CHAPTER II

At the beginning of the journey to the east-end the Lintoffs were as far

away as people in another town. When the east-end was reached they were

too near. Their brilliance lit up the dingy neighbourhood and sent out a

pathway of light across London. Their eyes were set on the far distance.

It seemed an impertinence to rise suddenly in their path and claim

attention.

But Michael lost his way and the Lintoffs were hidden, erupting just out

of sight. The excitement of going to meet them filtered away in the din

and swelter of the east-end streets.

They came upon the hotel at last, suddenly. A stately building with a

wide pillared porch. As they went up its steps and into the carpeted

hall, cool and clean and pillared, giving on to arched doorways and the

distances of large rooms, she wished the Russians could be spirited

away, that there were nothing but the strange escape from the midst of

squalor into this cool hushed interior.

But they appeared at once, dim figures blocking the path, closing up all

the distances but the one towards which they were immediately obliged to

move and that quickly ended in a bleak harshly lit room. And now here

they were, set down, meekly herded at the table with other hotel people.

No strange new force radiated from them across the chilly expanse of

coarse white tablecloth. They were able to be obliterated by their

surroundings; lost in the onward-driving tide of hotel-life; responding

murmuringly to Michael's Russian phrases, like people trying to throw

off sleep.

Her private converse with them the day before, made it impossible even

to observe them now that they were exposed before her. And a faint hope,

refusing to be quenched, prevented her casting even one glance across at

them. If the hope remained unwitnessed there might yet be, before they

separated, something that would satisfy her anticipations. If she could

just see what he was like. There was, even now, an unfamiliar force

keeping her eyes averted from all but the vague sense of the two

figures. Perhaps it came from him. Or it was the harvest growing from

the moment in the hotel entrance.

A dispiriting conviction was gathering behind her blind attention. If

she looked across, she would see a man self-conscious, drearily living

out the occasion, with an assumed manner. After all, he was now just a

married man, sitting there with his wife, a man tamed and small and the

prey of known circumstances, meeting an old college friend. This drop on

to London was the end of their wonderful adventure. A few weeks ago she

had still been his fellow student, his remembered companion, in a

Russian prison for her daring work, ill with the beginnings of her

pregnancy. Now, he was with her for good, inseparably married, no longer

able to be himself in relation to anyone else.... She felt herself

lapsing further and further into isolation. Something outside herself

was drowning her in isolation.

Something in Michael.... That, at least, she could escape now that she

was aware of it. She leaned upon his voice. At present there was no sign

of his swift weariness. He was radiant, sitting host-like at the head of

the table between her and his friends, untroubled by his surroundings,

his glowing Hebrew beauty, his kind, reverberating voice expressing him,

untrammelled, in the poetry of his native speech. But he was aware of

her through his eager talk. All the time he was tacitly referring to her

as a proud English possession.... It was something more than his way of

forgetting, in the presence of fresh people, and falling again into his

determined hope. Her heart ached for him as she saw that away in

himself, behind the brave play he made, in his glance of the

deliberately naughty child relying on its charm to obtain forgiveness,

he held the hope of her changing under the influence of seeing him thus,

at his fullest expansion amongst his friends. He was purposely excluding

her, so that she might watch undisturbed; so that he might use the

spaces of her silence to persuade her that she shared his belief. She

was helplessly supporting his illusion. It would be too cruel to freeze

him in mid-career, with a definite message. She sat conforming;

expanding, in spite of herself, in the rôle he had planned. He must make

his way back through his pain, later on, as best he could. No one was to

blame; neither he for being Jew, nor she for her inexorable

Englishness....

Across the table, supporting him, were living examples of his belief in

the possibility of marriage between Christians and Jews. Lintoff was

probably as much and as little Greek Orthodox as she was Anglican, and

as pure Russian as she was English, and he had married his little

Jewess.

Michael would eagerly have brought any of his friends to see her. But

she understood now why he had been so cautiously, carelessly determined

to bring about this meeting.... They would accept his reading, and had

noted her, superficially, in the intervals of their talk, in the light

of her relationship to him. She was wasting her evening in a hopeless

masquerade. She felt her face setting in lines of weariness as she

retreated to the blank truth at the centre of her being. Narrowly there

confined, cold and separate, she could glance easily across at their

irrelevant forms. They could be made to understand her remote

singleness; in one glance. Whatever they thought. They were nothing to

her, with their alien lives and memories. She was English; an English

spectacle for them, quite willing, an interested far-off spectator of

foreign ways and antics. No, she would not look, until she was forced;

and then some play of truth, springing in unexpectedly, would come to

her aid. Reduced by him to a mere symbol she would not even risk

encountering their unfounded conclusions.

She heard their voices, animated now in an eager to and fro, hers

contralto, softly modulated, level and indifferent in an easy swiftness

of speech; his higher, dry and chippy and staccato; the two together a

broken tide of musical Russian words, rich under the cheerless hotel

gas-light. It would flow on for a while and presently break and die

down. Michael's social concentration would not be equal to a public

drawing-room, a prolonged sitting on sofas. Coffee would come. They

would linger a little over it, eagerness would drop from their voices,

the business of reflecting over their first headlong communications

would be setting in for each one of them, separating them into

individualities, and suddenly Michael would make a break. For she could

hear they were not talking of abstract things. Revolutionary ideas would

be, between him and Lintoff, an old battlefield they had learned to

ignore. They were just listening, in excited entrancement, to the sounds

of each other's voices, their eyes on old scenes, explaining, repeating

themselves, in the turmoil of their attentiveness ... each ready to stop

halfway through a sentence to catch at an outbreaking voice. Michael's

voice was still rich and eager. His years had fallen away from him; only

now and again the memory of his settled surrounding and relentless daily

work caught at his tone, levelling it out.

Coffee had come. Someone asked an abrupt question and waited in a

silence. She glanced across. A tall narrow man, narrow slender height,

in black, bearded, a narrow straw-gold beard below bright red lips.

Unsympathetic; vaguely familiar. Him she must have observed in the dim

group in the hall during Michael's phrases of introduction.

"Nu; da;" Michael was saying cordially, "Lintoff suggests we go

upstairs," he continued, to her, politely. He looked pleased and easy;

unfatigued.

She rose murmuring her agreement, and they were all on their feet,

gathering up their coffee-cups. Michael made some further remark in

English. She responded in the vague way he knew and he watched her eyes,

standing near, taking her coffee-cup with a sturdy quiet pretence of

answering speech, leaving her free to absorb the vision of Madame

Lintoff, a small dark form risen sturdily against the cheap dingy

background, all black and pure dense whiteness; a curve of gleaming

black hair shaped against her meal-white cheek; a small pure profile,

firmly beautiful, emerging from the high close-fitting neck-shaped

collar of her black dress; the sweep of a falling fringed black shawl

across the short closely sleeved arm, the fingers of the hand stretched

out to carry off her coffee, half covered by the cap-like extension of

the long black sleeve. She might be a revolutionary, but her sense of

effect was perfect. Every line flowed, from the curve of her skull, left

free by the beautiful shaping of her thick close hair, to the tips of

her fingers. There was no division into parts, no English destruction of

lines at the neck and shoulders, no ugly break where the dull stuff

sleeve joined the wrist. In the grace of her small sturdy beauty there

seemed only scornful womanish triumph, weary; a suggestion of

unspeakable ennui. She was utterly different from English Jewesses....

Without breaking the rhythm of her smooth graceful movement, she turned

her head and glanced across at Miriam; a faint slight radiance,

answering Miriam's too-ready irrecoverable beaming smile, and fading

again at once as she moved towards the door. Too late--already they were

moving, separated, in single file up the long staircase, Madame Lintoff

now a little squarish dumpy Jewish body, stumping up the stairs ahead of

her--Miriam responded to the gleam she had caught in the deep _wehmütig_

Hebrew eyes, of something in her that had escaped from the confines of

her tribe and sex. She was not one of those Jewesses, delighting in

instant smiling familiarity with women, immediate understanding, banding

them together. She had not a trace of the half affectionate, half

obsequious envy, that survived the discovery of their being more

intelligent or better-informed than Englishwomen. She had looked

impersonally, and finding a blankness would not again enquire. She had

gone back into the European world of ideas into which somehow since her

childhood she had emerged. But she was weary of it; of her idea-haunted

life; of everything that had so far come into her mind and her

experience. Did the man leading the way upstairs know this? Perhaps

Russian men could read these signs? In any case a Russian would not have

Michael's physiological explanations of everything; even if they proved

to be true....

"I forgot to tell you, Miriam, that of course Lintoffs both speak

French. Lintoff has also a little English."

It was his bright _beginning_ voice. They were to spend the _evening_

... shut in a small cold bedroom ... resourceless, shut in with this

slain romance ... and the way already closed for communication between

herself and the Russians before she had known that they could exchange

words that would at least cast their own brief spell. Between herself

and Madame Lintoff nothing could pass that would throw even the thinnest

veil over their first revealing encounter. To the unknown man anything

she might say would be an announcement of her knowledge of his reduced

state....

