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Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
and away at whatever centre had formed down there in the open.
Going down the steps and along the paths she entered the
movement of the day, the beginning of the sense of tomorrow, that
would strengthen with the slow shifting of the sabbath light. Miss
Prout came into view round the first bend, a sunlit figure in a tub
chair on the grassy level at the end of the terrace. She had no hat.
Her dark head was bent over the peak made in her flowing draperies
by her crossed knees. She was sewing. Here. In public, serenely, the
first thing in the morning.
Strolling to join her Miriam saw her as she had been last night, set
like a flower, unaccented and harmonious, in her pleated gown of old
rose silk, towards the oval of dinner-table, an island of softly bright
silk-shaded radiance in the midst of the twilit room; under the
brightest of the central light, filmy flowers massed low in a wide
shallow bowl ... a gentleness about her, touching the easy
beginnings of talk, each phrase pearly, catching the light, expanding;
expressing a secret joy. Then the gathering and settling of the flow
of talk between him and her, lifting, shaking itself out, flashing into
sharp clear light; the fabric of words pierced by his wails of
amusement as he looked, still talking, at the pictures they drew....
People they knew passing to and fro; all laughable, all brought to
their strange shared judgment. The charm of the scene destroyed by
the surrounding vision of a wit-wrecked world.
After dinner that moment when she had drawn herself up before
him, suddenly young, with radiant eyes; looking like a flower in her
petaled gown. He had responded standing very upright, smiling back
at her, admiring her deliberate effect....
The break away across the landing, white and green night
brightness under the switched-on lights, into the dusk of the study,
ready peopled with its own stillness; the last of the twilight
glimmering outside the open windows. Each figure changed by the
gloom into an invisible, memorable presence. Hypo moving in and
out of the cone of soft light amongst the shadows at the far end.
“We’ll try the contralto laugh on the lady in the window-seat.”
The fear of missing the music in looking for his discovery. And
then into the waiting stillness Bach. Of all people. He found a
contralto laugh in Bach. There were no people, no women, in Bach.
Looking for the phrase. Forgetting to look for it. The feeling of the
twilight expanding within itself, too small. The on-coming vast of
night held back, swirling, swept away by broad bright morning light
running through forest tracery. Shining into a house. The clean cool
poise of everyday morning. The sounds of work and voices,
separate, united by surroundings greeted by everyone from within.
The secret joy in everyone pouring through the close pattern of life,
going on forever, the end in the first small phrase, every phrase a
fresh end and a beginning. Going on when the last chord stood still
on the air.... And if he liked Bach, how not believe in people? How
not be certain of God?... And then remarks, breaking thinly against
the vast nearness.
“What does the lady in the window think?”
“She’s asleep.” Miss Prout had really thought that....
“Oh no she isn’t.”
Miss Prout looked up as she approached but kept on with her
sewing and held her easy silence as she dropped into one of the low
chairs. She was working a pattern of bright threads on a small strip
of saffron-coloured silk ... looking much older in the blaze of hard
light. But far-off, not minding, sitting there as if enthroned, for the
morning, placid and matronly and indifferent. The heavenly morning
freshness was still here. But the remarks about the day had all been
made on the lawn after breakfast.... She admired the close bright
work. Miss Prout’s voice came at once, a little eagerly, explaining.
She was really keen about her lovely work.
She was saying something about Paris. Miriam attended swiftly,
not having grasped the beginning, only the fact that she was talking
and the curious dry level of her voice. Beginning on something as
everyone did, ignoring the present, leaving herself sitting there
outside life.... She made a vague response, hoping to hear about
Paris. Only to be startled by the tone and colour of her own voice.
Miss Prout would imagine that her life had been full. In any case
could not imagine....
“How long are you staying?” The question shot across at her. She
did not know as she answered whether she had seen the swift hot
glance of the blue eyes, or heard it in the voice. But she had found
the woman who wrote the searing scenes, the strange abrupt
phrases that lashed out from the page.
“Tomorrow I shall be grilling in my flat,” went on Miss Prout.
Alma’s laughter tinkled from above. She was coming this way. Miss
Prout’s voice hurried on incisive, splitting the air, ending with a rush
of low words as Alma appeared round the corner. Miriam watched
their little scene, smooth, unbroken by a single pause or hesitation,
saw them go away together, still talking.
“My hat,” she murmured to the thrilled surroundings, and again
“My hat.” She clutched at the fading reverberations, marvelling at
her own imperviousness, at the way the drama had turned, even
while it touched her, to a painted scene, leaving her unmoved. Miss
Prout’s little London eyrie. A distasteful refuge between visits.... Had
it been a flattering appeal, or an insult?
