you all rivals, is to find fathers. Your material is children."
"Then look here, if you think _that_, there's a perfect instance. If
women's material is people, their famous 'curiosity' is the curiosity of
the artist. Men call it 'incurable' in women. Men's curiosity, about
things, science and so forth, is called divine. There you are. My
_word_."
"_I_ don't, Miriam."
"Shaw knows how wildly interested women are in psychology. That's
funny.... But about children. If only you could realise how incidental
all that is."
"Incidental to what?"
"To the _life_ of the individual."
"Try it, Miriam. Marry your Jew. You know Jew and English makes a good
mix."
"You see I never knew he was a Jew. It did not come up until a possible
future came in view. I _couldn't_ have Jewish children."
"Incidents. Mere incidents."
"No; the wrong material. I, being myself, couldn't do anything with it;
couldn't be anything in relationship to it."
"You'd _be_, through seeing its possibilities and making an atmosphere."
"I've told you I'm _not_ one of those stupendous women."
"What _are_ you?"
"Well, now here's something you will like. If I were to marry a Jew, I
should feel that all my male relatives would have the right to _beat_
me."
"That's strange.... And, I think, great nonsense, Miriam."
"And I'm not anti-semite. I think Jews are better Christians than we
are. We have things to learn from them. But not by marrying them, until
they've learnt things from us. Women, particularly, can't marry Jews.
Men can marry Jewesses, if they like."
"Marriage is a more important affair for women than for men. Just so."
"I didn't say so."
"You _did_, Miriam, and it's quite true."
"It appears to be so because, as I've been trying to show you, men don't
know where they are."
"Your man'll know, Miriam. You ought to marry and have children. You'd
have good children. Good shapes and good brains."
"The mere sight of a child, moving unconsciously, its little shoulders
and busy intentions, makes me catch my breath."
"Marry your Jew, Miriam. Well--perhaps no; don't marry your Jew."
"The other day we were walking somewhere. I was dead-tired. He knew it
and kept on suggesting a hansom. Suddenly there was a woman, lugging a
heavy perambulator up some steps. He stood still, shouting to _me_ to
help her."
"What did you do?"
"I blazed his own words back at him. I daresay I stamped my foot.
Meanwhile the woman, who was very burly, had got the perambulator up. We
walked on and presently he said in a quiet intensely interested voice
'_Why_ did you not help this woman?'"
"What did you say?"
"I began to talk about something else."
"Diplomatic Miriam."
"Not at all. It's _useless_ to talk to _instincts_. I know; because I
have tried. Poor little man. I am afraid, now that I am not going to
marry him, of hurting and tiring him. I talked one night. We had been
agreeing about things, and I went on and on, it was in the drawing-room
in the dark, after a theatre, talking almost to myself, very interested,
forgetting that he was there. Presently a voice said, trembling with
fatigue, 'Believe me, Miriam, I am profoundly interested. Will you
perhaps put all this down for me on paper?' Yes. Wasn't it funny and
_appalling_. It was three o'clock. Since then I have been afraid.
Besides, he will marry a Jewess. If I were not sure of that I could not
contemplate his loneliness. It's heartbreaking. When I go to see friends
in the evening, he waits outside."
"I _say_. Poor _chap_. That's quite touching. You'll marry him yet,
Miriam."
"There are ways in which I like him and am in touch with him as I never
could be with an Englishman. Things he understands. And his absolute
sweetness. Absence of malice and enmity. It's so strange too, with all
his ideas about women, the things he will do. Little things like
cleaning my shoes. But look here; an important thing. Having children is
just shelving the problem, leaving it for the next generation to solve."
That stood out as the end of the conversation; bringing a sudden bright
light. The idea that there was something essential, for everybody, that
could not be shelved. Something had interrupted. It could never be
repeated. But surely he must have agreed, if there had been time to
bring it home to him. Then it might have been possible to get him to
admit uniqueness ... individuality. He would. But would say it was
negligible. Then the big world he thinks of, since it consists of
individuals, is also negligible....
_Something_ had been at work in the conversation, making it all so easy
to recover. Vanity? The relief of tackling the big man? Not altogether.
Because there had been moments of thinking of death. Glad death if the
truth could _once_ be stated. Disinterested rejoicing in the fact that a
man who talked to so many people was hearing _something_ about the world
of women. And if anyone had been there to express it better, the relief
would have been there, just the same, without jealousy. But what an
unconscious compliment to men, to feel that it mattered whether or no
they understood anything about the world of women....
The remaining days of the visit had glowed with the sense of the
beginning of a new relationship with the Wilsons. The enchantment that
surrounded her each time she went to see them and always as the last
hours went by, grew oppressive with the reminder of its impermanence,
shone, at last, wide over the future. The end of a visit would never
again bring the certainty of being finally committed to an overwhelming
combination of poverties, cut off, by an all-round ineligibility, from
the sun-bathed seaward garden, the joyful brilliant seaside light
pouring through the various bright interiors of the perfect little
house; the inexpressible _charm_, always renewed, and remaining, however
deeply she felt at variance with the Wilson reading of life, the topmost
radiance of her social year; ignored and forgotten nearly all the time,
but shining out whenever she chanced to look round at the resources of
her outside life, a bright enduring pinnacle, whose removal would level
the landscape to a rolling plain, its modest hillocks, easy to climb,
robbed of their light, the bright reflection that came, she half-angrily
admitted, from this central height.
But there had been a difference in the return to London after that
visit, that had filled her with misgiving. Usually upon the afterpain of
the wrench of departure, the touch of her own returning life had come
like a balm. That time, she had seemed, as the train steamed off, to be
going for the first time, not away from, but towards all she had left
behind. There had been a strange exciting sense of travelling, as
everyone seemed to travel, preoccupied, missing the adventure of the
journey, merely suffering it as an unavoidable time-consuming movement
from one place to another. She, like all these others, had a place and a
meaning in the outside world. She could have talked, if opportunity had
offered, effortlessly, from the surface of her mind, borrowing emphasis
and an appearance of availability and interest, from a secure unshared
possession. She had suddenly known that it was from this basis of
preoccupation with secure unshared possessions that the easy shapely
conversations of the world were made. But also that those who made them
were committed, by their preoccupations, to a surrounding deadness.
Liveliness of mind checked the expressiveness of surroundings. The
gritty interior of the carriage had remained intolerable throughout the
journey. The passing landscape had never come to life.
