembering and knowing
happiness all the time? In dropping to nothingness they escaped forever
into that state of amazed happiness that goes on all the time underneath
the strange forced quotations of deeds and words.
Oxford Street opened ahead, right and left, a wide empty yellow-lit
corridor of large shuttered shop-fronts. It stared indifferently at her
outlined fate.
Even at night it seemed to echo with the harsh sounds of its oblivious
conglomerate traffic. Since the high light-spangled front of the
Princess's Theatre had changed, there was nothing to obliterate the
permanent sense of the two monstrous streams flowing all day, fierce and
shattering, east and west. Oxford Street, unless she were sailing
through it perched in sunlight on the top of an omnibus lumbering
steadily towards the graven stone of the City, always wrought
destruction, pitting its helpless harshness against her alternating
states of talkative concentration and silent happy expansion. Going west
it _was_ destruction; forever approaching the west-end, reaching its
gates and passing them by.
Stay here, suggested Bond Street. Walking here you can keep alive, out
in the world, until the end, an aged crone, still a citizen of my
kingdom, hobbling in the sun, along my sacred pavements. She turned
gladly, encompassing the gift of the whole length of the winding lane
with a plan of working round through Soho, to cross Oxford Street
painlessly where it blended with St. Giles's, and would let her through
northwards into the squares. The strange new thoughts were about her the
moment she turned back. They belonged to these old, central finely
etched streets where they had begun, a fresh proof of her love for them;
a new enrichment of their charm.
Whatever might be the truth about heredity, it was immensely disturbing
to be pressed upon by two families, to discover, in their so different
qualities, the explanation of herself. The sense of existing merely as a
link, without individuality, was not at all compensated by the lifting,
and distribution backwards, of responsibility. To be set in a mould,
powerless to alter its shape ... to discover, too late for association
and enquiry, the people she helplessly belonged to. Yet the very fact
that young people fled their relatives, was an argument on the side of
individuality. But not all fled their relatives. Perhaps only those of
St. Paul's evil generation, "lacking in natural affection."
She glanced narrowly, with a curiosity that embarrassment could no
longer hold back, at her father's side of the family, and while she
waited for them to fall upon her and wrathfully consume her, she met the
shock of a surprise that caught her breath. They did not _object_.
Boldly faced, in the light of her new interest, the vividly remembered
forms, paintings and photographs almost as vividly real, came forward
and grouped themselves about her as if mournfully glad at last of the
long-deferred opportunity. They offered, not themselves, but what they
saw and knew, holding themselves withdrawn, rigorously in place about
the centre of their preoccupation. Yet they _were_ personal. The
terrible gentleness with which they asked her why for so long she had
kept aloof from consultation with them, held a personal appeal that made
her glow. Deeply desiring it, she held herself away from the solicited
familiarity in a stillness of fascinated observation.
They were _Puritans_.... More wonderful than she had known in thinking
of them as nonconformists, a disgrace her father had escaped together
with the trade he had abandoned in youth. They were the Puritans she had
read of; but not Cromwellian, certainly not Roundheads. Though they were
tall and gaunt with strongly moulded features, their thoughtless,
generous English ancestry showed in them, moulded by their sternness to
a startling ... _beauty_. They had well-shaped hands, alive and speaking
amongst their rich silks and fine old laces. They wore with a dignified
austerity, but still they wore, and must therefore have thought about,
silk and lace and broadcloth and fine frilled linen, as well as the sin
in themselves and in the world. But principally they were aware of sin,
gazing with stern meditative eyes, through the pages of their gloomily
bound books, into the abyss yawning at their feet. She held herself in
her place, growing bolder, longing now for parley with their silent
resistance, disguising nothing, offering them pell-mell, the least
suitable of her thoughts. But the eyes they turned on her, still
dreadfully begging her to remember now, in the days of her youth, were
kind, lit by a special smiling indulgence.... Their strong stern lives,
full of the knowledge of experience, that had led down to her, had made
them _kind_. However far she might stray, she was still their favourite,
their different stubby round-faced darling, never to be condemned to the
abyss. Listening as they called to their part in her, she shared the
salvation they had wrought ... salvage ... of hard fine lives, reared
narrowly, in beauty, above the gulf.