She is like the characters in her book, direct, swift, ruthless, using
any means.... She saw me as a fool, offered me the rôle of one of
the negligible minor characters, there to be used by the successful
ones. She is one with her work, with her picture of life.... But it is
not a true picture. The glinting sea, all the influences pouring in from
the garden denied its existence. It was just a fuss, the biggest
drama in the world was a fuss in which people competed, gambling,
everyone losing in the end. Dead, empty loss, on the whole, because
there was always the commission to be paid. Life in the world is a
vice; to which those who take it up gradually became accustomed....
Her eyes clung to the splinters of gold on the rippling blue sea.
Dropped them, and she was confined in the hot little rooms of a
London flat. If Miss Prout was not enviable, so feared her lonely
independence, then no one was enviable.
“Hullo, Miriametta! All alone?”
“They’ve gone to look at an enormous book; too big to lift.”
“Yes. And what’s Miriam doing?”
“Isn’t it a perfect morning?”
“It’s a good day. It’ll be a corker later on. Very pleasant here till
about lunch time. You camping here for the morning?” She looked
up.
 He was standing in profile, listening, with his head inclined; like a
person suffering from deafness; and pointing towards her his upheld
questioning finger; a German classmaster.
“I don’t know.”
“Then you will. That’s settled?” She murmured a speculative
promise, lazily, a comment on his taut, strung-up bearing. What, to
him, if she did or didn’t?
“That’s agreed then. You camp here,” he dropped neatly into the
chair between hers and Miss Prout’s, his face hidden behind the frill
of its canopy, “for the morning.” He looked out and round at her,
flushed and grinning. “I want you to,” he murmured, “now don’t you
go and forget.”
“All right,” she beamed ... the hours he was wasting spinning out
his mysterious drama ... “wild horses shan’t move me.” He did not
want her society. But it was miles more than wildly interesting
enough that he wished to avoid being alone with Miss Prout. But
then why not dump her as he always did guests he had run through,
on to Alma? He left her a moment for reflections, wound them up
with a husky chuckle and began on one of his improvisations; paying
her in advance ... putting in time.... She listened withheld, drawing
the weft of his words through the surrounding picture, watching it
enlivened, with fresher colours and stronger outlines ... a pause, the
familiar lifting tone and the drop, into a single italic phrase; one of
his destructive conclusions. His voice went on, but she had seized
the hard glittering thread, rending it, and watched the developing
bright pattern coldly, her opposition ready phrased for the next
break. She could stay forever like this, watching his thought;
thrusting in remarks, making him reconsider. But Miss Prout was
coming. There would be a morning of improvisations with no chance
of arresting him. It was only when they were alone that he would
take opposition seriously, not turning it into materials for spirals of
wit, where nobody could stand against him. The whole morning,
hearing him and Miss Prout chant their duet about people ... helped
out no doubt by the presence of an apparently uncritical audience....
I’m hanged if I will....
 “I must have a book or something. I’ll get a book,” she said,
rising. He peeped out, as if weighing her suggestion.
“All right.... Get a book.... But come back?”
“Eurasians are different,” she said. “Have you ever known any;
really well.”
“Never known anybody, Miriam. Take back everything I ever said.
Get your book and come out with it.”
On her way back she heard his voice, high; words broken and
carried along by a squeal of laughter. They were at it already,
reducing everything to absurdity. Turning the corner she found them
engrossed, sitting close at right angles, Miss Prout leaning forward,
her embroidery neglected on her knee. It was monstrous to break
in.... She wandered up and down the terrace, staring at the various
views, catching his eye upon her as she went to and fro; almost
deciding to depart and leave him to his fate. If he was engrossed he
was engrossed. If not, he shouldn’t pretend to be. When she was at
a distance their voices fell, low short sentences, sounding set and
colourless; but intimate.
“Found your book, Miriam?” he cried, as she came near.
“No. I couldn’t see anything. So I shut my eyes and whirled round
and pointed.”
“Your shameless superstitions, Miriam.”
“I am. I’ve got a lovely one I hadn’t seen.”
“A lovely one. A——”
“I’m not going to tell you what it is.”
“You’re just going to sit down and munch it up. Miriam’s a
paradox. She’s the omnivorous gourmet.”
“Can I have a cigarette?”
“Her authors—we’ll get you a cigarette, Miriam, no, alright, here
they are—her authors, the only authors she allows, can be counted
rather more than twice, on the fingers of one hand.”
She took two cigarettes, lighting one from his neatly struck match
and retired to a distant chair.
“You’ll have the sun in your eyes there.”
“I like it.” Their voices began again, his social and expansive, hers
clipped and solitary ... the bank of blazing snapdragon grew
prominent, told of nothing but the passing of time. What was the
time? How much of the morning had gone? There was a moment of
clear silence....
“Is Miriam there?”
“She is indeed; very much there.” Again silence, filled with the
echo of his comprehensive little chuckle. Miss Prout knew now that it
was not the stupidity of a fool that had spoiled her morning. But, if
she could go so far, why not carry him off to talk unembarrassed, or
talk, here, freely, as she wanted to, like those women in her book?