But the menace of a future invested in unpredictable activities in a
cause that seemed, now that she understood it, to have been won
invisibly since the beginning of the world, was lost almost at once in
the currents of her London life. Things had happened that had sharply
restored her normal feeling of irreconcilableness; of being altogether
differently fated, and to return, if ever they should wish it, only at
the bidding of the inexpressible charm. There had been things moving all
about her with an utterly reassuring independent reality. Mr. Leyton's
engagement ... bringing to light as she lived it through chapter by
chapter, sitting at work in the busy highway of the Wimpole Street
house, a world she had forgotten, and that rose now before her in serene
difficult perfection; a full denial of Mr. Wilson's belief in the death
of family life. In the midst of her effort to launch herself into a
definite point of view, it had made her swerve away again towards the
beliefs of the old world. Meeting them afresh after years of oblivion,
she had found them unassailably new. The new lives inheriting them
brought in the fresh tones, the thoughts and movement of modern life,
and left the old symphony recreated and unchanged.
The Tansley Street world had been full and bright all that summer with
the return of whole parties of Canadians as old friends. With their
untiring sociability, their easy inclusion of the abruptly appearing
unintroduced foreigners and provincials, they had made the world look
like one great family party.
They had influenced even Michael ... steeping him in sunlit gaiety. By
breaking up the strain of unrelieved association they had made him seem
charming again. Their immense respect for him turned him, in their
presence, once more into a proud uncriticised possession.
Rambles round the squares with him, snatched late at night, had been
easy to fill with hilarious discussions of the many incidents; serious
exhausting talk held in check by the near presence of unquestioning
people, and the promise of the lively morrow. Yet every evening, when
they had her set down and surrounded at the piano, there came the sense
of division. They cared only for music that interpreted their point of
view.
Captain Gradoff ... large flat lonely face, pock-marked, eyes looking at
nothing, with an expression of fear. Improper, naked old grizzly head,
suggesting other displayed helpless heads, above his stout neat sociable
Russian skipper's jacket ... praying in his room at the top of his
voice, with howls and groans. Suddenly teaching us all to make a long
loud syren-shriek with half a Spanish nutshell. He had an invention for
the Admiralty ... lonely and frightened, in a ghostly world; with an
invention to save the lives of ships.
Engström and Sigerson!
Engström's huge frame and bulky hard red face, shining with simplicity
below his great serene intellectual brow and up-shooting hair. His first
evening at Mrs. Bailey's right hand, saying gravely out into the silence
of the crowded dinner table, "there is in Pareece very much automobiles,
and good wash. In London not. I send much manchettes, and all the bords
are cassed." Devout reproachfulness in his voice; and his brow pure,
motherly serenity. Sweden in the room amongst all the others. Teased,
like everyone else, with petty annoyances. But with immense strength to
throw everything off. Everyone waiting in the peaceful silence that
surrounded the immense gently booming voice; electing him president as
he sat burying his jests with downcast eyes that left the mask of his
bluntly carven face yielded up to friendship. Waves of strength and
kindliness coming from him, bringing exhilaration. Making even the
Canadians seem pale and small and powerless. At the mercy of life. And
then the harsh kind blaze of his brown eyes again. More unhesitating
phrases. He had brought strength and happiness into the house. A rough,
clump-worded Swedish song, rawly affronting the English air, words of
his separate country, the only words for his deepest meanings, making
barriers ... till he leapt, he was so _light_ in his strength, on to a
chair to bring out the top note, and the barriers fell.... He pealed his
notes in farcical agony towards the ceiling. In that moment he was
kneeling, bowed before the coldest, looking through to the hidden
sunlight in everybody.... Conducting an imaginary orchestra from behind
the piano. Sind the Trommels in Ordna? Everybody had understood, and
loved each word he spoke.
"Wo ist the Veoleena Sigerson? I shall bring." Springing from his place
near the door, lightly in and out amongst the seated forms, leaping
obstacles all over the room on his way back to the open door, struggling
noiselessly with all his strength, strong legs sliding under him as he
pulled at the handle to open the open door. He and Sigerson had stayed
on after the spring visitors. Evenings, voyaging alone with the two of
them into strange new music. He had forgotten that he had said,
I play nor sing not payshionate musics in bystanding of
Miss--little--Hendershon. And the German theatre ... a shamed moving
forward into suspicion, even of Irving, in the way they all played,
working equally, together ... all taking care of the play ... play and
acting, rich with life.
Sigerson was jealous. He wanted all the bright sunlight to himself and
tried to hold it with his cold scornful brains. Waspy Schopenhauerism.
They went to _Peckham_. The little weepy dabby assistant of the Peckham
landlady, her speech ready-made quotations in the worst London English.
Impure vowels, slobbery consonants. She reflected his sunlight like a
dead moon. There was a large old garden. His first English garden in
summer. He had loved it with all the power of the Swedish landscape in
him turned on to its romantic strangeness, and identified the dabby girl
with it. She fainted when he went away. A despair like death. He had
come faithfully back and married her. _What_ could she, forever Peckham,
seeing nothing, distorting everything by her speech, make of Stockholm?
And all the time the Wimpole Street days had glowed more and more with
the forgotten story. Thanks to the scraps of detail in Mr. Leyton's
confidences she had lived in the family of girls, centred round their
widowed mother in the large old suburban house, garden girt, and
bordering on countrified open spaces. She imagined it always sunlit, and
knew that it rang all the morning with the echoes of work and laughter,
and the sharp-tongued ironic commentary of a family of Harrietts freed
from the shadows that had surrounded Harriett's young gaiety, by the
presence of an income, small but secure. The bustle of shared work, all
exquisitely done in the exacting, rewarding old-fashioned way, nothing
bought that could be home-made, filled each morning with an engrossing
life of its own, lit, by a surrounding endless glory, and left the house
a prepared gleaming orderliness, and the girls free to retreat to a
little room where a sewing machine was enthroned amidst a licensed
disorder of fashion papers, with coloured plates, and things in process
of making according to the newest mode, from oddments carefully selected
at the west-end sales. When they were there, during the times of busy
work following on consultations and decisions, gossip broke forth; and
thrilling the tones of their gossiping voices, and shining all about
them, obliterating the walls of the room and the sense of the day and
the hour, was a bright eternity of recurring occasions, when the sum of
their household labours blossomed unto fulfilment ... at-home days;
calls; winter dances; huge picnic parties in the summer, to which they
went, riding capably, in their clever home-made cycling costumes on
brilliantly gleaming bicycles. And all the year round, shed over each
revolving week, the glamour of Sunday ... the perpetual rising up,
amongst the varying seasons and days, of a single unvarying shape,
standing, in the morning quiet, chill and accusing between them and the
warm, far-off everyday life. The relief of the descent into the
distractions of dressing for church and bustling off in good time; the
momentary return of the challenging shape with the sight of the old grey
ivy-grown church; escape from it again into the refuge of the porch
amongst the instreaming neighbours, and the final fading of its outlines
into the colour and sound of the morning service, church shapes in stone
and wood and metal, secure round about their weakness, holding them
safe. The sermon, though they suffered it uncritically, could not,
preached by an intelligent or stupid man, but secure, soft-living and
married, revive the morning strength of the challenging shape, and as it
sounded on towards its end, the grey of another Sunday morning had
brought in sight the rest of the day, when, at the worst, if nobody
came, there was the evening service, the escape in its midst into a
state of bliss that stilled everything, and went on forever, making the
coming week, even if the most glorious things were going to happen,
wonderful only because it was so amazing to be alive at all ... That was
too much ... these girls did not consciously feel like that; perhaps
partly because they had a brother, were the kind of girls who would have
at least one brother, choking things back by obliviousness, but breezy
and useful in many ways. It's good to have brothers; but there is
something they kill, if they are in the majority, absolutely, so that
one girl with many brothers rarely becomes a woman, but can sometimes be
a nice understanding jolly sort of man. Brothers without sisters are
worse off than sisters without brothers; unless they are very gifted ...