Yet it was also from their incompleteness that they called to her; the
_darkness_ in them, visible in the air about them as they moved, that
she had always feared and run away from. The thought of the stern gaunt
chairs in which they sat and died of old age was horrible even at this
moment, and now that she no longer feared them, she knew, though she
felt a homesick longing for their stern righteousness, that it was
incomplete. The pressing darkness kept them firm, fighting the devil
every inch of the way....
But the devil was not dark, he was bright. Brightest and best of the
sons of the morning. What shocking profanity. Something has made me
drunk. I am always drunk in the west-end. Satan was proud. God revenged
himself. Revengeful, omnipotent, jealous, "the first of the autocrats."
...
There was a glory hidden in that old darkness, but they did not know it;
though they followed it. Accepting them, plunging into their darkness
she would never be able to keep from finding the bright devil and
wandering wrapt in gloom, but forgetful, perpetually in the bright
spaces within the darkness. And perhaps it was God. Impossible to say.
Religious people shunned the bright places believing them haunted by the
devil. Other religious people believed they were the gift of God and
would presently be everywhere, for everybody, the kingdom of God upon
Earth. But even if factories were abolished and the unpleasant kinds of
work shared out so that they pressed upon nobody, how could the Kingdom
of Heaven come upon earth as long as there were childbirth and cancer?
Light makes _shadows_. The devil is God's shadow? The Persians believed
that in the end the light would absorb the darkness. That was credible.
But it could never happen on earth. That was where the Puritans were
right with their vale of tears, and why they were more deeply attractive
than the other side of the family. Their roots in life were deeper and
harder and the light from the Heavenly City fell upon their foreheads
_because_ they struggled in the gloom. If only they knew what the gloom
was, the marvel of its being there. They were solemn and reproachful
because they could not get at their own gaiety....
The others were _too_ jolly, too much turned out towards life,
deliberately cheerful and roystering, not aware of the wonder and beauty
of gloom, yet more dreadfully haunted and afraid of it, showing its
uncomprehended presence by always deliberately driving it away. They
spread gloom about them, by their perpetual impatient cheerfulness,
afraid to listen and look. Their wild spirits were tragic, bright
tragedy, making their country life sound in the distance like one long
maddening unbroken noise, afraid to stop, rushing on, taking everything
for granted, and troubling about nothing. People who lived in the
country _were_ different. Fresh. All converted by their surroundings
into perpetual noise? The large spaces gave them large rich voices ...
rounded sturdy west country yeomen, blunt featured and jolly, with big
voices. Jesting with women. The women all dark and animated ... arch ...
minxes. Any amount of flirting. All the scandals of the family were on
that side. Girls, careering, with flying hair, round paddocks, on
unbroken bare-backed ponies. Huge families. Hunting. Great Christmas and
Harvest parties. Maypoles in the spring. They always saw the spring,
every year without fail. Perhaps that was their secret? Wherever they
were they saw nothing but dawn and spring, the light coming from the
darkness. They shouted against the darkness because they knew the light
was hidden in it. If you're waking, call me early, call me early ...
So ear-ly in, the mor-ning,
My Belo-ved
_My_ Beloved.
_Those_ women's voices pealed out into the wakening air of pure silver
dawns. The chill pure dawn and dark over the fields where L'Allegro
walked in her picture, the dewy dawn-lit grass under her white feet, her
hair blown softly back by the morning breeze flowing over her dawn-lit
face, shaping her garments to her happy limbs as she walked dancing,
towards the increasing light. Little pools and clumps of wet primroses
over the surface of the grey-green grass, flushed with rose, like her
glowing dancing face as she skimmed, her whole bright form pealing with
song towards the _increasing light_. Was that sort of life still going
on somewhere?
Yet Il Penseroso _knew_ and L'Allegro did not.
Long-featured Sarah was on the Puritan side, with a strain of the
artist, drawn from the other half, tormenting her. Eve, delicately and
unscrupulously adventurous, was the west country side altogether.