A servant, coming briskly through the sunlight, stopping half way
along the terrace.
“Mr. Simpson.”
“Yes. What have you done with him?”
“He’s in the study.”
“Fetch him out of the study. Bring him here. And bring, lemonade
and things.” But he rose as the maid wheeled round and departed.
“I’d better get him, I think. He’s Nemesis.”
Miriam rose to escape. “Now don’t you go, Miriam. You stay and
see it out. You haven’t met Simpson, Edna. I haven’t. No one has.”
“What is he?”
“He’s—he’s a postscript. The letter came this morning. Now don’t
either of you desert.” He disappeared, leaving the terrace stricken.
The rest of the morning, lunch, perhaps the whole day ... Simpson.
His voice returned a moment later, encouraging, as if shepherding an
invalid, across the garden and round the angle. A very tall young
man, in a blue serge suit, a pink collar and a face sunburnt all over,
an even red.
He was sitting upright in a headlong silence, holding on to the
thoughts with which he had come. But they were being scattered.
He had held them through the introductions and Hypo’s witty
distribution of drinks. But now the bright air rang with the rapid
questions, volleyed swiftly upon the beginnings of the young man’s
meditative answers, and he was sitting alone in the circle in a
puzzled embarrassment, listening, but not won by Hypo’s picture of
Norwich, not joining in the expansion and the laughter, aware only of
the scattering of his precious handful of thoughts. Towards lunch-
time Hypo carried him off to the study.
“Exit the postscript,” said Miss Prout. Charmingly ... dropping back
into her pose, but talkatively, a kindliness in the blue eyes gazing out
to sea. Again she bemoaned her return to London, but added at
once a little picture of her old servant; the woman’s gladness at
getting her back again.
“Only until the end of the week,” said Miriam seeing the old
servant, perpetually left alone, getting older. Sad. Left out. But what
an awful way of living in London; alone with one old servant. A
brilliant light came into Miss Prout’s eyes. She was looking fixedly
along the terrace.
“He wouldn’t stay to lunch.” Hypo, alone and gay. “He’s done with
me. Given me up. Gone away a wise young man.”
“He was appalling.”
“You didn’t hear him, Miriam.”
“I saw him.”
“You didn’t hear him on the subject of his guild.”
“He’s founded a guild?”
“It’s much worse than that. He’s gone about, poor dear, in
sublime, in the most sublime faith, collecting all the young men in
Norfolk, under my banner. I have heard this morning all I might
become if I could contrive to be ... as wooden as he is. Come along.
Let’s have lunch. You know, Edna, there’s a great work to be done
on you. You’ve got to be turned into a socialist.” He turned as they
walked, to watch her face. She was looking down, smiling,
withdrawn, revealing nothing. Seething with anticipation. She would
be willing. For the sake of the long conversations. They would sit
apart talking, for the rest of her time. There would be long
argumentative letters. No. She would not argue. She would be
another of those women in the Lycurgan, posing and dressing and
consciously shining at soirées. Making havoc and complications.
Worse than they. How could he imagine her a socialist with her view
of humanity and human motives.
“No. We won’t make you a socialist, Edna. You’re too good as you
are.” Beautiful, different; too good for socialism? Then he really
thought her wonderful. In some way beyond himself....

Turning just in time to be caught by the sun dipping behind the cliff.
Perfect sudden moment. No sunset effects. No radiance. Clean dull
colours. Mealy grey-blue sky, dull gold ball, half hidden, tilted by the
slope of the green cliff. Feeling him arrested, compelled to receptive
watching; watching a sunset, like anyone else.... The last third of the
disc, going, bent intently, asserting the moment, asserting
uniqueness; unanswerable mystery of beauty.
“God, reading a newspaper.”
“The way to see a sunset is to be indoors. Oblivious. Then ... just
a ruddy glow, reflected from a bright surface.... The indirect
method’s the method. Old Conrad.”
“Madeleine has no use for this storm-rent sky. She wants
untroubled blue, one small pink cloud, and presently, a single star.”
Then he must have wanted these things himself once. Why did he
try to jest young people into his disillusionment?
Yet tonight the sun had set without comment. With his approval.
He was openly sharing the unspoken response to the scene of its
magnificent departure.
The reproachful, watching eye of Sunday disappeared, drawn
down over the horizon with the setting sun. Leaving a blissful
refreshment, the strange unearned sense falling always somewhere
in the space between Sunday and Monday, of a test survived,
leaving one free to go forward to the cheerful cluster of oncoming
days.
The afterglow faded to a bright twilight, deepening in the garden
to a violet dusk. The sea glimmered in the remaining light that
glared along its further rim like a yawn, holding up the lid of the sky.
The figures in the chairs had grown dim, each face a pale disc set
towards the falling light. The talk died down to small shreds, simple
and slow, steeped in the beauty of the evening, deferring to it, as to
a host.