in which case they are really, as people say of the poets, more than
three parts women. But Sundays, for all girls, were in a way the same.
And though these girls did not reason and were densely unconscious of
the challenge embodied in their religion, and enjoyed being snobbish
without knowing it, or knowing the meaning and good of snobbishness,
their unconsciousness was harmless, and the huge Sunday things they
lived in, held and steered their lives, making, in England, in them and
in all of their kind, a world that the clever people who laughed at them
had never been inside.... _They_ did not laugh, except the busy enviable
blissful laughter permitted by God, from the midst of their lives, about
nothing at all. They thought liberals vulgar--mostly chapel people; and
socialists mad. But in the midst of their conservatism was something
that could never die, and that these other people did not seem to
possess....
And the best, most Charlotte Yonge part of the story, was the arrival of
Mr. Leyton and his cousin, whilst these girls were still at home amongst
their Sundays; and the opening out, for two of them at once, of a
future; with the past behind it undivided.
And they had suddenly asked her to their picnic. And she had been back,
for the whole of that summer's afternoon, in the world of women; and the
forgotten things, that had first driven her away from it, had emerged
again, no longer mysterious, and with more of meaning in them, so that
she had been able to achieve an appearance of conformity, and had felt
that they regarded her not with the adoration or half-pitying dislike
she had had from women in the past, but as a woman, though only as a
weird sort of female who needed teaching. They had no kind of fear of
her; not because they were massed there in strength. Any one of them,
singly, would, she had felt, have been equal to her in any sort of
circumstances; her superior; a rather impatient but absolutely loyal and
chivalrous guide in the lonely exclusive feminine life.
Surprised by the unanticipated joy of a summer holiday in miniature,
their gift, wrested by their energies from the midst of the sweltering
London July, and with their world and its ways pulling at her memory,
and the door of their good fellowship wide open before her, for an hour
she had let go and gone in and joined them, holding herself teachable,
keeping in check, while she contemplated the transformation of Mr.
Leyton under the fire of their chaff, her impulse to break into the
ceaseless jesting with some shape of conversation. And she had felt that
they regarded her as a postulant, a soul to be snatched from outer
darkness, a candidate as ready to graduate as they were, to grant a
degree. And the breaking of the group had left her free to watch the
way, without any gap of silence or difficulty of transition, they had
set the men to work on the clearing up and stowing away of the
paraphernalia of the feast; training them all the while according to the
Englishwoman's pattern, an excellent pattern, she could not fail to see,
imagining these young males as they would be, undisciplined by this
influence, and comparing them with the many unshaped young men she had
observed on their passage through the Tansley Street house.
But all the time she had been half aware that she was only watching a
picture, a charmed familiar scene, as significant and as unreal as the
set figure of a dance. Giving herself to its discipline she would reap
experience and knowledge, confirming truths; but only truths with which
she was already familiar, leading down to a lonely silence, where
everything still remained unanswered, and the dancers their unchanged
unexpressed selves. Individual converse with these young men on the
terms these women had trained them to accept, was impossible to
contemplate. Every word would be spoken in a dark void.
Breaking in, as the little feast ended in a storm of flying buns and
eggshells, a little scene that she had forgotten completely at the
moment of its occurrence had risen sharply clear in her mind.... A
family party of quiet soberly dressed Scotch Canadian people from the
far-west, seated together at the end of the Tansley Street dinner-table,
coming out, on the eve of their departure, from the enclosure of their
small, subduedly conversing group, to respond, in level friendly tones,
to some bold person's enquiries as to the success of their visit. The
sudden belated intimacy, ripened in silence, had seemed very good,
compressed into a single occasion that would leave the impression of
these homely people single and strong, so well worth losing that their
loss would be a permanent acquisition. Suddenly from their midst, the
voice of the youngest daughter, a pale, bitter-faced girl with a long
thin pigtail of sandy hair, had rung out down the table.
"London's _fine_. But the folks don't all match it. The girls don't.
They're just queer. I reckon there's two things they don't know. How to
wear their waists, and how to go around with the boys. When I hear an
English girl talking to boys, I just have to think she's funny in the
head. If Canadian girls were stiff like that, they'd have the dullest
time on earth." Her expressionless pale blue eyes had fixed no one, and
she had concluded her speech with a little fling that had settled her
back in her chair, unconcerned.
And in the interval before the ride home, when the men had been driven
off, and she was alone with the sisters and saw them relax and yawn,
speak in easy casual tones and apostrophise small things, with great
gusto, in well-chosen forcible terms, while the men were no doubt also
enjoying the same blessed relief, she had felt that the Canadian girl
was more right than she knew. Between men and girls, throughout English
life there was no exchange, save in the ways of love. Except for those
moments when they stood, to each other, for all the world, they never
met. And the sense of these sacred moments embarrassed, even while it
shaped and beautified, every occasion. Women were its guardians and
hostesses. Their guardianship made them hostesses for life. Upon the
faces of these girls as they sat about unmasked and pathetically
individual, it shed its radiance and, already, its heavy shadows.