Within me ... the _third_ child, the longed-for son, the two natures,
equally matched, mingle and fight? It is their struggle that keeps me
adrift, so variously interested and strongly attracted, now here, now
there? Which will win?... Feeling so identified with both, she could not
imagine either of them set aside. Then her life _would_ be the battle
field of her two natures. Which of them had been thrilled through and
through, so that she had seemed to enter, lightly waving her hand to all
that had gone before, for good, into a firelit glow, the door closing
behind her, and leaving her launched, without her belongings, but richly
accompanied, on a journey to the heart of an unquenchable joy? It was
not socialism that had drawn her, though the moment before, she had
been, spontaneously a socialist, for the first time. The glow that had
come with his words was still there, drawing her, an unfulfilled
promise. She was still waiting to be, consciously, in league and
everlasting company with others, a socialist. Yet the earlier lonely
moment had been so far her only experience of the state; everything that
had followed had been a slow gradual undoing of it.
What was the secret of the immense relief, the sense of being and doing
in an unbounded immensity that had come with her dreamy sudden words?
One moment sitting on the hearth-rug living in the magic of the woven
text, feeling its message rise from the quiet firelit room, drive
through the sound of the winter sea and out and away over the world, to
everyone who had ears to hear; giving the power of hearing to those who
had not, until they equally possessed it. And then hearing her own
voice, like a whisper in the immensity, thrilled with the sense of a
presented truth, coming _given_, suddenly, from nowhere, the glad sense
of a shape whose denial would be death, and bringing as she dreamily
followed its prompting, a willingness to suffer in its service.
"You ought to cut out the pathos in that passage."
"_Which_ passage, Miriametta?" The effort of throwing off the many
distractions of the interested, mocking, critical voice.
"You weaken the whole argument by coming forward in those three words to
tell your readers what they ought to feel. An _enormous_ amount of time
is lost, while attention is turned from the spectacle to yourself."
"Yes. _Which_ passage?"
"In the moment that the reader turns away, everything goes, and they
come back distracted and different, having been racing all over their
own world, perhaps _indifferent_."
"Passage, passage----"
"The _real_ truth is that you don't feel that pathos to yourself, or not
in that way and in those words ... there are one or two earlier passages
that stopped me, the same sort of thing."
"Right. We'll have'm all out."
"Without them the book will convince everybody."
"No sane person can read it and keep out of socialism."
"No." But how fearful that sounds said by the author. As if he knew
something else as well.
"Y'know _you_ ought to be a Lycurgan, Miriam." And then had come the
sense of the door closing on all past loneliness, the rich sense of
being carried forward to some new accompanied moulding change; but
without any desire to go. Even with him, a moment of expression,
seeming, while it lasted, enough in itself; the whole of life, when it
happened not alone, but in an understanding presence; led to _results_,
the destructive demand for the pinning of it down to some small shape of
specialised action. Could he not see that the thing so surprising her
and coming to him also as a surprise, was enough in itself ... would
disappear if she rushed forward into activities, masquerading, with
empty hands, as one who had something to give. Yet _he_ was going
forward into activities.... She ought, having learned from him a clear
theory of the working of the whole of human life, to be willing to
follow, only too glad of the opportunity of any sort of share, even as
an onlooker in the making of the new world.
But if she responded, she would be supporting his wrong estimate of her,
his way of endowing everyone with his own gifts, seeing people only as
capability, waiting for opportunities for action. She wanted only
further opportunities with him, of forgetfulness, and the strange
following moments of expression.
"Everyone will be socialists soon; there's no need to join societies."
"There's mountains, my dear Miriam, _mountains_ of work ahead, that only
an organised society can compass. And you'd like the Lycurgans. We'll
make you a Lycurgan."
"What could I do?"
"You can talk. You might write. Edit. You've got a deadly critical eye.
Yes, you are a Lycurgan. That's settled."
"How _can_ you say I can talk?"
"You've got a _tenacity_. I'd back you against anyone in argument, when
you're roused."