 They were still the guests of the evening while they sat grouped
round the lamplit verandah supper-table that turned the dusk into
night. But the end was coming. The voices in the lamplight were
growing excited and forgetful. Indoors and separation were close at
hand.
He was oblivious. Given up to his jesting ... she watched his
jesting face, shiny now and a little loose, the pouching of his lips as
he spoke, the animal glimmer of teeth below the scraggy
moustache, repellent, yet part of the fascination of his smile, and
perpetually redeemed by the charm of his talk, the intense charm of
the glancing eyes, seeing and understanding, comforting even when
they mistook, and yet all the time withheld, preoccupied behind their
clean rings and filmy sightless grey—fixed always on the shifting
changing mass of obstructive mannish knowledge, always on
science, the only thing in the world that could get his full
attention.... She felt her voice pour out suddenly, violently quenching
a flicker of speech. He glanced, attentive, healing her despair with
his quick interest. The women awoke from their conspiring trance,
alert towards her, watching.
“Yes.” His voice followed hers without a break, cool, a comment on
her violence. He turned, looking into the night. His shaggy intelligent
gaze, the reflective slight lift of his eyebrows gave him the look of an
old man lost. The rosy scene was chilled. Cold light and harsh black
shadow, his averted form in profile, helpless, making empty the
deeps of the thing that was called a summer night. Her desire beat
no longer towards the open scene. She hated it. For its sake she had
pulled him up, brought down this desolation.
“It’s a good night. It’s about the human optime in nights. We
ought to sleep out.” He turned back to the table, gathering up
expressions, radiating his amusement at the disarray caused by his
absence.
“Let’s sleep out. Miriam will. Unless we lock her in.” He was on his
feet, eagerly halted, gathering opinions. His eyes came to rest on
Alma. “Let’s be dogs. Be driven, by Miriam, into fresh fields of
experience.”
 Would it happen? Would she agree? He was impatient, but
deferring. Alma sat considering, in the attitude Mr. Stoner had called
a pretty snap, her elbows meeting on the table, her chin on her
slender hands; just its point, resting on the bridge they made laid
flatly one upon the other. It was natural in her. But by now she knew
that men admired natural poses. He was admiring, even through his
impatience.
“I didn’t suggest it. I’ve never slept out in my life.”
“You suggested it, Miriam. My death, all our little deaths from
exposure, will lie at your door.” The swift personal glance he dealt
her from the midst of his watching swept round to Miss Prout and
flashed into admiration as he turned, still sideways surveying her, to
bend his voice on Alma.
“It’s quite manageable, eh, Susan?” Miriam followed his eyes. Miss
Prout had risen and was standing away from the table posed like a
Gainsborough; challenging head, skirts that draped and spread of
themselves, gracefully, from the slenderness of her body. She was
waiting, indifferent, interpreting the scene in her way, interpreting
the other women for him, united with him in interpreting them....
Alma relaxed and looked up, holding the matter poised,
deliberately locating the casting vote before breaking into
enthusiasm. He paid tribute, coming round the table companionably
to her side, but still looking from face to face, claiming audience.
“We’ll break out. Each bring its little mattress and things. After
they’ve retired. Yes, I think, after they’ve retired.” Why the
conspirator’s smile? The look of daring? What of the servants? They
were bound, anyhow, to know in the morning.
It was glorious to rush about in the lit house, shouting
unnecessary remarks. People shouting back. Nobody attending.
Shouting and laughing for the sake of the jolly noise. Saying more
than could be said in talk. Admitting.
And then just to lie extinguished in the darkness wondering what
point there was in sleeping out if you went to sleep at once. All that
jolly tumult. And he had been so intent on the adventure that he
had let Miss Prout change her mind without protest, only crying out
from the midst of busily arranging his bed on the lawn.... “Have you
seen Miriam’s pigtails?”
And suddenly everything was prim; the joy of being out in the
night surging in the air, waiting for some form of expression. They
didn’t know how to be joyful; only how to be clever.... She hummed
a little song and stopped. It wreathed about her, telling off the
beauties of the night, a song sung by someone else, heard,
understood, a perfect agreement.
“What is she doing?”
“She’s sitting up, waving her banana in the air; conducting an
orchestra, I think.”
“Tell her to eat the banana and lie down.” Alma, Rose Gauntlett,
Mrs. Perry and me, starting off just after I came, to paddle in the
moonlight.... “Don’t, don’t do anything that would make a cabman
laugh.” Why not? Why should he always imagine someone waiting to
be shocked? Damn the silly cabman if he did laugh. Who need care?
As soon as her head was on the pillow, nothing visible but the huge
night and the stars, she spoke quietly to herself, flouting them. He
should see, hear, that it was wicked to simmer stuffily down as if
they were in the house. He didn’t want to. She was making his
sounds for him.