Yet American girls with their easy regardlessness seemed lacking in
depth of feminine consciousness, too much turned towards the surfaces of
life, and the men with their awakened understanding and quick
serviceableness, by so much the less men. In any case there was not the
recognisable difference in personality that was so striking in England,
and that seemed in some way, even at one's moments of greatest
irritation with the women, to bring all the men under a reproach. Many
young American men had faces moulded on the lines of responsible
middle-aged German housewives; while some of the quite young girls
looked out at life with the sharp shrewd repudiation of cynical elderly
bachelors. If it were the building up of a civilisation that had brought
the sexes together, for generations, in relations that came in English
society only momentarily, at a house-warming or a picnic, would the
results remain? Or would there be, in America, later on, a beginning of
the English differences, the women moving, more and more heavily veiled
and burdened, towards the heart of life and the men getting further and
further away from the living centre. Ought men and women to modify each
other, each standing as it were, halfway between the centre and the
surface, each with a view across the other's territory? Or should they
accentuate their natural differences? _Were_ the differences natural?
As they rode home through the twilit lanes, the insoluble problem,
sounding for her in every shouted remark, had been continually soothed
away by the dewy, sweet-scented, softly streaming air. The slurring of
their tyres in unison along the smooth roadway, the little chorus of
bells as they approached a turning, made them all one entered for good
into the heritage of the accomplished day. Nothing could touch the
vision that rose and the confessions that were made within its silence.
Within each one of the indistinguishable forms the sense of the day was
clearing with each moment; its incidents blending and shaping, an
irrevocable piece of decisive life; but behind and around and through it
all was summer, smiling. Before each pair of eyes, cleared of heat and
dust by the balm of the evening air, the picture of the English summer,
in blue and gold and green, stood clear within the outspread invisible
distances. _That_ was the harvest, the thing that drew people to the
labour of organising picnics, that remained afterwards forever; that
would remain for the lovers after their love was forgotten; that linked
all the members of the party in a fellowship stronger than their
differences.
But when they reached the suburbs, the problem was there again in might,
incessant as the houses looming by on either side, driven tyrannously
home by the easy flight ahead, as Highgate sloped to London, of the two
whose machines were fitted with "free" wheels.... Only a mind turned
altogether towards outside things could invent....
And then _London_ came, opening suddenly before me as I rode out alone
from under a dark archway into the noise and glare of a gaslit Saturday
night.
Trouble fell away like a cast garment as I swung forward, steering with
thoughtless ease, into the southernmost of the four converging streets.
This was the true harvest of the summer's day; the transfiguration of
these northern streets. They were not London proper; but tonight the
spirit of London came to meet her on the verge. Nothing in life could be
sweeter than this welcoming--a cup held brimming to her lips, and
inexhaustible. What lover did she want? No one in the world could oust
this mighty lover, always receiving her back without words, engulfing
and leaving her untouched, liberated and expanding to the whole range of
her being. In the mile or so ahead, there was endless time. She would
travel further than the longest journey, swifter than the most rapid
flight, down and down into an oblivion deeper than sleep; and drop off
at the centre, on to the deserted grey pavements, with the high quiet
houses standing all about her in air sweetened by the evening breath of
the trees, stealing down the street from either end; the sound of her
footsteps awakening her again to the single fact of her incredible
presence within the vast surrounding presence. Then, for another
unforgettable night of return, she would break into the shuttered house
and gain her room and lie, till she suddenly slept, tingling to the
spread of London all about her, herself one with it, feeling her life
flow outwards, north, south, east and west, to all its margins.
And it had been so. Nothing had intervened, but, for a moment, the
question, coming as the wild flowers fell from her unclasped belt,
bringing back the long-forgotten day--what of those others, lost, for
life, in perpetual association?
The long lane of Bond Street had come to an end, bringing her out into
the grey-brown spaciousness of Piccadilly, lit sparsely by infrequent
globes of gold. The darkness cast by the massive brown buildings
thrilled heavily about the shrouded oblivion of west-end life. She
passed elderly men, black coated and mufflered over their evening dress,
wrapped in their world, stamped with its stamp, still circulating, like
the well preserved coins of a past reign--thinking their sets of
thoughts, going home to the small encirclement of clubs and chambers, a
little aware of the wide night and the time of year told on the air as
they had passed along where the Green Park slept on the far side of the
road. This was their moment, between today and tomorrow, of freedom to
move amongst the crowding presences gathered through so many years
within themselves; slowly, mannishly; old-mannishly, perpetually pulled
up, daunted, taking refuge in their sets of thoughts; not going far,
never returning to renew a sally, for the way home was short, and their
gait showed them going, almost marching, to the summons of their various
destinations. Some of their faces betrayed as they went by, unconscious
of observation, the preoccupation that closed in on all their solitude;
a look of counting, but with liberal evening hand, the days that
remained for them to go their rounds. One came prowling with slow,
gentlemanly stroll, half-halting to stare at her, dim-eyed, from his
mufflings. Here and there a woman, strayed away from the searching light
and the rivalry of the Circus, hovered in the shadows. Presently, across
the way, the Park moved by, brimming through its railings a midnight
freshness into the dry sophisticated air. Through this strange mingling,
hansoms from the theatres beyond the Circus, swinging, gold-lamped, one
by one, along the centre of the deserted roadway, drew bright threads of
younger west-end life, meshed and tangled, men and women from social
throngs, for whom no solitude waited.
Piccadilly Circus was almost upon her, the need for thoughtless hurrying
across its open spaces; the awakening on the far side with the west-end
dropping away behind; and the tide of her own neighbourhood setting
towards her down Shaftesbury Avenue; bringing with it the present
movement of her London life.... Why hadn't she a club down here; a
neutral territory where she could finish her thoughts undisturbed?