The coming upstairs had stayed the tide of reminiscences. There was

nothing ahead but obstructive conversation, perhaps in French; but

steered all the time by Michael's immovable European generalisations;

his clear, swiftly manoeuvring, encyclopædic Jewish mind....

With her eyes on the fatiguing vista she agreed that of course Monsieur

and Madame Lintoff would know French; letting her English voice sound at

last. The instant before she spoke she heard her words sound in the dim

street-lit room, an open acknowledgment of the death of her

anticipations. And when the lame words came forth, with the tone of the

helplessly insulting, polite, superfluous English smile, she knew that

it was patent to everyone that the evening was dimmed, now, for them

all. It was not her fault that she had been brought in amongst these

clever foreigners. Let them think what they liked, and go. If even

anarchists had their world linked to them by strands of clever easy

speech, had she not also her world, away from speech and behaviour?

Lintoff was lighting a candle on the chest of drawers. The soft

reflected glare coming in at the small square windows, was quenched by

its gleam. He was standing quite near, in profile, his white face and

bright beard lit red from below. The bent head full of expression, yet

innocent, was curious, neither English nor foreign. He was a Doctor of

Philosophy. But not in the way any other European man would have been.

His figure had no bearing of any kind. Yet he did not look foolish. A

secret. There was some secret power in him ... Russia. She was seeing

Russia; far-away Michael blessedly there in the room; keeping her there.

He had sat down in his way, in a small bedroom chair, his head thrust

forward on his chest, his hands in his pockets, his legs stretched out

across the thread-bare carpet, his coffee on the floor at his side. He

was at home in Russia after his English years. Madame Lintoff in the

small corner beside the bed was ferreting leisurely in a cupboard with

her back to the room. Lintoff was holding a match to the waxy wick of

the second candle. No one was speaking. But the cold dingy room, with

its mean black draperies and bare furniture, was glowing with life.

There was no pressure in the room; no need to buy peace by excluding all

but certain points of view. She felt a joyful expansion. But there was a

void all about her. She was expanded in an unknown element; a void,

filled by these people in some way peculiar to themselves. It was not

filled by themselves or their opinions or ideas. All these things they

seemed to have possessed and moved away from. For they were certainly

animals; perhaps intensely animal, and cultured. But principally they

seemed to be movement, free movement. The animalism and culture, so

repellent in most people, showed, in them, rich jewels of which they

were not aware. They were moving all the time in an intense joyous

dreamy repose. It centred in him and was reflected, for all her

weariness, upon Madame Lintoff. It was into this moving state, that she

had escaped from a Jewish family life.

If the right question could be found and addressed to him, the secret

might be plumbed. It might rest on some single unacceptable thing that

would drop her back again into singleness; just the old familiar

inexorable sceptical opposition....

His second candle was alight. Michael spoke, in Russian, and arrested

him standing in the middle of the floor with his back to her. She heard

his voice, no longer chippy and staccato as it had been in the midst of

their intimate talk downstairs, but again dim, expressionless, the voice

of a man in a dream. Madame Lintoff had hoisted herself on to the bed.

She had put on a little black ulster and a black close-fitting astrakhan

cap. Between them her face shone out suddenly rounded, very pretty and

babyish. From the deep Hebrew eyes gleamed a brilliant vital serenity.

An emancipated Jewish girl, solid, compact, a rounded gleaming beauty

that made one long to place one's hands upon it; but completely herself,

beyond the power of admiration or solicitude; a torch gleaming in the

strange void.... But so _solidly_ small and pretty. It was absurd how

pretty she was, how startling the rounded smooth firm blossom of her

face between the close dead black of her ulster and little cap. Miriam

smiled at her behind the to and fro of dreamy Russian sentences. But she

was not looking.

It was glorious that there had been no fussing. No one had even asked

her to sit down. She could have sung for relief. She wanted to sing the

quivering alien song that was singing itself in the spaces of the room.

There was a chair just at hand against the wall, beside a dilapidated

wicker laundry basket. But her coffee was where Michael had deposited

it, on the chest of drawers at his side. She must recover it, go round

in front of Lintoff to get it before she sat down. She did not want the

coffee, but she would go round for the joy of moving in the room. She

passed him and stood arrested by the talk flowing to and fro between her

and her goal. Michael rose and stood with her, still talking. She waited

a moment, weaving into his deep emphatic tones the dreamy absent voice

of Lintoff.

Michael moved away with a question to Madame Lintoff sitting alone

behind them on her bed. She was left standing, turned towards Lintoff,

suddenly aware of the tide that flowed from him as he stood, still

motionless, in the middle of the room. He stood poised, without

stiffness, his narrow height neither drooping nor upright; as if held in

place by the surrounding atmosphere. Nothing came to trouble the space

between them as she moved towards him, drawn by the powerful tide. She

felt she could have walked through him. She was quite near him now, her

face lifted towards the strange radiance of the thin white face, the

glow of the flaming beard; a man's face, yielded up to her, and free

from the least flicker of reminder.

"What do you think? What do you _see_?" she heard herself ask. Words

made no break in the tide holding her there at rest.

His words followed hers like a continuation of her phrase:

"Mademoiselle, I see the _People_." His eyes were on hers, an intense

blue light; not concentrated on her; going through her and beyond in a

widening radiance. She was caught up through the unresisting eyes; the

dreamy voice away behind her. She saw the wide white spaces of Russia;

motionless dark forms in troops, waiting....

She was back again, looking into the eyes that were now upon her

personally; but not in the Englishman's way. It was a look of remote

intense companionship. She sustained it, helpless to protest her

unworthiness. He did not know that she had just flown forward from

herself out and away; that her faint vision of what he saw as he spoke

was the outpost of all her experience. He was waiting to speak with an

equal, to share.... He had no social behaviour. No screen of adopted

voice or manner. There was evil in him; all the evils that were in

herself, but unscreened. He was careless of them. She smiled and met his

swift answering smile; it was as if he said, "I know; isn't everything

wonderful." ... They moved with one accord and stood side by side before

the gleaming candles. Across the room the two Russian voices were

sounding one against the other; Michael's grudging sceptical bass and

the soft weary moaning contralto.

"Do you like Maeterlinck?" she asked, staring anxiously into the flame

of the nearest candle. He turned towards her with eager words of assent.

She felt his delighted smile shining through the sudden enthusiastic

disarray of his features and gazed into the candle summoning up the

vision of the old man sitting alone by his lamp. The glow uniting them

came from the old man's lamp ... this young man was a revolutionary and

a doctor of philosophy; yet the truth of the inside life was in him,

nearer to him than all his strong activities. They could have nothing

more to say to each other. It would be destruction to say anything more.

She dropped her eyes and he was at once at an immense distance. Behind

her closed door she stood alone grappling her certainties, trying to

answer the voice that cried out within her against the barriers between

them of language and relationships. Lintoff began to walk about the

room. Every time his movements brought him near he stood before her in

eager discourse. She caught the drift of the statements he flung out in

a more solid, more flexible French, mixed with struggling, stiff,

face-stiffening scraps of English. The people, alive and one and the

same all over the world, crushed by the half-people, the educated

specialists, and by the upper classes dead and dying of their luxury.

She agreed and agreed, delighting in the gentleness of his unhampered

movements, in his unself-conscious, uncompeting speech. If what he said

were true, the people to pity were the specialists and the upper

classes; clean sepulchres.... How would he take opposition?

"Isn't it weird, étrange," she cried suddenly into a pause in his

struggling discourse, "that Christians are just the very people who make

the most fuss about death?"

He had not understood the idiom. Sunned in his waiting smile she glanced

aside to frame a translation.

"N'y a rien de plus drôle," she began. How cynical it sounded; a cynical

French voice striking jests out of the surface of things; neighing them

against closed nostrils, with muzzles tight-crinkled in Mephistophelian

mirth. She glanced back at him, distracted by the reflection that the

contraction of the nostrils for French made _everything_ taut....

"Isn't it funny that speaking French banishes the inside of everything;

makes you see only _things_?" she said hurriedly, not meaning him to

understand; hoping he would not come down to grasp and struggle with the

small thought; yet longing to ask him suddenly whether he found it

difficult to trim the nails of his right hand with his left.

He was still waiting unchanged. Yet not waiting. There was no waiting in

him. There would be, for him, no more dropping down out of life into the

humble besogne de la pensée. That was why she felt so near to him, yet

alive, keeping the whole of herself, able to say anything, or nothing.

She smiled her delight. There was no sheepishness in his answering

radiance, no grimace of the lips, not the least trace of any of the ways

men had of smiling at women. Yet he was conscious, and enlivened in the

consciousness of their being man and woman together. His eyes, without

narrowing from that distant vision of his, yet looked at her with the

whole range of his being. He had known obliterating partialities, had

gone further than she along the pathway they forge away from life, and

returned with nothing more than the revelation they grant at the outset;

his further travelling had brought him nothing more. They were equals.