“Tell Miriam this is not a conversazione.”
His voice was actually sleepy. Kindly, long-suffering, but simply
wanting to go to sleep. There was to be no time of being out in the
night with him. He was too far off. She imagined herself at his side,
a little space of grass between. Silent communication, understanding
and peace. All the things that were lost, obliterated by his swift
speech, communicated to him at leisure, clear in the night. Here
under the verandah, with its roof cutting off a part of the sky, they
were still attached to the house. Alma had been quietly posed for
sleep from the first moment. They were all more separated than in
their separate rooms indoors.
The lingering faint light reflected the day, the large open space of
misunderstandings, held off the cloak of darkness in which things
grew clear. She lay watching for the night to turn to night.
 But the light seemed to grow clearer as the stillness went on. The
surrounding objects lost their night-time mystery. Teased her mind
with their names as she looked from point to point. Drove up her
eyes to search for night in the sky. But there was no night there.
Only a wide high thinness bringing an expansion of sight that could
not be recalled; drawing her out, beyond return, into a wakefulness
that was more than day-time wakefulness; a breathless feeling of
being poised untethered in the thin blue-lit air, without weight of
body; going forward, more and more thinly expanded, into the pale
wide space....
There is no night.... Compared to this expanse of thin,
shadowless, boundless light the sunlit sky is a sort of darkness....
Even in a motionless high midday the sky is small, part of it invisible,
obliterated by light. After sunset it is hidden by changing colours....
This is the real sky, in full power, stripping away sleep. Time,
visible, pouring itself out. Day, not night, is forgetfulness of time. Its
movement is a dream. Only in its noise is real silence and peace.
This awful stillness is made of sound; the sound of time, pouring
itself out; ceaselessly winding off short strips of life, each life a strip
of sleepless light, so much, no more, lessening all the time.
What rubbish to talk about the stars. Vast suns, at immense
distances, and beyond them, more. What then? If you imagine
yourself at any point in space or wafting freely about from star to
star you are not changed. Like enlarging the circle of your
acquaintance. And finding it, in the end, the same circle, yourself. A
difference in degree is also a difference in kind. Yes. But the same
difference. Relations remain the same however much things are
changed. Interest in the stars is like interest in your neighbours
before you get to know them. A way of running away from yourself.
What is there to do? How know what is anyone’s best welfare?
To be alive, and to know it, makes a selfless life impossible. Any
kind of life accompanied by that stupendous knowledge, is selfish.
Christ? But all the time he was alone with a certainty. Today thou
shalt be with me.... He was booked for Paradise from the beginning
... like the man in No. 5 John Street going to live in a slum,
imagining he was experiencing a slum, with the latchkey of his west-
end house in his pocket.... Now if he had sacrificed Paradise. But he
couldn’t. Then where was selflessness?
Yet if Christ had never been, the sky would look different. A
Grecian or a Jewish sky. Awful. If the personal delight that the sky
showed to be nothing were put away? Nothing held on to but the
endless pouring down of time? Till an answer came.... Get up
tomorrow showing indifference to everything, refusing to be
bewitched. There is an answer or there would be no question. Night
is torment. That is why people go to sleep. To avoid clear sight and
torment.
Tomorrow, certainly, gloriously, the daytime scenes, undeserved,
uncontributed to, would go forward again in the sunlight.
Forgetfulness would come of itself. Even the thought of the bright
scenes, the scenes that did not matter and were nothing, spread
over the sky the sense of the dawn it would be obliged to bring; ...
the permitted postponement of the problems set by night. Dawn
stole into the heart. With a sudden answer. That had no words. An
answer that lost itself again in the day. But there would be no dawn;
only the pitiless beginning of a day spoiled by the fever of a
sleepless night. Torment, for nothing. The sky gazed down mocking
at fruitless folly. She turned away. She must, would, sleep. But her
eyes were full of the down-bent stars. Condemnation, and the
communication that would not speak; stopping short, poised,
probing for a memory that was there....
A harsh hissing sigh, far away; gone. The unconscious sea.
Coming back. Bringing the morning tide. The sound would increase.
The sky would thicken and come near, fill up with increasing blind
light, ignoring unanswered pain.
“You can put tea in the bedrooms.”
Alma, folded in her dressing-gown, disappearing into the house.
The tumbled empty bed on the lawn, white in the open stare of the
morning....
“Edna wants to know how we’re getting on.” Duplication in light
and darkness, of memories of the night.... Their two figures, side by
side, silhouetted against dark starry blue. Dismantled voices. His
simplicity. His sharp turn and toga’d march towards the house. A
memory of dawn; a deep of sleep ending in faint light tinting the
garden? “Edna wants to know how we’re getting on.” Then starlit
darkness? Angry sleep leading direct to this open of morning.
Everyone in the house had plunged already into new beginnings.