Defying the surrounding influences, she glanced back at the months
following the picnic ... the shifting of the love-story into the midst
of the Wimpole Street household, making her room like a little theatre
where at any moment the curtain might go up on a fresh scene ... knowing
them all so well, being behind the scenes as well as before them, she
had watched with a really cruel indifference, and let the light of the
new theories play on all she saw. For unconscious unquestioning people
were certainly ruled by _something_. The acting of the play had been all
carefully according to the love-stories of the sentimental books, would
always be, for good kind people brought up on the old traditions. And a
predictable future was there, another home life carrying the traditions
forward. All the old family sayings applied. Many of them were quoted
with a rueful recognition. But they were all proud of playing these
recognisable parts. All of their faces had confessed, as they had come,
one by one, betweenwhiles, to talk freely to her alone, their belief in
the story that had lain, hidden and forgotten, in the depths of her
heart; making her affection for them blaze up afresh from the roots of
her being. She had _seen_ the new theories disproved. Not that there was
not some faint large outline of truth in them, but that it was so large
and loose that it did not fit individuals. It did not correspond to any
individual experience because it was obliged to ignore the underlying
things of individuality.... Blair Leighton ... Marcus Stone ... Watts;
Mendelssohn, corresponded to an actual individual truth.... The new
people did not know it because they were odd, isolated people without
up-bringing and circumstances? They did not know because they were
without backgrounds? Quick and clever, like Jews without a country? They
would fasten in this story on the critical dismay of the parents, make
comedy or tragedy out of the lack of sympathy between the two families,
the persistence of unchanged character in each one, that would tell
later on. But comedy and tragedy equally left everything unstated. No
blind victimising force could account for the part of the story they
left untold, something that justified the sentimental books they all
jeered at; a light, that had come suddenly holding them all gentle and
hushed behind even their busiest talk; bringing wide thoughts and
sympathies; centring in the girl; breaking down barriers so completely
that for a while they all seemed to exchange personalities. Blind force
could not soften and illuminate.... There was something more than an
allurement of "nature," a veil of beauty disguising the "brutal physical
facts." Why brutal? Brutal is deliberate, a thing of the will. They
meant brutish. But what was wrong with the brutes, except an absence of
freewill? Their famous "brutal frankness" was brutish frankness, showing
them pitifully proud of their knowledge of facts that looked so large,
and ignorant of the tiny enormous undying fact of freewill. Perhaps
women have more freewill than men?
It is because these men _write_ so well that it is a relief, from
looking and enduring the clamour of the way things state themselves from
several points of view simultaneously, to read their large superficial
statements. Light seems to come, a large comfortable stretching of the
mind, things falling into an orderly scheme, the flattering fascination
of grasping and elaborating the scheme. But the after reflection is
gloom ... a poisoning gloom over everything.... "Good writing" leaves
gloom. Dickens doesn't.... But people say he's not a good writer....
_Youth_ ... and _Typhoon_.... Oh "_Stalked about gigantically in the
darkness_." ... Fancy forgetting that. And he is modern and a good
writer. New. They all raved quietly about him. But it was not like
reading a book at all.... Expecting good difficult "writing" some
mannish way of looking at things, and then ... complete forgetfulness of
the worst time of the day on the most grilling day of the year in a
crowded Lyons' at lunch-time and afterwards joyful strength to face the
disgrace of being an hour or more late for afternoon work.... They leave
life so small that it seems worthless. He leaves everything big; and all
he tells added to experience forever. It's dreadful to think of people
missing him; the forgetfulness and the new birth into life. Even God
would enjoy reading Typhoon.... Then _that_ is "great fiction?"
"Creation?" Why these falsifying words, making writers look cut-off and
mysterious? _Imagination._ What is imagination? It always seems
insulting, belittling, both to the writer and to life.... He looked and
listened with his whole self--perhaps he is a small pale invalid--and
then came 'stalked about gigantically' ... not made, nor created, nor
begotten, but _proceeding_ ... and working his salvation. That is what
matters to him.... In the day of Judgment, though he is a writer, he
will be absolved. Those he has redeemed will be there to shout for him.
But he will still have to go to Purgatory; or be born again as a woman.
_Why_ come forward suddenly, in the midst of a story to say they live
far from reality? A sudden smooth complacent male voice, making your
attention rock between the live text and the picture of a supercilious
lounging form, slippers, a pipe, other men sitting round, and then the
phrase so smooth and good that it almost compels belief. Why cannot men
exist without thinking themselves all there is?
She was in the open roadway, passing into the deeps of the central
freedom of Piccadilly Circus, the crowded corner unknowingly left
behind. Just ahead was the island, the dark outline of the fountain, the
small surmounting figure almost invisible against the shadowy upper mass
of a bright-porched building over the way. The grey trottoir, empty of
the shawled flowerwomen and their great baskets, was a quiet haven. The
surrounding high brilliancies beneath which people moved along the
pavements from space to space of alternating harsh gold and shadowy
grey, met softly upon its emptiness, drawing a circle of light round the
shadow cast by the wide basin of the fountain. There was a solitary
man's figure standing near the curb, midway on her route across the
island to take to the roadway opposite Shaftesbury Avenue; standing
arrested; there was no traffic to prevent his crossing; a watchful
habitué; she would pass him in a moment, the last fragment of the
west-end ... good-bye, and her thoughts towards gaining the wide
homeward-going lane. A little stoutish dapper grey-suited ... _Tommy
Babington!_ Standing at ease, turned quite away from the direction that
would take him home; still and expressionless, unrecognisable save for
the tilt of his profile and the set of his pince-nez. She had never
before seen him in unconscious repose, never with this look of a
motionless unvoyaged soul encased in flesh; yet had always known even
when she had been most attracted, that thus he was. He had glanced. Had
he recognised her? It was too late to wheel round and save his solitude.
Going on, she must sweep right across his path. Fellow-feeling was
struggling against her longing to touch, through the medium of his
voice, the old home-life so suddenly embodied. He had seen her, and his
unawakened face told her that she would neither pause nor speak. Years
ago they would have greeted each other vociferously.... She was now so
shrouded that he was not sure she had recognised him. Through his
stupefaction smouldered a suspicion that she wished to avoid
recognition. He was obviously encumbered with the sense of having placed
her amidst the images of his preoccupation. She rushed on, passing him
with a swift salute, saw him raise his hat with mechanical promptitude
as she stepped from the curb and forward, pausing an instant for a
passing hansom, in the direction of home. It was done. It had always
been done from the very beginning. They had met equally at last. This
was the reality of their early association. Her spirits rose, clamorous.
It was epical she felt. One of those things arranged above one's head
and perfectly staged. Tommy of all people wakened thus out of his
absorption in the separated man's life that so decorated him with
mystery in the feminine suburbs; shocked into helpless inactivity; glum
with an irrevocable recognising hostility. It had been arranged. Silent
acceptance had been forced upon him, by a woman of his own class. She
almost danced to the opposite pavement in this keenest, witnessed moment
of her yearslong revel of escape. He would presently be returning to
that other enclosed life to which, being a man, and dependent on
comforts, he was fettered. Already in his mind was one of those formulas
that echoed about in the enclosed life ... "Oui, ma chère, little Mirry
_Henderson_, strolling, at midnight, across Piccadilly Circus."
Suddenly it struck her that the life of men was pitiful. They hovered
about the doors of freedom, returning sooner or later to the hearth,
where even if they were autocrats they were not free; but passing
guests, never fully initiated into the house-life, where the real active
freedom of the women resided behind the noise and tumult of meetings.