But the new thing he brought so unobstructively, so humbly identifying

and cancelling himself that it might be seen, was his, or was

Russian....

Looking at him she was again carried forth, out into the world. Again

about the whole of humanity was flung some comprehensive feeling she

could not define.... It filled her with longing to have begun life in

Russia. To have been made and moulded there. Russians seemed to begin,

by nature, where the other Europeans left off....

"The educated _specialists_," she quoted to throw off the spell and

assert English justice, "are the ones who have found out about the

people; not the people themselves." His face dimmed to a mask ... dead

white Russian face, crisp, savage red beard, opaque china blue eyes,

behind which his remembered troops of thoughts were hurrying to range

themselves before her. Michael broke in on them, standing near, glowing

with satisfaction, making a melancholy outcry about the last 'bus. She

moved away leaving him with Lintoff and turned to the bedside unprepared

with anything to say.

Where could she get a little close-fitting black cap, and an enveloping

coat of that deep velvety black, soft, not heavy and tailor-made like

an English coat, yet so good in outline, expressive; a dark moulding for

face and form that could be worn for years and would retain, no matter

what the fashions were, its untroublesome individuality? Not in London.

They were Russian things. The Russian woman's way of abolishing the mess

and bother of clothes; keeping them close and flat and untrimmed.

Shining out from them full of dark energy and indifference. More

oppressively than before, was the barrier between them of Madame

Lintoff's indifference. It was not hostility. Not personal at all; nor

founded on any test, or any opinion.

In the colourless moaning voice with which she agreed that there was

much for her to see in London and that she had many things she wished

particularly not to miss, in the way she put her foreigner's questions,

there was an over-whelming indifference. It went right through. She sat

there, behind her softly moulded beauty, dreadfully full of clear hard

energy; yet immobile in perfect indifference. Not expecting speech; yet

filching away the power to be silent. No breath from Lintoff's wide

vistas had ever reached her. She had driven along, talking, teaching,

agitating; had gone through her romance without once moving away from

the dark centre of indifference where she lay coiled and beautiful....

_Her_ sympathy with the proletarians was a fastidious horror of all they

suffered. Her cold clear mind summoned it easily, her logical brain

could find sharp terse phrases to describe it. She cared no more for

them than for the bourgeois people from whom she had fled with equal

horror, and terse phrases, into more desperate activities than he. He

loved and _wanted_ the people. He felt separation from them more as his

loss than as theirs. He wanted the whole vast multitude of humanity. The

men came strolling. Lintoff asked a question. They all flung sentences

in turn, abruptly, in Russian, from unmoved faces. They were making

arrangements for tomorrow.

Lintoff stood flaring in the lamplit porch, speeding them on their way

with abrupt caressing words.

"Well?" said Michael before they were out of hearing--"Did you like

them?"

"Yes or no as the case may be." Michael's recovered London manner was a

support against the prospect of sustaining a second meeting tomorrow,

with everything already passed that could ever pass between herself and

them.

"You have made an _immense_ impression on Bruno Feodorovitch."

"How do you know?"

"He finds you the type of the Englishwoman. Harmonious. He said that

with such a woman a man could all his life be perfectly happy. Ah,

Miriam, let us at once be married." His voice creaked pathetically;

waiting for the lash. The urgent certainty behind it was not his own

certainty. Nothing but a too dim, too intermittent sense of something he

gathered in England. She stood still to laugh aloud. His persistent

childish naughtiness assured her of the future and left her free to

speak.

"You _know_ we can't; you _know_ how separate we are. You have seen it

again and again and agreed. You see it now; only you are carried away by

this man's first impression. Quite a wrong one. I know the sort of woman

he means. Who accepts a man's idea and leaves him to go about his work

undisturbed; sure that her attention is distracted from his full life by

practical preoccupations. It's _perfectly_ easy to create that

impression, on any man. Of bright complacency. All the busy married

women are creating it all the time, helplessly. Men see them looking out

into the world, practical, responsible, quite certain about everything,

going from thing to thing, too active amongst things to notice men's

wavering self-indulgence, their slips and shams. Men lean and feed and

are kept going, and in their moments of gratitude they laud women to the

skies. At other moments, amongst themselves, they call them

materialists, animals, half-human, imperfectly civilised creatures of

instinct, sacrificed to sex. And all the time they have no suspicion of

the individual life going on behind the surface." ... To marry would be

actually to become, as far as the outside world could see, exactly the

creature men described. To go into complete solitude, marked for life as

a segregated female whose whole range of activities was known; in the

only way men have of knowing things.

"Lintoff of course is not quite like that. But then in these

revolutionary circles men and women live the same lives.... It's like

America in the beginning, where women were as valuable as men in the

outside life. If the revolution were accomplished they would separate

again." ...

She backed to the railings behind her, and leant, with a heel on the low

moulding, to steady herself against the tide of thought, leaving Michael

planted in the middle of the pavement. A policeman strolled up, narrowly

observing them, and passed on.

"No one on earth knows whether these Russian revolutionaries are right

or wrong. But they have a thing that none of their sort of people over

here have--an effortless sense of humanity as one group. The _men_ have

it and are careless about everything else. I believe they think it worth

realising if everybody in the world died at the moment of realisation.

The women know that humanity is two groups. And they go into revolutions

for the freedom from the pressure of this knowledge."

"Revolution is by no means the sole way of having a complete sense of

humanity. But what has all this to do with _us_?"

"It is not that the women are heartless; that is an appearance. It is

that they know that there are no _tragedies_...."

"Listen, Mira. You have taught me much. I am also perhaps not so

indiscriminating as are some men."

"In family life, all your Jewish feelings would overtake you. You would

slip into dressing-gown and slippers. You have said so yourself. But I

am now quite convinced that I shall never marry." She walked on.

He ran round in front of her, bringing her to a standstill.

"You think you will never marry ... with _this_"--his ungloved hands

moved gently over the outlines of her shoulders. "Ah--it is

most--musical; you do not know." She thrilled to the impersonal

acclamation; yet another of his many defiant tributes to her forgotten

material self; always lapsing from her mind, never coming to her aid

when she was lost in envious admiration of women she could not like. Yet

they contained an impossible idea; the idea of a man being consciously

attracted and won by universal physiological facts, rather than by

individuals themselves....

If Michael only knew, it was this perpetual continental science of his

that had helped to kill their relationship. With him there could never

be any shared discovery.... She grudged the formal enlightenment he had

brought her; filching it from the future. There could never now be a

single harmonious development in relation to one person. Unless in

relation to him.... For an instant marriage, with him, suggested itself

as an accomplished fact. She saw herself married and free of him; set

definitely in the bright resounding daylight of marriage ... free of

desires ... free to rest and give away to the tides of cheerfulness

ringing in confinement within her. She saw the world transformed to its

old likeness; and walked alone with it, in her old London, as if

awakened from a dream. But her vision was disturbed by the sense and

sound of his presence and she knew that her response was not to him....

The necessity of breaking with him invaded her from without, a

conviction, coming from the radiance on which her eyes were set, and

expanding painlessly within her mind. She recognised with a flush of

shame at the continued association of these two separated people, that

there was less reality between them now than there had been when they

first met. There was none.... She was no longer passionately attached to

him, but treacherously since she was hiding it, to someone hidden in the

past, or waiting in the future ... or _anyone_; any chance man might be

made to apprehend ... so that when his man's limitations appeared, that

past would be there to retreat to....

_He_ had never for a moment shared her sense of endlessness.... More

sociably minded than she ... but not more sociable ... more quickly

impatient of the cessations made by social occasions, _he_ had no

visions of waiting people.... His personal life was centred on her

completely. But the things she threw out to screen her incommunicable

blissfulnesses, or to shelter her vacuous intervals from the unendurable

sound of his perpetual circling round his set of ideas, no longer

reached him. She could silence and awaken him only in those rare moments

when she was lifted out of her growing fatigues to where she could grasp

and state in all its parts any view of life that was different from his

own. Since she could not hold him to these shifting visions, nor drop

them and accept his world, they had no longer anything to exchange....

At the best they were like long-married people, living, alone, side by

side; meeting only in relation to outside things. Any breaking of the

silence into which she retreated while keeping him talking, every pause

in her outbursts of irrepressible cheerfulness, immediately brought her

beating up against the bars of his vision of life as uniform experience,

and gave her a fresh access of longing to cut out of her consciousness

the years she had spent in conflict with it.

Always until tonight her longing to escape the unmanageable burden of

his Jewishness had been quenched by the pain of the thought of his going

off alone into banishment. But tonight the long street they were in

shone brightly towards the movement of her thought. Some hidden barrier

to their separation had been removed. She waited curbed, incredulous of

her freedom to breathe the wide air; unable to close her ears to the

morning sounds of the world opening before her as the burden slipped

away. Drawing back, she paused to try upon herself the effect of his

keenly imagined absence. She was dismantled, chill and empty handed,

returning unchanged to loneliness. But no thrill of pain followed this

final test; the unbelievable severance was already made. Even whilst

looking for words that would break the shock, she felt she had spoken.