"Argument is no good to anybody, world without end, amen."
"Don't be frivolous, Miriam. Real argument's a fine clean weapon."
"Cutting both ways; proving _anything_."
"Quarrelsome Miriam."
"And you know what you think about my writing. That I, or _anybody_
could _learn_ to write, passably."
"If you _have_ written anything, I've not seen it. You shall learn to
write, passably, in the interests of socialism."
What an awful fate. To sit in a dusty corner, loyally doing odd jobs,
considered by him "quite a useful intelligent creature" among other much
more clever, and to him, more attractive creatures, all working
submissively in the interests of a theory that he understood so well
that he must already be believing in something else. But she was already
a useful fiercely loyal creature, that was how he described her, at
Wimpole Street----But that was for the sake of freedom. Working with him
there would be no freedom at all. Only a series of loyal posings.
Standing upon the footstool to get out, back, away from the wrong
turning into the sense of essential expression. The return into the room
of the sound of the sea, empty and harsh, in a void.
"That's admirable. You could carry off any number of inches, Miriam. You
only want the helmet and the trident. You're Britannia, you know. The
British Constitution. You're infinitely more British than I am."
"Foreigners always tell me I am the only English person who understands
them."
"_Flattery._ You've no _idea_ how British you are. A mass of British
prejudice and intelligent obstinacy. I shall put you in a book."
"Then how can you want me to be a socialist. I am a Tory and an
anarchist by turns."
"You're certainly an anarchist. You're an individualist you know, that's
what's wrong with you."
"And what's wrong with _you_?"
"And now you shall experiment in being a socialist."
"Tories are the best socialists."
"You shall be a Tory socialist. My dear Miriam, there will be socialists
in the House of _Lords_."
The same group of days had contained the relief of the beginning of
generalisations; the end, on her part, of stories about people, told
with an eye upon his own way of observing and stating. These stories
had, during the earlier time, kept him so amused and, with his profane
comments and paraphrases, so perpetually entertaining, that a large part
of her private councils during the visits were spent in reviewing the
long procession of Tansley Street boarders, the patients at Wimpole
Street, and people ranged far away in her earlier lives, as material for
anecdote. But throughout the delight of his interest and his surprising
reiterated envy of the variety of her contacts, there had been a
haunting sense of misrepresentation, and even of treachery to him, in
contributing to his puzzling almost unvarying vision of people as
pitifully absurd, from the small store of experiences she had dropped
and forgotten, until he drew them forth and called them wealth.
His refusal to believe in a Russian's individuality because no one had
heard of him had set a term to these communications, leaving an abrupt
pain. It was so strange that he should fail to recognise the distinction
of the Russian _being_, the quality of the Russian attitude towards
life. He had followed with interest, gentle and patient at first before
her overwhelming conviction, allowing her to add stroke after stroke to
her picture, seeming for a moment to see what she saw and then----What
has he _done_? Either it was that his pre-arranged picture of European
life had no place for these so different, inactive Russians, or her
attempts to represent people in themselves, without borrowed methods of
portrayal, were useless because they fell between the caricature which
was so uncongenial to her and the methods of description current in
everyday life, which equally refused to serve by reason of their tacit
reference to ideas she could not accept.
But the beginnings of abstract discussion had brought a most joyful
relief, and a confirming intensification of the beauty of the interiors
and of the surrounding landscape, in which their talks were set.
Discussing people, save when he elaborated legend and profanity until
privately she called upon the hosts of heaven to share this brightest
terrestrial mirth, cast a spell of sadness all about her. With every
finished vignette there came a sense of ending. Sacrificed to its sharp
expressiveness were the real moments of these people's lives; and the
moments of the present, counting themselves off, ignored and
irrecoverable, offering, as their extension, time that was unendurably
narrow and confined, a narrow featureless darkness, its walls grinning
with the transfixed features of consciousness that had always been, and
must, if the pictures were accepted as true, forever be, a motionless
absurdity.