Man's life was bandied to and fro ... from _word_ to _word_. Hemmed in
by women, fearing their silence, unable to enter its freedom--being
himself made of words--cursing the torrents of careless speech with
which its portals were defended.
And all the time unselfconscious thoughtless little men, with neat or
shabby sets of unconsidered words for everything, busily bleating
through cornets, blaring through trombones and euphoniums, thrumming
undertones on double-basses. She summoned Harriett and shrieked with
laughter at the cheerful din. It was cheerful, even in a funeral march.
There would certainly be music in heaven; but not books.
The shock of meeting Tommy had brought the grey of tomorrow morning into
the gold-lit streets. There was a fresh breeze setting down Shaftesbury
Avenue. Here, still on the Circus, was that little coffee-place. Tommy
was going home. _She_ was rescuing the last scrap of a London evening
here at the very centre and then going home, on foot, still well within
the charmed circle.
The spell of the meeting with Tommy broke as she went down the little
flight of steps. Here was eternity, the backward vista indivisible,
attended by throngs of irreconcilable interpretations. Years ago, a
crisis of loneliness, this little doorway, a glimpse, from the top of
the steps, of a counter and a Lockhart urn, a swift descent, unseen
people about her, companions; misery left behind, another little
sanctuary added to her list. The next time, coming coldly with Michael
Shatov, in a unison of escape from everlasting conflict; people clearly
visible, indifferent and hard; the moment of catching, as they sat down,
the flicker of his mobile eyelid, the lively unveiled recognising glance
he had flung at the opposite table, describing its occupants before she
saw them; the rush of angry sympathy; a longing to _blind_ him; in some
way to screen them from the intelligent unseeing glance of all the men
in the world.
"You don't _see_ them; they are not _there_ in what you see."
"These types are generally quite rudimentary; there is no question of a
soul there."
"If you could only have seen your look; the most horrible look I have
ever seen; _alive_ with interest."
"There is always a certain interest."
The strange agony of knowing that in that moment he had been alone and
utterly spontaneous; simple and whole; that it had been, for him, a
moment of release from the evening's misery; a sudden plunge into his
own eternity, his unthreatened and indivisible backward vista. The
horrible return, again and again, in her own counsels, to the fact that
she had seen, that night, for herself, more than he had ever told her;
that the pity he had appealed to was unneeded; his appeal a bold bid on
the strength of his borrowed conviction that women do not, in the end,
really care. How absolutely men are deceived by a little
cheerfulness....
And now she herself was interested; had attained unawares a sort of
connoisseurship, taking in, at a glance, nationality, type, status, the
difference between inclination and misfortune. Was it he who had aroused
her interest? Was this contamination or illumination?
And Michael's past was a matter of indifference.... Only because it no
longer concerned her? Then it _had_ been jealousy? Her new calm interest
in these women was jealousy. Jealousy of the appeal to men of their
divine simplicity?
"... which women don't understand.
And them as sez they does is not the marryin' brand."
Oh, the hopeless eternal inventions and ignorance of men; their utter
cleverness and ignorance. _Why_ had they been made so clever and yet so
fundamentally stupid?
She ordered her coffee at the counter and stood facing upstairs towards
the oblong of street. The skirts of women, men's trousered legs, framed
for an instant in the doorway, passed by, moving slowly, with a lifeless
intentness.... Is the absence of personality original in men? Or only
the result of their occupations? Original. Otherwise environment is more
than the human soul. It is original. Belonging to maleness; to Adam with
his spade; lonely in a universe of _things_. It causes them to be
moulded by their occupations, taking shape, and status, from what they
do. A barrister, a waiter, recognisable. Men have no natural rank. A
woman can become a waitress and remain herself. Yet men pity women, and
think them hard because they do not pity each other.
It is man, puzzled, astray, always playing with breakable toys, lonely
and terrified in his universe of chaotic forces who is pitiful. The
chaos that torments him is his own rootless self. The key, unsuspected,
at his side.
In women like Eleanor Dear? Calm and unquestioning. Perfectly at home in
life. With a charm beyond the passing charm of a man. She was central.
All heaven and earth about her as she spoke. Illiterate, hampered,
feeling her way all the time. And yet with a perfect knowledge.
_Perfect_ comprehension in her smile. All the maddening moments spent
with her, the endless detail and fussing, all afterwards showing upon a
background of gold.
Men weave golden things; thought, science, art, religion upon a black
background. They never _are_. They only make or do; unconscious of the
quality of life as it passes. So are many women. But there is a moment
in meeting a woman, any woman, the first moment, before speech, when
everything becomes new; the utter astonishment of life is there, speech
seems superfluous, even with women who have not consciously realised
that life is astonishing. It persists through all the quotations and
conformities, and is there again, the one underlying thing that women
have to express to each other, at parting. So that between women, all
the practical facts, the tragedies and comedies and events, are but
ripples on a stream. It is not possible to share this sense of life with
a man; least of all with those who are most alive to "the wonders of the
universe." Men have no present; except sensuously.... That would explain
their _ambition_ ... and their doubting speculations about the future.
Yet it would be easier to make all this clear to a man than to a woman.
The very words expressing it have been made by men.
It was just after coming back from the Wilsons, in the midst of the time
round about Leyton's wedding, that Eleanor had suddenly appeared on the
Tansley Street doorstep.... I was just getting to know the houseful of
Orly relations ... Mrs. Sloan-Paget, whisking me encouragingly into
everything.... "my dear you've got style, and taste; stunning hair and a
good complexion. Look at my girls. Darlings, I know. But what's the good
of putting clothes on figures like that?" ... Daughterless Mrs. Orly
looked pleased like a mother when Mrs. Paget said "S'Henderson's got to
come down to Chumleigh." ... I almost gave in to her reading of me;
feeling whilst I was with her, back in the conservative, church point of
view. I could have kept it up, with good coats and skirts and pretty
evening gowns. Playing games. Living hilariously in roomy country
houses, snubbing "outsiders," circling in a perpetual round of family
events, visits to town, everything fixed by family happenings, hosts of
relations always about, everything, even sorrow, shared and distributed
by large rejoicing groups; the warm wide middle circle of English life
... secure. And just as the sense of belonging was at its height,
punctually, Eleanor had come, sweeping everything away. As if she had
been watching. Coming out of the past with her claim.... Skimpier and
more beset than ever. Yet steely with determination. Deepening her
wild-rose flush and her smile. It was all over in a moment. Wreckage.