Panoplied in advantages; able to feel in strong refreshed bodies the
crystal brightness of the morning; not worn out as if by long illness.
It was Miss Prout, coming from her quiet night indoors, who was
reaping the adventure. She had some strange conscious power. She
knew that it was she who was the symbol of morning. Her look of
age was gone. She had dared to come out in a wrapper of mealy
white, folded softly; and with bare feet that gleamed against the
green of the flat grass. Consciously using the glow of adventure left
over from the night to engrave her triumphant effect upon the
adventurers; of marvellous youth that was not hers but belonged to
some secret living in her stillness.... It was not an illusion. He saw it
too; let her stand for the morning; was crowning her all the time,
preoccupied in everything he said with the business of rendering
half-amused approval of her miracle. The talk was hampered, as if,
by common consent, prevented from getting far enough to interfere
with the set shape of spectacle and spectators; yet easy, its quality
heightened by the common recognition of an indelible impression.
For a moment it made her power seem almost innocent of its
strange horror.
When she had left the day was stricken. Evil had gone from the
air, leaving it empty. Everything that happened seemed to be a
conspiracy to display emptiness. The daily life of the house came
into view, visible as it was, when no guests were there, going bleakly
on its way. Hypo appeared and disappeared. Rapt and absent,
though still swiftly observant and between whiles his unchanged
talking self; falling back, with his chuckling unspoken commentary,
for lack of kindred brilliance; escaping to his study as if to a waiting
guest.
Miriam came to dinner silently raging; invisible, yet compelled to
be seen. Reduced to nonentity by his wrongly directed awareness,
his everlasting demand for bright fussy intelligence. It was her own
fault. The result of having been beguiled by joy into a pretence of
conformity. For the rest of the visit she would be roughly herself. To
shreds she would tear his twofold vision of women as bright
intelligent response or complacently smiling audience. Force him to
see the evil in women who made terms with men, the poison there
was in the trivial gaiety of those who accepted male definitions of
life and the world. Somehow make him aware of the reality that fell,
all the time, in the surrounding silence, outside his shapes and
classifications.
Sunk away into separation, she found herself gliding into
communion with surrounding things, shapes gleaming in the twilight,
the intense thrilling beauty of the deep, lessening colours.... She
passed into association with them, feeling him fade, annihilated,
while her eased breathing released the strain of battle. He was
spending the seconds of silence that to him were a void, in
observation, misinterpretations. The air was full of his momentary
patience. She turned smiling and caught his smile halting between
amused contemplation of vacuity and despairing sympathy with
boredom. He had not heard the shouts of repudiation with which she
had plunged down into her silence. He dropped her and let his
testing eye, which he knew she followed, rest on Alma. Two
vacuities ... watched by empty primitive eyes, savage eyes, under
shaggy brows, staring speculatively out through a forest of eyelash.
Having thus made his statement and caught Alma’s attention he
made a little drama of childish appeal, with plaintive brows, pleading
for rescue.
“Let’s have some light. We’re almost in darkness,” said Alma.
“We are, we are,” he wailed, and Miriam caught his eyes flashed
upon her to collect her acceptance of his judgment. The central light
Alma had risen to switch on, flashed up over the silk-clad firm little
column of her body winged on either side by the falling drapery of
her extended arms, and revealed as she sat down the triangle of
pendant-weighted necklace on her white throat, the soft squareness
of her face, peaked below by the delicate sharp chin and above by
her piled gold hair. The day had gone; quenched in the decoration of
the night set there by Alma, like the first scene of a play into whose
speech and movement she was, with untroubled impersonal bearing,
already steadily launched, conscious of the audience, untroubled by
their anticipation.
“It’s awful. The evenings are already getting short,” cried Miriam,
her voice thrilling in conversation with the outer living spaces beyond
the shut-in play. His swiftly flashed glance lingered a moment;
incredulous of her mental wandering? In stupefaction that was
almost interest, over her persistence, after diagnosis, in
anachronism, in utter banality?
Alma’s voice, strangely free, softly lifted a little above its usual
note, but happy and full, as it was with outsiders with whom she
was at her best, took possession of the set scene. His voice came in
answer, deferring, like that of a delighted guest. Presently they were
all in an enchantment. From some small point of departure she had
carried them off abroad, into an Italian holiday. He urged her on
with his voice, his eyes returning perpetually from the business of
his meal to rest in admiring delight upon her face. It was lovely,
radiant, full of the joy of the theme she had set in the midst and was
holding there with bright reflective voice, unattained by the little
bursts of laughter, piling up her monologue, laughing her own
laughter in its place, leading on little bridges of gay laughter that did
not break her speech, to the points of her stories. All absurd. All
making the places she described pathetically absurd, and mysterious
strangers, square German housewives and hotel people, whom
Miriam knew she would forever remember as they looked in Alma’s
tales, and love, absurd. But vivid; each place, the look and the
sound and the very savour of it, each person....