His voice breaking his silence, came like an echo. She went like a ghost

along the anticipated phrases, keenly aware only of those early moments

when she had first gathered the shapes and rhythms of his talk.

Freedom; and with it that terrible darkness in his voice. Words must be

said; but it was cruel to speak from far away; from the midst of joy.

The unburdened years were speeding towards her; she felt their breath;

the lifting of the light with the presence, just beyond the passing

moments, of the old companionship that for so long had been hers only

when she could forget her surrounded state.... His resonant cough

brought her again the sound of his voice ... how could the warm kind

voice disappear from her days ... she felt herself quailing in

loneliness before the sharp edges of her daily life.

Glancing at him as they passed under a lamp she saw a pale, set face.

His will was at work; he was facing his future and making terms with it.

He would have a phrase for his loss, as a refuge from pain. That was

comforting; but it was a base, social comfort; far away from the truth

that was loading her with responsibility. He did not know what he was

leaving.... There was no conscious thought in him that could grasp and

state the reality of his loss; nor what it was in him that even now she

could not sever from herself. If he knew, there would be no separation.

He had actually moved into his future; taken of his own freewill the

first step away from the shelter she gave. Perhaps a better, kinder

shelter awaited him. Perhaps he was glad in his freedom and his manner

was made from his foreigner's sense of what was due to the occasion. He

did not know that there would be no more stillness for him.

Yet he _did_ dimly know that part of his certainty about her was this

mysterious _youth_; the strange everlasting sense of being, even with

servants and young children, with _any_ child, in the presence of adult

cynical social ability, comfortably at home in the world.... Perhaps he

would be better off without such an isolated, helpless personality in

the life he must lead. But letting him go was giving him up to cynicism,

or to the fixed blind sentiments of all who were not cynics. No one

would live with him in his early childhood, and keep it alive in him. He

would leave it with her, without knowing that he left it.

All the things she had made him contemplate would be forgotten.... He

would plunge into the life he used to call normal.... That was jealousy;

flaming through her being; pressing on her mind. For a moment she faced

the certainty that she would rather annihilate his mind than give up

overlooking and modifying his thoughts. Here alone was the root of her

long delay ... it held no selfless desire for his welfare ... then he

would be better off with _anyone_. He and the cynics and the

sentimentalists were human and kindly, however blind.... They were not

cruel; ready to wreck and destroy in order to impose their own

certainties.... Even as she gazed into it, she felt herself drawn

powerfully away from the abyss of her nature by the pain of anticipating

his separated future; the experiences that would obliterate and vanquish

her; justifying as far as he would ever again see, his original

outlook.... She battled desperately, imploring the power of detachment,

and immediately found words for them both.

"It is weak to go on; it will only become more difficult."

"You are right, it is a weakness;" his voice broke on a gusty breath;

"tomorrow we will spend as we have promised, the afternoon with

Lintoffs. On Monday I will go."

The street swayed about her. She held on, forcing her limbs; passing

into emptiness. The sounds of the world were very far away; but within

their muffled faintness she heard her own free voice, and his, cheerful

and impersonal, sounding on through life. With the breath of this

release she touched the realization that some day, he would meet, along

a pathway unknown to her and in a vision different from her own, the

same truth.... What truth? God? The old male prison, whether men were

atheists or believers?... The whole of the truth of which her joy and

her few certainties were a part, innocently conveyed to him by someone

with a character that would win him to attend. Then he would remember

the things they had lost in speech. The enlightener would not argue.

Conviction would come to him by things taken for granted.

Clear demonstration is at once fooled.... All _men_ in explanatory

speech about _life_, have at once either in the face, or in the

unconscious rest of them, a look of shame. Because they are not living,

but calculating.... Women who are not living ought to spend all their

time cracking jokes. In a rotten society women grow witty; making a

heaven while they wait....

But if from this far cool place where she now was, she breathed deep and

let mirth flow out, he would _never_ go.

* * * * *

At the very beginning of the afternoon Miriam was isolated with Madame

Lintoff. Forced to walk ahead with her, as if companionably, between the

closed shop-fronts and the dismal gutter of Oxford Street, while her

real place, at Michael's side, with Lintoff beyond, or side by side with

Lintoff, and Michael beyond, was empty, and the two men walked alone,

exchanging, without interference, one-sided, masculine views.

She listened to Madame's silence. For all her indifference, she must

have had some sort of bright anticipation of her first outing in London.

And this was the outing. A walk, along a grey pavement, in raw grey air,

under a heavy sky, with an Englishwoman who had no conversation.

Most people began with questions. But there was no question she wanted

to ask Madame Lintoff.... She knew her too well. During the short night

she had become a familiar part of the picture of life; one of the

explanations of the way things went.... Yet it was inhospitable to leave

her with no companion but the damp motionless air.

Relaxing her attention, to make an attempt at bold friendliness, she

swung gaily along, looking independently ahead into the soft grey murk.

But hopelessness seized her as a useless topic sprang eagerly into her

mind and she felt herself submerged, unable to withstand its private

charm. Helplessly she explained, in her mind, to the far-off woman at

her side that this bleak day coming suddenly in the midst of July was

one of the glorious things in the English weather.... Only a few people

find English weather glorious.... Clever people think it contemptible to

mention weather except in jest or with a passing curse. Madame Lintoff

would have just that same expression of veiled scorn that means people

are being kept from their topics.... For a few seconds, as she skirted a

passing group, she looked back to an unforgettable thing, that would

press for expression, now that she had thought of it, through anything

she might try to say ... a wandering in twilight along a wide empty

pavement at the corner of a square of high buildings, shutting out all

but the space of sky above the trees.... That lovely line about

Beatrice, bringing bright, draped, deep-toned figures, with the grave

eyes of intensest eternal happiness, and heads bent in an attitude of

song, about her in the upper air; the way they had come down, as she had

lowered her eyes to the gleaming, wet pavement to listen again and again

into the words of the wonderful line; how they had closed about her; a

tapestry of intensifying colour, making a little chamber filled with

deep light, gathering her into such a forgetfulness that she had found

herself going along at a run, and when she had wakened to recall the

sense of the day and the season, had looked up and seen November in the

thick Bloomsbury mist, the beloved London lamplight glistening on the

puddles of the empty street, and spreading a sheen of gold over the wet

pavements; the jewelled darkness of the London winter coming about her

once more; and then the glorious shock of remembering that August and

September were still in hand, waiting hidden beyond the dark weather....

She came back renewed and felt for a moment the strange familiar uneasy

sense of being outside and indifferent to the occasion, the feeling that

brought again and again, in spite of experience, the illusion that

everyone was merely playing a part, distracting attention from the

realities that persisted within. That all the distortions of speech and

action were the whisperings and postures of beings immured in a bright

reality they would not or could not reveal. But acting upon this belief

always brought the same result. Astonishment, contempt, even affronted

dignity were the results of these sudden outbreaks....

But a Russian idealist ... would not be shocked, but would be

appallingly clever and difficult. All the topics which now came tumbling

into her mind shrank back in silence before Madame Lintoff's

intellectual oblivion. It was more oppressive than the oblivion of the

intellectual English. Theirs was a small, hard, bright circle. Within it

they were self-conscious. Hers was an impersonal spreading darkness....

They were nearing Oxford Circus. There were more people strolling along

the pavement. For quite a little time they were separated by the passing

of two scattered groups, straggling along, with hoarse cockney shouting,

the women yodelling and yelling at everything they saw. The reprieve

brought them together again, Miriam felt, with something rescued; a

feeling of accomplishment. Madame Lintoff's voice came hurriedly--Was

she noticing the Salvation Army Band, thumping across the Circus; or

this young man getting into a hansom as if the whole world were watching

him being importantly headlong?--mournfully came a rounded little

sentence deploring the Sunday closing of the theatres.... She would have

neatly deplored September.... Je trouve cela _triste_, l'automne.

But thrilled by the sudden sounding of the little voice, Miriam tried

eagerly to see London through her eyes; to find it a pity that the

theatres were not open. She agreed, and turned her mind to the plays

that were on at the moment. She could not imagine Madame Lintoff at any

one of them. But their bright week-day names lost meaning in the Sunday

atmosphere; drew back to their own place, and insisted that she should

find a defence for its quiet emptiness. They themselves defended it,

these English theatre names, gathering much of their colour and

brightness from the weekly lull. But the meaning of the lull lay much

deeper than the need for contrast; deeper than the reasons given by

sabbatarians, whom it was a joy to defy, though they were right. It was

something that was as difficult to defend as the qualities of the

English weather.