Committal to her and her new set of circumstances.... She would not
understand that a sudden greeting is always wonderful; even if the
person greeted is not welcome. But Andrew Lang did not know what he was
admitting. Men greet only themselves, their own being, past, present or
future.... I am a man. The more people put you at your ease, the more
eagerly you greet them.... That is why we men like "ordinary women." And
always disappoint them. They mistake the comfort of relaxation for
delight in their society.
Eleanor swept everything away. By seeming to know in advance everything
I had to tell, and ignore it as not worth consideration. But she also
left her own circumstances unexplained; sitting about with peaceful
face, talking in hints, telling long stories about undescribed people,
creating a vast leisurely present, pitting it against the whole world,
with graceful condescending gestures.
It was part of her mystery that she should have come back just that very
afternoon. Then she was in the right. If you are in the right everything
works for you. The original thing in her nature that made her so
beautiful, such a perpetually beautiful spectacle, was _right_. The
moment that had come whilst she must have been walking, brow modestly
bent, with her refined, conversational little swagger of the shoulders,
aware of all the balconies, down the street, had worked for her....
The impulses of expansive moments always make things happen. Or the
moments come when something is about to happen? How can people talk
about coincidence? How not be struck by the inside pattern of life? It
is so obvious that everything is arranged. Whether by God or some deep
wisdom in oneself does not matter. There is something that does not
alter. Coming up again and again, at long intervals, with the same face,
generally arresting you in midway, offering the same choice, ease or
difficulty. Sometimes even a lure, to draw you back into difficulty.
Determinists say that you choose according to your temperament, even if
you go against your inclinations. But what is temperament?... Uniqueness
... something that has not existed before. A free edge.... Contemplation
is freedom. The _way_ you contemplate is your temperament. Then action
is slavery?
There is something always plucking you back into your own life. After
the first pain there is relief, a sense of being once more in a truth.
Then why is it so difficult to remember that things deliberately done,
with a direct movement of the will, always have a falseness? Never meet
the desire that prompted the action. The will is really meant to prevent
deliberate action? That is the hard work of life? The Catholics know
that desire can never be satisfied. You must not _desire_ God. You must
love. I can't do that. I can't get clear enough about what he wants. Yet
even without God I am not lonely; or ever completely miserable. Always
in being thrown back from outside happiness, there seem to be two. A
waiting self to welcome me.
It can't be wrong to exist. In those moments before disaster existence
is perfect. Being quite still. Sounds come presently from the outside
world. Your mind moving about in it without envy or desire, realises the
whole world. The future and the past are all one same stuff, changing
and unreal. The sense of your own unchanging reality comes with an
amazement and sweetness too great to be borne alone; bringing you to
your feet. There _must_ be someone there, because there is a shyness.
You rush forward, to share the wonder. And find somebody engrossed with
a cold in the head. And are so emphatic and sympathetic that they think
you are a new friend and begin to expand. And it is wonderful until you
discover that they do not think life at all wonderful.... That afternoon
it had been a stray knock at the front door and a sudden impulse to save
Mrs. Bailey coming upstairs. And Mrs. Bailey, after all she had said,
also surprised into a welcome, greeting Eleanor as an old friend, taking
her in at once. And then the old story of detained luggage, and plans
prevented from taking shape. The dreadful slide back, everything
disappearing but her and her difficulties, and presently everything
forgotten but the fact of her back in the house. Afterwards when the
truth came out, it made no difference but the relief of ceasing to be
responsible for her. But this time there had been no responsibility. She
had made no confidences, asked for no help. Was it blindness, or
flattered vanity, not to have found out what she was going through?
Yet if the facts had been stated, Eleanor would not have been able to
forget them. In those evenings and week-ends she had forgotten, and been
happy. The time had been full of reality; memorable. It stood out now,
all the going about together, drawn into a series of moments when they
had both seen with the same eyes. Experiencing identity as they laughed
together. Her recalling of their readings in the little Marylebone room,
before the curate came, had not been a pretence. Mr. Taunton was the
pretence. There had been no space even for curiosity as to the end of
his part of the story. Eleanor, too, had not wished to break the charm
by letting things in. She had been taking a holiday, between the
desperate past and the uncertain future. In the midst of overwhelming
things she had stood firm, her power of creating an endless present at
its height. A great artist.
To Michael, a poor pitiful thing; Rodkin's victim. _She_, of course, had
given Michael that version. Little Michael, stealing to her room night
by night, towards the end, to sleep at her side and say consoling
things; never guessing that her threat of madness was an appeal to his
Jewish kindness, a way of securing him. What a story for proper English
people ... the best revelation in the whole of her adventure. And Mrs.
Bailey too; true as steel. Serenely warding off the women boarders ...
gastric distension.
Rodkin ... poor little Rodkin with his weak dreadful little life.
Weekdays; the unceasing charm of Anglo-Russian speculation, Sundays;
boredom and newspapers. Then the week again, business and a City man's
cheap adventures. He _had_ behaved well, in spite of Michael's
scoldings. It was wonderful, the way the original Jewish spirit came out
in him, at every step. His loose life was not Jewish. And it was
_really_ comic that he should have been trapped by a girl pretending to
be an adventuress. Poor Eleanor, with all her English dreams; just
_Rodkin_. But he was a Jew when he hesitated to marry a consumptive, and
perfectly a Jew when he decided not to see the child lest he should love
it; and also when he hurried down into Sussex the moment it came, to see
it, with a huge armful of flowers, for her.... What a scene for the
Bible-woman's Hostel. All Eleanor. Her triumph. What other woman would
have dared to engage a cubicle and go calmly down without telling them?
And a week later she was in the Superintendent's room and all those prim
women sewing for her and hiding her and telling everybody she had
rheumatic fever. And crying when she came away....
She was right. She justified her actions and came through. And now she's
a young married woman in a pretty villa, _near_ the church, and the
vicar calls and she won't walk on Southend pier because "one meets one's
butcher and baker and candlestick maker." But only because Rodkin is a
child-worshipper. And she tolerates him and the child and he is a
brow-beaten cowed little slave.... It is tempting to tell the story. A
perfect recognisable story of a scheming unscrupulous woman; making one
feel virtuous and superior; but only if one simply outlined the facts,
leaving out all the inside things. Knowing a story like that from the
inside, knowing Eleanor, changed all "scandalous" stories.... They were
scandalous only when told? Never when thought of by individuals alone?
Speech is technical. Every word. In telling things, technical terms must
be used; which never quite apply.... To call Eleanor an adventuress does
not describe her. You can only describe her by the original contents of
her mind. Her own images; what she sees and thinks. She was an
adventuress by the force of her ideals. Like Louise going on the street
without telling her young man so that he would not have to pay for her
trousseau....