By the end of dinner, in the midst of eating a peach, Alma was
impersonating a fat shiny Italian opera star, flinging out without
losing her dainty charm, a scrap of a rolling cadence, its swift final
run up and up in curling trills to leap clear at the end to a single
note, terrifically high, just touched and left on the air, the fat singer
silent below it, unmoved and more mountainous than before.
Hypo was wholly won by the enchantment she had felt and cast.
His face was smooth with the pleasure that wreathed it whenever he
passed, listening, from laughter that was not of his own making, to
more laughter. He carried Alma off to the study with the bright
eagerness he gave to an entertaining guest, but intimately, with his
arm through hers.
They sat side by side on the wide settee. There was to be no
music. He did not want to go away by himself to the other end of
the room and make music. Sitting forward with his hands clasped,
towards Alma enthroned, he suddenly improvised a holiday
abroad.... “We’ll go mad, stark staring mad. Switzerland. Your
ironmongery in my rucksack and off we’ll go.”
To go away, not the wonderful eventful holiday life here; to go
away, with Alma, was reward and holiday for him.... This life, with its
pattern of guests was the hard work of everyday? These times
abroad were the bright points of their long march together? Then if
this life and its guests were so little, she was once more near to
them. She had shared their times abroad, by first unconsciously
kindling them to go. And presently they were deferring to her. It was
strange that having preceded them, created, even with them, the
sense of advantage persisting so long after they had outdone in such
wide sweeps the scope of her small experience.
She had never deliberately “gone abroad.” Following necessity she
had found herself in Germany and in Belgium. Pain and joy in equal
balance all the time and in memory only joy. So that all going abroad
by other people seemed, even while envy rose at the ease and
quantity of their expeditions, their rich collection of notorious beauty,
somehow slight. Envy was incomplete. She could not by stern
reasoning and close effort of imagination persuade herself that they
had been so deeply abroad as she. That they had ever utterly lost
themselves in foreign things. She forgot perpetually, in this glad
moment she again found that she had forgotten, having been
abroad. She forgot it when she read and thought by herself of other
parts of the world. Yet when, as now, anyone reminded her, she was
at once alight, weighed down by the sense of accomplishment, of
rich deeps of experience that would never leave her. Others were
bright and gay about their wanderings. But even while pining for
their free movement she was beside herself with longing to convey
to them the clear deep sense they seemed to lack of what they were
doing. The wonder of it. She talked to them about Switzerland,
where they had already been. It was for her the unattainable ideal
of a holiday. She resented it when he belittled the scenery, gathered
it up in a few phrases and offered any good gorge in the Ardennes
as an alternative. It was not true. He was entranced with
Switzerland. It was the protuberance of the back of his head that
made him oppose. And his repudiation of any form of expression
that did not jest. She sought and found a weapon. To go to
Switzerland in the summer was not to go. She had suddenly
remembered all she had heard about Swiss winters. Switzerland in
the summer was an oleograph. In winter an engraving. That
impressed him. And when she had described all she remembered,
she had forgotten she had not been. They had forgotten. They had
come into her experience as it looked to herself. Their questions
went on, turned to her life in London. She was besieged by things to
communicate, going on and on, wondering all the time where the
interest lay, in remote people, most of them perceived only once and
remembered once as speech, yet feeling it, and knowing that they
felt it. There was a clue, some clue to some essential thing, in her
mood. Suddenly she awoke to see them sitting propped close
against each other, his cheek cushioned on her crown of hair, both of
them blinking beseechingly towards her.
“How long,” she raged, “have you been sitting there cursing me?”
“Not been cursing, Miriam. You’ve been interesting, no end. But
there’s a thing, Miriam, an awful thing called tomorrow morning.”
“Is it late?” The appalling, the utter and everywhere appalling
scrappiness of social life....
“Not for you, Miriam. We’re poor things. We envy. We can’t
compete with your appetite, your disgraceful young appetite for late
hours.”
“Things always end just as they’re beginning.”
“Things end, Miriam, so that other things may begin.”
She roused herself to give battle. But Alma drifted between, crying
gaily that there was tomorrow. A good strong tomorrow. Warranted
to stand hard wear.
“And turn; and take a dye when you’re tired of the colour.”
 He laughed, really amused? Or crediting her with an attempt to
talk in a code?
“A tomorrow that will wear forever and make a petticoat
afterwards.”
He laughed again. Quite simply. He had not heard that old jest.
Seemed never to have heard the old family jests. Seemed to have
grown up without jests.... Tomorrow, unless no one came, would not
be like today.

The morning offered a blissful eternity before lunch. She had

wakened drowsy with strength and the apprehension of good, and
gone through breakfast like a sleepwalker, playing her part without
cost, independent of sight and hearing and thought. Successful.