This Russian woman was also a continental, sharing the awful continental

demand that the week-day things should never cease; dependent all the

time on revolving sets of outside things ... and the modern English were

getting more and more into the same state. In a few years Sunday would

be "bright"; full of everyday noise. Unless someone could find words to

explain the thing all these people called _dullness_; what it was they

were so briskly smothering. Without the undiscoverable words, it could

not be spoken of. An imagined attempt brought mocking laughter and the

sound of a Bloomsbury voice: "Vous n'savez pas quand vous vous rasez,

hein?" Madame Lintoff would not be vulgar; but she would share the

sentiment....

Miriam turned to her in wrath, feeling an opportunity. Here, for all her

revolutionary opinions, was a representative of the talkative oblivious

world. She would confess to her that she dared not associate closely

with people because of the universal capacity for being bored, and the

_hurry_ everyone was in. Her anger began to change into interest as

words framed themselves in her mind.... But as she turned to speak she

was shocked by the pathos of the little cloaked figure; the beautifully

moulded, lovely disc of face, shining out clasped by the cap, above the

close black draperies, and withdrew her eyes to contemplate in silence

the individual life of this being; her moments of solitary dealing with

the detail of the day when she would be forced to think _things_; not

thoughts; and did not know how marvellous things were. That lonely one

was the person to approach, ignoring everything else. She would protest,

make some kind of defence; but if the ground could be held, they would

presently be together in a bright world. But there was not enough

_time_, between here and Hyde Park. Then later.

Behind, near or far, the two dry men were keeping their heads,

exchanging men's ready-made remarks....

"Est-ce qu'il y a en Angleterre le grand drame psychologique?"

What on earth did she mean?

"Oh yes; here and there," said Miriam firmly.

She sang over in her mind the duet of the contrasting voices as she

turned in panic to the region within her, that was entrenched against

England. Some light on the phrase would be there, if anywhere.... Shaw?

Were his things great psychological dramas?

"_Galumphing_ about like an _ele_phant." ... The sudden bright English

voice reverberated through her search.... Sudermann? She saw eager,

unconscious faces, well-off English people, seeing only their English

world, translating everything they saw into its language; strayed into

Oxford Street to remind her. She wanted to follow them, and go on

hearing, within the restricted jargon of their English voices, the

answer to questions they never dreamed of putting. The continentals put

questions and answered them by theories. These people answered

everything in person; and did not know it.

The open spaces of the Park allowed them to line up in a row, and for

some time they hovered on the outskirts of the crowd gathered nearest to

the gates. Michael, in Russian, was delightedly showing off his Hyde

Park crowds, obviously renewing his own first impression of these

numbers of people casually gathered together--looking for his friends to

show that they were impressed in the same way. They were impressed. They

stood side by side, looking small and wan; making little sounds of

appreciation, their two pairs of so different eyes wide upon the massed

people. He could not wait; interrupted their contemplation in his ironic

challenging way.

Lintoff answered with an affectionate sideways movement of the head; two

short Russian words pouching his red lips in a gesture of denial. But he

did not move, as an Englishman would have done after he thought he had

settled a debateable point; remaining there gently, accessible and

exposed to a further onslaught. He held his truths carelessly, not as a

personal possession, to be fought over with every other male.

It was Michael who made the first movement away from his summed-up

crowd.... They drifted in a row towards the broad pathway lined with

seated forms looking small and misty under the high trees, but presently

to show clearly, scrappy and inharmonious, shreds of millinery and

tailoring, no matter how perfect, reduced to confusion, spoiling the

effect of the flower beds brightly flaring under the grey sky and the

wide stretch of grass, brilliant emerald until it stopped without

horizon where the saffron distances of the mist shut thickly down. She

asked Michael what Lintoff had said.

"He says quite simply that these people are not free."

"Nor are they," she said, suddenly reminded of a line of thought. "They

are," she recited, clipping her sentences in advance as they formed, to

fit the Russian intonation, with carelessly turned head and Lintoff's

pout of denial on her lips, "docile material; an inexhaustible _supply_.

An employer must husband; his horses and machinery; his people he uses

up; as-cheaply-as-possible-always-quite-sure-of-_more_."

"That has been so. But employers begin to understand that it is a sound

economic to care for their workers."

"A few. And that leads only to blue canvas."

"_What_ is this?"

"Wells's hordes of uniformed slaves, living in security, with all sorts

of material enjoyments."

"It surprises me that still you quote this man."

"He makes phrases and pictures."

"Of what service are such things from one who is incapable of

unprejudiced thought?"

"Everybody is."

"Pardon me; you are _wrong_."

"Thought _is_ prejudice."

"That is most-monstrous."

"Thought is a secondary human faculty, and can't _lead, anyone,

anywhere_."

He turned away to the Lintoffs with a question. His voice was like a

cracked bell. Lintoff's gentle, indifferent tones made a docile

response.

"I suggest we have _tea_," bellowed Michael softly, facing her with a

cheerful countenance. "They agree. Is it not a good idea?"

"Perfectly splendid," she murmured, smiling her relief. He could be

trusted not to endure ... to be tired of an adventure before it had

begun....

"Certainly it is splendid if it bring dimples. Where shall we go?" He

turned eagerly, to draw them back at once to the park gates, shouting

gaily as he broke the group, "Na, na; _where_. What do you think,

Miriam?"

"There isn't anything near here," she objected. She pressed forward with

difficulty, her strength ebbing away behind her. His impatience was

drawing them away from something towards which they had all been moving.

It was as if her real being were still facing the other way.

"No--where really can we go?" In an instant he would remember the dark

little Italian-Swiss café near the Marble Arch, and its seal would be

set on the whole of the afternoon. The Lintoffs would not be aware of

this. They were indifferent to surroundings in a world that had only one

meaning for them. But the sense of them and their world, already, in the

boundless immensity of Sunday, scattered into the past, would be an

added misery amongst the clerks and shop-girls crowded in that stuffy

little interior where so many of her Sunday afternoons had died. The

place cancelled all her worlds, put an end to her efforts to fit Michael

into them, led her always impatiently into the next week for

forgetfulness of their recurring, strife-tormented leisure....

Verandahs and sunlit sea; small drawing-rooms, made large by their

wandering shapes; spaces of shadow and sunlight beautifying all their

English Sunday contents; windowed alcoves reflecting the sky; spacious,

silken, upstairs tea-rooms in Bond Street.... But these things were hers

now, only through friends. Here, by herself, as the Lintoffs knew her,

she belonged to the resourceless crowd of London workers....

Michael ordered much tea and a lemonade, in a reproachful aside to the

pallid grubby little waiter squeezing his way between the close-set

tables with a crowded tray held high.

"'Ow many?" he murmured over his shoulder, turning a low-browed anxious

face. His tray tilted dangerously, sliding its contents.

"You can count?" said Michael without looking at him.

"Four tea, four limonade," murmured the poor little man huskily.

"I have ordered _tea_," thundered Michael. "You can bring also one

bottle limonade."

The waiter pushed on, righting his noisy trayful. Michael subsided with

elbows on the smeary marble table-top, his face propped on his hands,

about to speak. The Lintoffs also; their gleaming pale faces set towards

the common centre, while their eyes brooded outwards on the crowded

little scene. Miriam surveyed them, glad of their engrossment, dizzy

with the sense of having left herself outside in the Park.

"Shall I tell the Lintoffs that you have dimples?" Michael asked

serenely, shifting his bunched face round to smile at her.

She checked him as he leaned across to call their attention.... It was

in this very room that she had first told him he must choose between her

company and violent scenes with waiters. He was utterly unconscious;

aware only of his compatriots sitting opposite, himself before them in

the pride of an international friendship. Yesterday's compact set aside,

quite likely, later on, to be questioned.

The Lintoffs' voices broke out together, chalkily smooth and toneless

against the cockney sounds vibrating in the crowded space, _all_ harsh

and strident, _all_ either facetious or wrangling. Their eyes had come

back. But they themselves were absent, set far away, amongst their

generalisations. Of the actual life of the passing moment they felt no

more than Michael. Itself, its uniqueness, the deep loop it made, did

not exist for them. They looked only towards the future. He only at a

uniform pattern of humanity.

Yet within the air itself was all the time the something that belonged

to everybody; that could be universally recognised; disappearing at once

with every outbreak of speech that sought only for distraction, from

embarrassment or from tedium.... She sat lifeless, holding for comfort

as she gathered once more, even with these free Russians, the proof of

her perfect social incompatibility, to the thought that this endurance

was the last. These were the last hours of wandering out of the course

of her being.... She felt herself grow pale and paler, sink each moment

more utterly out of life. The pain in her brow pressed upon her eyelids

like a kind of sleep. She must be looking quite horrible. Was there

anyone, anywhere, who suffered quite in this way, felt always and

everywhere so utterly different?

Tea came bringing the end of the trio of Russian phrases. Michael began

to dispense it, telling the Lintoffs that they had discovered that the

English did not know how to drink tea. Ardent replies surged at the back

of her mind; but speech was a faraway mystery. She clung to Michael's

presence, the sight of his friendly arm handing the cup she could not

drink; to the remembered perfection of his acceptance of failures and

exhaustions ... mechanically she was speaking French ... appearing

interested and sincere; caring only for the way the foreign words gave a

quality to the barest statement by placing it in far-off surroundings,

giving it a life apart from its meaning, bearing her into a tide of

worldly indifference....