Exeter was another. Keeping the shapes of civilisation. Charming at tea
parties.... Knowing all the worldly things, made of good style from her
perfect brow and nose to the tip of her slender foot ... made to shine
at Ascot. It was only because she knew so much about Mrs. Drake's secret
drinking, that Mrs. Drake said suddenly in that midnight moment when
Exeter had swept off to bed after a tiff, "_I_ don't go to hotels, with
strange men." I was reading that book of Dan Leno's and thinking that if
they would let me read it aloud their voices would be different; that
behind their angry voices were real selves waiting for the unreal sounds
to stop. Up and down the tones of their voices were individual
inflexions, feminine, innocent of harm, incapable of harm, horrified
since their girlhood by what the world had turned out to be.... It was
an awful shock. But Exeter paid her young man's betting debts and kept
him on his feet. And _he_ was divorced. And so _nice_. But weak. Still
he had the courage to shoot himself. And then _she_ took to backing
horses. And now married, in a cathedral, to a vicar; looking angelic in
the newspaper photograph. He has only one regret ... their
childlessness. "Er? Have _children_?" Yet Mrs. Drake would be staunch
and kind to her if she were in need. Women are Jesuits....
From the first, in Eleanor's mind, had shone, unquestioned, the shape of
English life. Church and State and Family. God above. Her belief was
perfect; impressive. In all her dealings she saw the working of a higher
power, leading her to her goal. When her health failed and her vision
receded, she clutched at the nearest material for making her picture. In
all she had waded through, her courage had never failed. Nor her charm;
the charm of her strength and her singleness of vision. Her God, an
English-speaking gentleman, with English traditions, tactfully ignored
all her contrivances and waited elsewhere, giving her time, ready to
preside with full approval, over her accomplished aim.... Women are
Jesuits.... The counterpart of all those Tansley Street women was little
Mrs. Orly, innocently unscrupulous to save people from difficulty and
pain....
* * * * *
It was when Eleanor went away that autumn that I found I had been made a
Lycurgan; and began going to the meetings ... in that small room in
Anselm's Inn.... Ashamed of pride in belonging to a small exclusive
group containing so many brilliant men. Making a new world. Concentrated
intelligence and goodwill. Unanimous even in their differences. Able to
joke together. Seeking, selflessly, only one thing. And because they
selflessly sought it, all the things of fellowship added to them....
From the first I knew I was not a real Lycurgan. Not wanting their kind
of selfless seeking, yet liking to be within the stronghold of people
who were keeping watch, understanding how social injustice came about,
explaining the working of things, revealing the rest of the world as
naturally unconsciously blind, urgently requiring the enlightenment that
only the Lycurgans could bring, that could only be found by endless dry
work on facts and figures.... At first it was like going to school.
Eagerly drinking in facts; a new history. The history of the world as a
social group. Realising the immensity of the problems crying aloud all
over the world, not insoluble, but unsolved because people did not
realise themselves as members of one group. The convincing little
Lycurgan tracts, blossoming out of all their intense labour, were the
foundation of a new social order; gradually spreading social
consciousness. But the hope they brought, the power of answering all the
criticisms and objections of ordinary people, always seemed ill-gained.
Always unless one took an active share, like listening at a door.... She
was always catching herself dropping away from the first eager gleaning
of material to speculations about the known circumstances of the
lecturer, from them into a trance of oblivion, hearing nothing,
remembering afterwards nothing of what had been said, only the quality
of the atmosphere--the interest or boredom of the audience, the secret
preoccupations of unknown people sitting near....
* * * * *
Everyone was going. The restaurant was beginning to close. The west-end
was driving her off. She rose to go through the business of paying her
bill, the moment of being told that money, someone's need of profits,
was her only passport into these central caverns of oblivion. Forever
driven out. Passing on. To keep herself in countenance she paid briskly,
with the air of one going purposefully. The sound of her footsteps on
the little stairway brought her vividly before her own eyes, playing
truant. She hurried to get out and away, to be walking along, by right,
in the open, freed, for the remaining time, by the necessity of getting
home, to lose herself once more....
The treelit golden glow of Shaftesbury Avenue flowed through her; the
smile of an old friend. The _wealth_ of swinging along up the bright
ebb-way of the west-end, conscious of being, of the absence of desire to
be elsewhere or other than herself. A future without prospects, the many
doors she had tried, closed willingly by her own hand, the growing
suspicion that nowhere in the world was a door that would open wide to
receive her, the menace of an increasing fatigue, crises of withering
mental pain, and then suddenly this incomparable sense of being plumb at
the centre of rejoicing. Something always left within her that
contradicted all the evidence. It compensated the failure of her efforts
at conformity.... Yet to live outside the world of happenings, always to
forget and escape, to be impatient, even scornful, of the calamities
that moved in and out of it like a well-worn jest, was certainly wrong.
But it could not be helped. It was forgetfulness, suddenly overtaking
her in the midst of her busiest efforts ... memory ... a perpetual
sudden blank ... and upon it broke forth this inexhaustible joy. The
tappings of her feet on the beloved pavement were blows struck
hilariously on the shoulder of a friend. To keep her voice from breaking
forth she sang aloud in her mind, a soaring song unlimited by sound.
The visit to the revolutionaries seemed already in the past, added to
the long procession of events that broke up and scattered the moment she
was awake at this lonely centre.
Speech came towards her from within the echoes of the night; statements
in unfamiliar shape. Years falling into words, dropping like fruit. She
was full of strength for the end of the long walk; armed against the
rush of associations waiting in her room; going swift and straight to
dreamless sleep and the joy of another day.
The long wide street was now all even light, a fused misty gold, broken
close at hand by the opening of a dark byway. Within it was the figure
of an old woman bent over the gutter. Lamplight fell upon the sheeny
slopes of her shawl and tattered skirt. Familiar. Forgotten. The last,
hidden truth of London, spoiling the night. She quickened her steps,
gazing. Underneath the forward-falling crushed old bonnet shone the
lower half of a bare scalp ... reddish ... studded with dull, wartlike
knobs.... Unimaginable horror quietly there. Revealed. Welcome. The head
turned stealthily as she passed and she met the expected side-long
glance; naked recognition, leering from the awful face above the
outstretched bare arm. It was herself, set in her path and waiting
through all the years. Her beloved hated secret self, known to this old
woman. The street was opening out to a circus. Across its broken lights
moved the forms of people, confidently, in the approved open pattern of
life, and she must go on, uselessly, unrevealed; bearing a semblance
that was nothing but a screen set up, hiding what she was in the depths
of her being.