Launched into wide opposition, no longer trying to see with his eyes,
while still hoarding, as a contrasting amplification of her own visions,
much that he had given her, she found people still there; rallying round
her in might, ranging forward through time, each one standing clear of
everything that offered material for ironic commentary, in a radiant
individuality.
Wide generalisation was, she had immediately vowed, the way to
illuminating contemplation of humanity. Its exercise made the present
moment a life in itself, going on forever; the thought of the speakers
and the surroundings blended in an unforgettable whole; her past life
gleaming about her in a chain of moments; leaping glad acceptances or
ardent refusals, of large general views.
The joy of making statements not drawn from things heard or read but
plumbed directly from the unconscious accumulations of her own
experience was fermented by the surprise of his interested attention,
and the pride of getting him occasionally to accept an idea or to modify
a point of view. It beamed compensation for what she was losing in
sacrificing, whenever expression was urgent in her, his unmatchable
monologue to her own shapeless outpourings. But she laboured, now and
then successfully, to hold this emotion in subjection to the urgency of
the things she longed to express.
"_Women_, everybody knows nowadays, have made civilisation, the thing
civilisation is so proud of--social life. It's one of the things I
dislike in them. There you are, by the way, women were the first
socialists." Havelock Ellis; and Emerson quoting Firdusi's description
of his Persian Lilla ... but the impression, remaining more sharp and
deep than the event, became one's own by revealing an inborn sharing of
the view expressed. And waiting behind it now, was the proof, in life,
as she had seen it.
"I don't mean that idea of public opinion 'the great moulding and
civilising force steered by women' that even the most pessimistic men
admit, in horror."
"What _do_ you mean, Miriam?" Patient scepticism.
"Something quite different. It's amazing, the blindness in men, even in
you, about women. There must be a reason for it. Because it's universal.
It's no good looking, with no matter _what_ eyes, if you look in the
wrong place. All that men have done, since the beginning of the world,
is to find out and give names to and do, the things that were in women
from the beginning, and that the best of them have been doing all the
time. Not me."
"_You_, Miriam, are an incorrigible _loafer_. I've a sneaking sympathy
with _that_."
"Well, the thing is, that whereas a few men here and there are creators,
originators ... _artists_, women are this all the time."
"My dear Miriam, I don't know _what_ women are. I'm enormously
interested in sex; but I don't know _anything_ about it. Nobody does.
That's just where we are."
"Because you're a man and have no personality."
"Don't talk nonsense, Miriam."
"How can a man have personality?"
"All right. _Men_--have no personality."
"You see women simply as a sex. That's one of the proofs."
"Right. Women have no sex."
"You are doubtful about 'emancipating' women, because you think it will
upset their sex-life."
"I don't know _anything_, Miriam. No personality. No knowledge. But
there's Miss Waugh, with a thoroughly able career behind her; been
_everywhere_, done _everything_, my dear Miriam; come out of it all,
shouting you back into the nursery."
"I don't know her. Perhaps she's jealous, like a man, of her freedom.
But the point is, there's no emancipation to be done. Women are
emancipated."
"Prove it, Miriam."
"I can. Through their pre-eminence in an art. The art of making
atmospheres. It's as big an art as any other. Most women can exercise
it, for reasons, by fits and starts. The best women work at it the whole
of the time. Not one man in a million is aware of it. It's like air
within the air. It may be deadly. Cramping and awful, or simply
destructive, so that no life is possible within it. So is the bad art of
men. At its best it is absolutely life-giving. And not soft. Very hard
and stern and austere in its beauty. And like mountain air. And you
can't get behind it, or in any way divide it up. Just as with 'Art.' Men
live in it and from it all their lives without knowing. Even recluses."
"Don't drive it too far, Miriam."
"Well; I'm so staggered by it. All women, of course, know about it, and
_there's_ the explanation of why women clash. Over what men call
'trifles.' Because the thing I mean goes through everything. A woman's
way of 'being' can be discovered in the way she pours out tea. _Men_
can't get on together. If they're boxed up. Do you know there's hardly a
partnership in Wimpole Street that's not a permanent feud. Yes. Would
you believe it. And for scandal and gossip and jealousy there's
_nothing_ to beat the professors in a University Town. Several of them
don't speak. They communicate by letter.... But it's the women who are
not grouped who can see all this most clearly. By moving, amongst the
grouped women, from atmosphere to atmosphere. It's one of my principal
social entertainments. I feel the atmosphere created by the lady of the
house as soon as I get on to the door step."