But real impressions living within her own voice came crowding upon her,

overwhelming the forced words, opening abysses, threatening complete

flouting of her surroundings. She snatched at them as they passed before

her, smiled her vanishing thread of speech into inanity, and sat silent,

half turned towards the leaping reproachful shapes of thought,

inexpressible to these people waiting with faces set only towards swift

replies. Madame Lintoff made a fresh departure in her moaning sweetly

querulous voice ... a host of replies belonged to it, all contradicting

each other. But there was a smooth neat way of replying to a thing like

that, leading quickly on to something that would presently cancel it ...

quite simple people.... Mrs. Bailey, saying wonderful things without

knowing it.

Answers given knowingly, admitted what they professed to demolish....

She had forfeited her right to speak; disappeared before their eyes, and

must yet stay, vulnerable, held by the sounds she had woven, false

threads between herself and them. Her head throbbed with pain, a molten

globe that seemed to be expanding to the confines of the room. Michael

was inaccessible, carefully explaining to Madame Lintoff, in his way,

why she had said what she had said; set with boyish intentness towards

the business of opening his dreadful green bottle.

Lintoff sat upright with a listening face; the lit brooding face of one

listening to distant music. He was all lit, all the time, curiously

giving out light that his thinly coloured eyes and flaming beard helped

to flow forth. She could imagine him speaking to crowds; but he had not

the unmistakable speaker's look, that lifted look and the sense of the

audience; always there, even in converse with intimate friends.... But

of course in Russia there were no crowds, none of that machinery of

speaker and audience, except for things that were not going to end in

action.... When Michael lifted his glass with a German toast, Lintoff's

smile came without contracting his face, the light that was in him

becoming a person. He was so far away from the thoughts provoked by

speech that he could be met afresh in each thing that was said; coming

down into it whole and serious from his impersonal distances; but only

to go back. There was no permanent marvel for him in the present.... The

room was growing dim. Only Michael's profile was clear, tilted as he

tossed off his dreadful drink at one draught. His face came round at

last, fresh and glowing with the effervescence. He exclaimed, in gulps,

at her pallor and ordered hot milk for her, quietly and courteously from

the hovering waiter. The Lintoffs uttered little condolences most

tenderly, with direct homely simplicity.

Sitting exempted, sipping her milk while the others talked, lounging, in

smooth gentle tones, three forces ... curbed to gentleness ... she felt

the room about her change from gloom to a strange blurred brightness, as

if she were seeing it through frosted glass.... A party of young men

were getting up to go, stamping their feet and jostling each other as

they shook themselves to rights, letting their jeering, jesting voices

reach street level before they got to the door. They filed past. Their

faces, browless under evilly flattened cloth caps, or too large under

horrible shallow bowlers set too far back, were all the same, set

towards the street with the look, even while they jested, of empty

finality; choiceless dead faces. They were not really gay. They had not

been gay as they sat. Only defiantly noisy, collected together to

banish, with their awful ritual of jeers and jests, the closed-in view

that was always before their eyes; giving them, even when they were at

their rowdiest, that look of lonely awareness of something that would

never change. That was _why_ they jeered? Why their voices were always

defensive and defiant? What else could they do when they could alter

nothing and never get away? The last of the file was different; a dark

young man with a club-footed gait. His face was pursed a little with the

habit of facetiousness, but not aggressively; the forehead that had just

disappeared under his dreadful cap was touched with a radiance, a

reflection of some individual state of being, permanently independent of

his circumstances; very familiar, reminding her of something glad ...

she found it as she brought her eyes back to the table; the figure of a

boy, swinging in clumsy boots along the ill-lit tunnel of that new tube

at Finsbury Park on a Saturday night, playing a concertina; a frightful

wheezing and jangling of blurred tones, filling the passage, bearing

down upon her, increasing in volume, detestable. But she had taken in

the leaping unconscious rhythmic swinging of his body and the joy it was

to him to march down the long clear passage, and forgiven him before he

passed; and then his eyes as he came, rapt and blissfully grave above

the hideous clamour.

"Listen, Miriam. Here is something for you." She awoke to scan the three

busy faces. It had not been her fault that she had failed and dropped

away from them. Had it been her fault? The time was drawing to an end.

Presently they would separate for good. The occasion would have slipped

away. With this overwhelming sense of the uniqueness of occasions, she

yet forgot every time, that every occasion was unique, and limited in

time, and would not recur.... She sat up briskly to listen. There was

still time in hand. They had been ages together. She was at home. She

yawned and caught Lintoff's smiling eye. There was a brightness in this

little place; all sorts of things that reflected the light ... metal and

varnished wood, upright; flat surfaces; the face of the place; its

features certainly _sometimes_ cleansed, perhaps by whistling waiters in

the jocund morning, for her. She did not dust ... she could talk and

listen, in prepared places, knowing nothing of their preparations....

She belonged to the leisure she had been born in, to the beauty of

things. The margins of her time would always be glorious.

"Lintoff says that he understands not at all the speech of these young

men who were only now here. I have not listened; but it was of course

simply cockney. He declares that one man used repeatedly to the waiter

making the bill, one expression, sounding to him like a mixture of Latin

and Chinese--_Ava-tse_. I confess that after all these years it means to

me absolutely nothing. Can you recognise it?"

She turned the words over in her mind, but could not translate them

until she recalled the group of men and the probable voice. Then she

recoiled. Lintoff and Michael did not know the horror they were handling

with such light amusement.

"I know," she said, "it's appalling; fearful"--even to think the words

degraded the whole spectacle of life, set all its objects within reach

of the transforming power of unconscious distortion....

"Why fearful? It is just the speech of London. Certainly this tame boor

was not swearing?" railed Michael. Lintoff's smile was now all personal

curiosity.

"It's not Cockney. It's the worst there is. London Essex. He meant

_I've_; _had_; _two_; buns or something. Isn't it _perfectly_ awful?"

Again the man appeared horribly before her, his world summarised in

speech that must, _did_ bring everything within it to the level of its

baseness.

"Is it possible?" said Michael with an amused chuckle. Lintoff was

murmuring the phrase that meant for him an excursion into the language

of the people. He could not see its terrible menace. The uselessness of

opposing it.... Revolutionaries would let all these people out to spread

over everything.... But the people themselves would change? But it would

be too late to save the language....

"English is being destroyed," she proclaimed. "There _is_ a relationship

between sound and things.... If you heard a Canadian reading

Tennyson.... 'Come into the goiden, Mahd.' But that's different. And in

parts of America a very beautiful rich free English is going on; more

vivid than ours, and taking things in all the time. It is only in

England that deformed speech is increasing--is being _taught_ in

schools. It shapes these people's mouths and contracts their throats and

makes them hard-eyed."

"You have no ground _whatever_ for these wild statements."

"They are not wild; they are tame, when you really think of it." Lintoff

was watching tensely; deploring wasted emotion ... probably.

"Do you think Lintoff...." They moved on in their talk, unapprehensive

foreigners, leaving the heart of the problem untouched. It was difficult

to keep attached to a conversation that was half Michael's, with the

Lintoffs holding back, acquiescing indulgently in his topics. An

encyclopædia making statements to people who were moving in a dream;

halting and smiling and producing gestures and kindly echoes.... Michael

like a rock for most things as they were and had been in the past, yet

knowing them only in one way; clear as crystal about ordered knowledge,

but never questioning its value.

She wanted, now, to talk again alone with Lintoff ... anything would do.

The opposition that was working within her, not to his vision, but to

his theory of it, and of the way it should be realised, would express

itself to him through any sort of interchange. Something he brought with

him would be challenged by the very sound on the air of the things that

would be given her to say, if she could be with him before the mood of

forgetful interest should be worn away. She sat waiting for the homeward

walk, surrounded by images of the things that had made her; not hers,

England's, but which she represented and lived in, through something

that had been born with her. If there was anyone she had ever met to

whom these things could be conveyed without clear speech or definite

ideas, it was he. But when they left the restaurant they walked out into

heavy rain and went to the place of parting, separated and silent in a

crowded 'bus.

* * * * *

Michael was going to keep his word.

Michael alone. With more than the usual man's helplessness.... Getting

involved. At the mercy of his inability to read people.

The torment of missing his near warm presence would grow less, but the

torment of not knowing what was happening to him would increase.

This stillness creeping out from the corners of the room was the opening

of a lifetime of loneliness. It would grow to be far more dreadful than

it was tonight. Tonight it was alive, between the jolly afternoon with

the Lintoffs--_jolly_; the last bit of shared life--and the agony of

tomorrow's break with Michael. But a day would come when the silence

would be untormented, absolute, for life; echoing to all her movements

in the room; waiting to settle as soon as she was still.

She resisted, pitting against it the sound of London. But in the distant

voice there was a new note; careless dismissal. The busy sound seemed

very far away; like an echo of itself.

She moved quickly at the first sinking of her heart, and drew in her

eyes from watching her room, the way its features stood aloof, separate

and individual; independent of her presence. In a moment panic would

have seized her, leaving no refuge. She asserted herself, involuntarily

whistling under her breath, a cheerful sound that called across the

night to the mistaken voice of London and blended at once with its

song.... She would tell Michael he must communicate with her in any dire

necessity.... Moving about unseeing she broke up the shape of her room

and blurred its features and waited, holding on. Attention to these wise

outside threats would drive away something coming confidently towards

her, just round the corner of this vast, breathless moment.... She

paused to wait for it as for a person about to speak aloud in the room,

and drew a deep breath sending through her a glow from head to foot ...

it was there; independent, laughing, bubbling up incorrigibly, golden

and bright with a radiance that spread all round her; her _profanity_

... but if incurable profanity was incurable happiness, how could she

help believing and trusting it against all other voices ... if the last

deepest level of her being was joy ... a hilarity against which

_nothing_ seemed to be able to prevail ... able, in spite of herself, in

spite of her many solemn eager expeditions in opposition to it, to be

always there, not gone; always waiting behind the last door. It was

simply _rum_. Her limbs stirred to a dance ... how _slowly_ he had

played that wild Norwegian tune; making it like an old woman singing to

a fretful child to cheat it into comfort; a gay quavering.

Its expanded gestures carried her slowly and gently up and down the

room, dipping, swaying, with wooden clogs on her feet, her arms swinging

to balance the slow movements of her body, the surrounding mountain

landscape gleaming in the joy of the festival, defying the passing of

the years. She could not keep within the slow rhythm. Her feet flung off

the clogs and flew about the room until she was arrested by the flying

dust and escaped to the window while it settled behind her on the

subdued furniture. A cab whistle was sounding in the street and the

voices, coming up through the rain-moist air, of people grouped waiting

on a doorstep ... come out into the deep night, out again into endless

space, from a room, and still keeping up the sound of carefully

modulated speech and laughter. The jingling of a hansom sounded far away

in the square. It would be years before it would get to them. They would

have to go on fitting things into the shape of their carefully made

tones. She was tempted to call down to them to stop; tell them they were

not taking anyone in....

A puff of wind brought the rain against her face, inviting her to stay

with the night and find again, as she had done in the old days of

solitude, the strange wide spaces within the darkness. But she was drawn

back by a colloquy set in, behind her, in the room. Warmly the little

shabby enclosure welcomed her, given back, eager for her to go on

keeping her life in it; showing her the time ahead, the circling scenes;

all the undeserved, unsought, extraordinary wealth of going on being

alive. She stood with the rain-drops on her face, tingling from head to

foot to know why; why; _why_ life should exist....

Going back into the room she found that her movement about it had all

its old quality; she was once more in that zone of her being where all

the past was with her unobstructed; not recalled, but present, so that

she could move into any part and be there as before. She felt her way to

sit on the edge of her bed, but gently as she let herself down, the

bedstead creaked and gave beneath her, jolting her back into today,

spreading before her the nothingness of the days she must now pass

through, bringing back into her mind the threats and wise sayings. She

faced them with arguments, flinching as she recognised this

acknowledgment of their power.

Lifelong loneliness is a _phrase_. With no evidence for its meaning, but

the things set down in books.... People who _record_ loneliness, bare

their wounds, and ask for pity, are not wholly wounded. For others, no

one has any right to speak.... What is "a lonely figure"? If it knows it

is lonely it is not altogether lonely. If it does not know, it is not

lonely. Books about people are lies from beginning to end. However

sincere, they cannot offer any evidence about _life_. Even lifelong

loneliness is life; too marvellous to express. Absolutely, of course.

But relatively? Relative things are forgotten when you are alone....

The thought, at this moment, of the alternative of any sort of social

life with its trampling hurry, made her turn to the simple single sense

of her solitude with thankfulness that it was preserved. Social

incompatibility thought of alone, brought a curious boundless promise, a

sense of something ahead that she must be alone to meet, or would miss.

The condemnation of social incompatibility coming from the voices of the

world roused an impatience which could not feel ashamed; an angry demand

for time, and behind it a sense of companionship for which there was no

name....

Single, detached figures came vividly before her, all women. Each of

them had spoken to her with sudden intimacy, on the outskirts of groups

from which she had moved away to breathe and rest. They had all

confessed their incompatibility; a chosen or accepted loneliness. But it

was certain they never felt that human forms about them crushed, with

the sets of unconsidered assumptions behind their talk, the very sense

of existence. They were either cynical, not only seeing through people,

but not caring at all to be alive, never assuming characters in order to

share the fun ... or they were "misjudged" or "resigned." The cynical

ones were really alone. They never had any sense of being accompanied by

themselves. They had a strange hard strength; unexpected hobbies and

interests. Those who were resigned were usually religious.... They lived

in the company of their idea of Christ ... but regretfully ... as if it

were a second best.... "And I who hoped for only God, found _thee_." ...

Mrs. Browning could never have realised how fearfully funny that was ...

from a churchwoman.... And Protestant churchwomen believe that only men

are eligible to associate with God. Thinking of Protestant husbands the

idea was suffocating. It made God intolerable; and even Heaven simply

_abscheulich_.... Buddhism.... "Buddhism is the only faith that offers

itself to men and women alike on equal terms ..." and then, "women are

not encouraged to become priests" ... _Thibet_.... The whole world would

be Thibet if the people were evenly distributed. Only the historic

centuries had given men their monstrous illusions; only the crowding of

the women in towns. But the Church will go on being a Royal Academy of

Males....

She called back her thoughts from a contemplation that would lead only

to anger, and was again aware of herself waiting, on the edge of her

bed, just in time. In spite of her truancy the gay tumult was still

seething in her mind; the whole of her past happinesses close about her,

drawing her in and out of the years. Fragments of forgotten experience

detached themselves, making a bright moving patchwork as she watched,

waiting, while she passed from one to another and fresh patches were

added drawing her on. Joy piled up within her; but while she savoured

again the quality all these past things had held as she lived them

through, she suddenly knew that they were there only because she was on

her way to a goal. Somewhere at the end of this ramble into the past,

was a release from wrath. She rallied to the coolness far away within

her tingling blood. How astoundingly good life was; generous to the

smallest effort.... The scenes gathered about her, called her back,

acquired backgrounds that spread and spread. She watched single figures

going on into lives in which she had no part; into increasing incidents,

leaving them, as they had found them, unaware. They never stopped, never

dropped their preoccupation with people and the things that happened, to

notice the extraordinariness of the world being there and they on it ...

and so it was, everywhere....

She seemed to be looking with a hundred eyes, multitudinously, seeing

each thing from several points at once, while through her mind flitted

one after another all the descriptions of humanity she had ever culled.

There was no goal here. Only the old familiar business of suspended

opinions, the endless battling of thoughts. She turned away. She had

gone too far. Now there would be lassitude and the precipice that

waited.... Her room was clear and hard about her as she moved to take

refuge near the friendly gas, the sheeny patch of wall underneath it.

As she stood within the radiance, conscious only of the consoling light,

the little strip of mantelshelf and the small cavernous presence of the

empty grate, a single scene opened for a moment in the far distance,

closing in the empty vista, standing alone, indistinct, at the bottom of

her ransacked mind. It was gone. But its disappearance was a gentle

touch that lingered, holding her at peace and utterly surprised.

This forgotten thing was the most deeply engraved of all her memories?

The most powerful? More than any of the bright remembered things that

had seemed so good as they came, suddenly, catching her up and away,

each one seeming to be the last her lot would afford?

It was. The strange faint radiance in which it had shone cast a soft

grey light within the darkness concealing the future....

Oldfield. It had come about through Dr. Salem Oldfield. She could not

remember his arrival. Only suddenly realising him, one evening at dinner

when he had been long enough in the house to chaff Mrs. Bailey about

some imaginary man. Sex-chaff; that was his form of humour; giving him

away as a nonconformist. But so handsome, sitting large and square, a

fine massive head, well shaped hair, thick, and dinted with close

cropped waves; talking about himself in the eloquent American way. It

was that night he had told the table how he met his fiancée. He was a

charlatan, stagey; but there must have been something behind his clever

anecdotal American piety. Something remained even after the other

doctors' stories about his sharing their sitting-room and books, without

sharing expenses; about his laziness and self-indulgence.

Mr. Chadband. But why shouldn't people on the way to Heaven enjoy

buttered toast? A hypocrite is all the time trying to be something, or

he wouldn't be a hypocrite.... And the story he told was _true_.... Dr.