"Perceptive Miriam.... You _have_ a flair, Miriam. I grant you that. I
believe in your flair."
"Well, it's _true_, what I'm trying to tell you. It's one of the answers
to the question about women and art. It's all there. It doesn't show,
like men's art. There's no drama or publicity. _There_; d'you see? It's
hard and exacting; needing 'the maximum of detachment and control.' And
people have to learn, or be taught, to see it."
"Y...es. Is it conscious?"
"Absolutely. And there you are again. Artists, well, and _literary_
people, say they have to get away from everything at intervals. They
associate with queer people, and some of them are dissipated. They can
only rest, stop being artists, by getting _away_. That is why so many
women get nervy and break down. The only way they can rest, is by being
nothing to nobody, leaving off for a while giving out any atmosphere."
"Stop breathing."
"Yes. But if you laugh at that, you must laugh at artists, _and_
literary people."
"I will. I _do_."
"Yes; but in general. You must see the identity of the two things for
good or for bad. If people reverence men's art and feel their sacrifices
are worth while, to _themselves_, as well as to other people, they must
not just _pity_ the art of women. It doesn't matter to women. But it's
so jolly bad for men, to go about feeling lonely and superior. Men, and
the women who imitate them, bleat about women 'finding their truest
fulfilment in _self-sacrifice_.' In speaking of male art it is called
_self-realisation_. That's men all over. They get an illuminating
theory--man must die, to live--and apply it only to themselves. If a
theory is true, you may be sure it applies in a most thorough-going way
to women. They don't stop dead at self-sacrifice. They reap ... freedom.
Self-realisation. Emancipation. Lots of women hold back. Just as men
do--from exacting careers. _I_ do. _I_ don't want to exercise the
feminine art."
"It's true you don't compete or exploit yourself, Miriam."
"Some women want to be men. And the contrary, men wanting to be women,
is almost unknown. This is supposed to be evidence of the superiority of
the masculine state. It isn't. Women only want to be men before they
begin their careers. It's a longing for exemptions. Young women envy
men, as young men, faced with the hard work of life, envy dogs."
"Harsh Miriam."
"It's true. At any rate it's deserved, after all men have said. And I
believe it's _true_."
"Pugilistic Miriam.... Your atmospheric idea is quite illuminating. I
think there's some truth in it; and I'd be with you altogether but for
one ... damning ... yes, I think absolutely damning, _fact_."
"Well?"
"The men women will marry. The men quite fine, intelligent women marry;
and _idolise_, my dear Miriam."
"Many artists have to use any material that comes to hand. The treatment
is the thing."
"Treatment that mistakes putty for marble, my dear Miriam----"
"And you don't see that you are proving my point. Women _see_ things
when they are not there. That's creativeness. What is meant by women
'making' men."
"They don't. They'll make idols of nothing at all; and go on burning
incense--all their lives."
"I don't believe women are _ever_ deceived about their husbands. But
they don't give up hope. And there's something in everybody. That's what
women see."
"Nonsense, Miriam. Girls, with quite good brains and abilities will
marry anything; accept its views and quote them."
"Yes; just as they will show off a child's tricks. Views and opinions
are masculine things. Women are indifferent to them, really. Any set
will do. I know the way a woman's opinions and interests change with her
different husbands, if she marries more than once, is supposed to prove
the vacuity of her mind. Half the satirists of women have made their
reputation on that idea. It isn't so. It is that women can hold all
opinions at once, or any, or none. It's because they see the relations
of things which don't change, more than things which are always
changing, and mostly the importance to men of the things men believe.
But behind it all their own lives are untouched."
"Behind.... What _is_ there behind, Miriam?"
"Life."
"What do they do with it?"
"Live."