Winchester knew. It was with his friends at Balham that the girl had

been staying. Wonderful. His lonely despair in Uganda; the way he had

forced himself in the midst of his darkness to visit the sick convert

... and found the answer to his trouble in a leaflet hymn at the

bedside; and come to London for his furlough and met the authoress in

the very first house he visited. Things like that don't happen unless

people are real in some way. And the way he had admired Michael; and

liked him.

It had been Michael he had taken to the Quaker meeting. But there must

have been some talk with him about religion, to lead up to that sudden

little interview on the stairs, he holding a book in one large hand and

thumping it with the other.... "You'll find the basic realities of

religious belief set forth _here_; in this small volume. Your George Fox

was a marvellous man." There was an appealing truth in him at that

moment, and humility.... But before his footsteps had died away she knew

she could not read the book. Even the sight of it suggested his

sledge-hammer sentimental piety. Also she had felt that the religious

opinions of a politician could not clear up the problems that had

baffled Emerson. It was only after she had given back the book that she

remembered the other George Fox and the Quaker in _Uncle Tom's Cabin_.

But she had said she had read it and that it was wonderful, to silence

his evangelistic attacks, and also for the comfort of sharing, with

anybody, the admission that there was absolute wonderfulness.

After that there was no memory of him until the Sunday morning when

Michael had come panting upstairs to ask her to go to this meeting. He

was incoherent, and she had dressed and gone out with them, into the

high bright Sunday morning stillness; without knowing whither. Finding

out, somewhere on the way, that they were going to see Quakers waiting

to be moved by the spirit.... A whitewashed room, with people in Quaker

dress sitting in a circle? Shocking to break in on them.... Startling

not to have remembered them in all these years of hoping to meet someone

who understood silence; and now to be going to them as a show; because

Dr. Oldfield admired Michael, and being American, found out the unique

things in London....

In amongst the small old shops in St. Martin's Lane, gloomy, iron-barred

gates, a long bleak corridor, folding doors; and suddenly inside a large

room with sloping galleries and a platform, like a concert room, a row

of dingy modern people sitting on the platform facing a scattered

"chapel" congregation; men and women sitting on different sides of the

room ... being left standing under the dark gallery, while Dr. Oldfield

and Michael were escorted to seats amongst the men; slipping into a

chair at the back of the women's side; stranded in an atrocious emphasis

of sex. But the men were on the _left_ ... and numbers of them; not the

few of a church congregation; and young; modern young men in overcoats;

really religious, and _not_ thinking the women secondary.... But there

were men also on the women's side; here and there. Married men? Then

those across the way were bachelors.... That young man's profile; very

ordinary and with a _walrus_ moustache; but stilled from its maleness,

deliberately divested and submitted to silence, redeeming him from his

type....

To have been born amongst these people; to know at home and in the

church a _shared_ religious life.... They were in Heaven already.

Through acting on their belief. Where two or three are gathered

together. Nearer than thoughts; nearer than breathing; nearer than hands

and feet. The church knew it; but put the cart before the horse; the

surface before the reality. The beautiful surroundings, the bridge of

music and then, the moment the organ stopped a booming or nasal voice at

top speed, "T' th' _Lord_our God b'long _mah_cies 'n f'giveness." ...

Anger and excited discovery and still more time wasted, in glancing

across to find Michael, small and exposed at the gangway end, his head

decorously bent, the Jew in him paying respect, but looking up and

keenly about him from under his bent brows, observing on the only terms

he knew, through eye and brain....

Michael was a determinist.... But to assume the presence of the holy

spirit was also determinism?... Beyond him Dr. Oldfield, huge and

eagerly bowed, conforming to Quaker usages, describing the occasion in

his mind as he went. It was just then, turning to get away from his

version, that the quality of the silence had made the impression that

had come back to her now.

Dr. McHibbert said pure being was nothing. But there is no such thing as

nothing ... being in the silence was being in something alive and

positive; at the centre of existence; being there with others made the

sense of it stronger than when it was experienced alone. Like lonely

silence it drove away the sense of enclosure. There had been no

stuffiness of congregated humanity; the air, breathed in, had held

within it a freshness, spreading coolness and strength through the

secret passages of the nerves.

It had felt like the beginning of a life that was checked and postponed

into the future by the desire to formulate it; and by the nudging of a

homesickness for daily life with these people who lived from the centre,

admitted, in public, that life brims full all the time, away below

thoughts and the loud shapes of things that happen.... And just as she

had longed for the continuance of the admission, the spell had been

broken. Suddenly, not in continuance, not coming out of the stillness,

but interrupting it, an urbane, ingratiating voice. Standing up in the

corner of the platform, turned towards the congregation, as if he were a

lecturer facing an audience, a dapper little man in a new spring suit,

with pink cheeks and a pink rose in his buttonhole.... Afterwards it had

seemed certain that he had broken the silence because the time was

running out. Strangers were present and the spirit must move....

It had been a little address, a thought-out lecture on natural history,

addressed by a specialist to people less well informed. He had talked

his subject not with, but at them.... While his voice went on, the

gathering seemed to lose all its religious significance. His informing

air; his encouraging demonstrator's smiles; his obvious relish of the

array of facts. They fell on the air like lies, losing even their own

proper value, astray and intruding in the wrong context. When he sat

down the silence was there again, but within it were the echoes of the

urbane, expounding, professorial voice. Then, just afterwards, the

breaking forth of that old man's muffled tones; praying; quietly, as if

he were alone. No one to be seen; a humbled life-worn old voice, coming

out of the heart of the gathering, carrying with it, gently, all the

soreness and groaning that might be there. No whining or obsequiousness;

no putting on of a special voice; patient endurance and longing;

affection and confidence. And far away within the indistinct aged tones,

a clarion note; the warm glow of sunlight; his own strong certainty

beating up unchanged beneath the heavy weight of his years. A gentle,

clean, clear-eyed old man, with certainly a Whitman beard. Beautiful.

For a moment it had been perfectly beautiful.

If he had stopped abruptly.... But the voice cleared and swelled. Life

dropped away from it; leaving a tiresome old gentleman in full blast;

thoughts coming in to shape carefully the biblical phrases describing

God; to God. In the end he too was lecturing the congregation, praying

at them, expressing his judgment.... Bleakness spread through the air.

It was worse than the little pink man, who partly knew what he was doing

and was ashamed. But this old chap was describing, at awful length,

without knowing it, the secret of his own surface misery, the fact that

he had never got beyond the angry, jealous, selfish, male God of the

patriarchate.

Almost at once after that, the stirring and breaking up; and those

glimpses, as people moved and turned towards each other, shaking hands,

of the faces of some of the women, bringing back the lost impression.

The inner life of the meeting was more fully with the women? It was they

who spread the pure, live atmosphere? But they were obviously related.

They had a household look, but not narrowly; none of the air of

isolation that spread from churchwomen; the look of being used up by men

and propping up a man's world with unacknowledged, or simply unpondered,

private reservations. Nor any of the jesting air of those women who

'make the best of things.' They looked enviably, deeply, richly alive,

on the very edge of the present, representing their faith in their own

persons, entirely self-centred and self-controlled; poised and serene

and withdrawn, yet not withholding. They had no protesting competing

eagerness, and none of the secret arrogance of churchwomen. Their

dignity was not dignified. Seen from behind they had none of the

absurdity of churchwomen, devoutly uppish about the status of an

institution which was a standing insult to their very existence.... It

was they, the shock of the relief, after the revealed weakness of the

men, of their perfect poise, their personality, so strong and intense

that it seemed to hold the power of reaching forth, impersonally, in any

thinkable direction, that had finally confirmed the impression that had

been so deep and that yet had not once come up into her thoughts since

the day it was made....

The poorest, least sincere type of Anglican priest had a something that

was lacking in Dr. Oldfield and the pink man. The absence of it had been

the most impressive part of seeing them talking together. He had

introduced Michael first. And the feeling of being affronted had quickly

changed to thankfulness at representing nothing in the eyes of the suave

little man. He had given only half his attention, not taking up the fact

that Michael was a Zionist; his eyes wandering about; the proprietary

eyes of a churchwarden....

St. Pancras clock struck two. But there was no sense of night in the

soft wide air; pouring in now more strongly at the open casement,

rattling its fastening gently, rhythmically, to and fro, sounding its

two little notes. It was the _west_ wind. Of _course_ she was not tired

and there was no sense of night. She hurried to be in bed in the

darkness, breathing it in, listening to the little voice at the window.

Here was part of the explanation of her evening. Again and again it had

happened; the escape into the tireless unchanging centre; when the wind

was in the west. Michael had been hurt when she had told him that the

west wind brought her perfect happiness and always, like a sort of

message, the certainty that she must remain alone. But it was through

him that she had discovered that it transformed her. It was an augury

for tomorrow. For the way of the wind tonight, its breath passing

through her, recalled, seeming exactly to repeat, that wonderful night

of restoration when, for the only time, he had been away from London. It

was useless to deplore the seeming cruelty. The truth was forced upon

her, wafted through her by this air that washed away all the

circumstances of her life.