Dreamily watching a play, taking a part inaudibly dictated, without
effort, seeing it turn into the chief part, more and more turned over
to her as she lay still in the hands of the invisible prompter;
withdrawn in an exploration of the features of this state of being
that nothing could reach or disturb. If, this time, she could discover
its secret, she would be launched in it forever.
Back in her room she prepared swiftly to go out and meet the day
in the open; all the world, waiting in the happy garden.... Through
the house-stillness sounded three single downward-stepping notes
... the first phrase of the seventh symphony.... Perfect. Eternity
stating itself in the stillness. He knew it, choosing just this thing to
play to himself, alone; living in space alone, at one with everybody,
as everyone was, the moment life allowed. Beethoven’s perfect
expression of the perfection of life, first thing in the morning.
Morning stillness; single dreaming notes that blossomed in it and left
it undisturbed; moved on into a pattern and then stood linked
together in a single perfect chord. Another pattern in the same
simple notes and another chord. Dainty little chords bowing to each
other; gentle gestures that gradually became an angelic little dance
through which presently a song leapt forth, the single opening notes
brought back, caught up and swept into song pealing rapturously
out.
He was revealing himself as he was when alone, admitting
Beethoven’s vision of life as well as seeing the marvellous things
Beethoven did with his themes? But he liked best the slamming,
hee-hawing rollick of the last movement.... Because it did so much
with a theme that was almost nothing.... Bang, toodle-oodle-oodle,
Bang, toodle-oodle-oodle, Bang toodle-oodle-oodle-oo. A lumpish
phrase; a Clementi finger exercise played suddenly in startling
fortissimo by an impatient schoolboy; smashed out with the full force
of the orchestra, taken up, slammed here and there, up and down,
by a leaping, plunging, heavy hoofed pantaloon, approving each
variation with loud guffaws.... The sly swift dig-in-the-ribs of the
sudden pianissimos....
To watch a shape adds interest to listening. But something
disappears in listening with the form put first. Hearing only form is a
kind of perfect happiness. But in coming back there is a reproach; as
if it had been a kind of truancy.... People who care only for form
think themselves superior. Then there is something wrong with
them.
On the landing table a letter lay waiting for the post. She passed
by, gladly not caring to glance. But a tingling in her shoulders drew
her back. She had reached the garden door. The music now pouring
busily through from the next room urged her forward. But once
outside she would have become a party to bright reasonableness, a
foolish frontage, caricatured from behind. She fled back along her
path to music that was once more the promise of joy ... to read the
address of one of Alma’s tradespeople, a distasteful reminder of the
wheels of dull work perpetually running under the surface of beauty.
But this morning it would not attain her.... It was not Alma’s hand,
but the small running shape like a scroll, each part a tiny perfection.
She bent over it. Miss Edna Prout.... This, then, was what she had
come back to find; poison for the day. The house was silent as a
desert; empty, swept clear of life. The roomful of music was in
another world. Alone in it, he had written to her and then sat down,
thinking of her, to his music.
Complications are enlivening.... Within the sunlight, in the great
spread of glistening sea, in the touch of the free air and the look of
the things set down on the bench there was a lively intensity. A
demand for search; for a thought that would obliterate the smear on
the blue and gold of the day. The thought had been there even at
the moment of shock. The following tumult was the effort to find it.
To get round behind the shock and slay it before it could slay. To
agree. That was the answer. Not to care. To show how much you
care by deliberately not caring? People show disapproval of their
own actions by defending them. By deliberately not hiding or
defending them, they show off a version of their actions. That they
don’t themselves accept.
Meantime everything passes. There are always the powerful
intervals. Meetings, and then intervals in which other things come up
and life speaks directly, to the individual.... Except for married
people. Who are all a little absurd, to themselves and to all other
married people. That is why they always talk so hard when two
couples are together? To cover the din of their thoughts.... Their
marriage was a success without being an exception to the rule that
all marriages are failures, as he said. Why are they failures? Science,
the way of thinking and writing that makes everybody seem small, in
all these new books. Biology, Darwin. The way men, who have no
inner convictions, no self, fasten upon an idea and let it describe life
for them. Always a new idea. Always describing and destroying,
filtering down, as time goes on to quite simple people, poisoning
their lives, because men must have a formula. Men are gossips.
Science is ... cosmic scandalmongering.
Science is Cosmic Scandalmongering. Perhaps that might do for
the House of Lords. But those old fogies are not particularly
scientific. They quote the Classics. The same thing. Club gossip.
Centuries of unopposed masculine gossip about the universe.
Years ago he said there will be no more him and her, the novels of
the future will be clear of all that.... Poetry nothing. Religion nothing.
Women a biological contrivance. And now. Women still a sort of
attachment to life, useful, or delightful ... the “civilised women of the
future” to be either bright obedient assistants or providers of illusion
for times of leisure. Two kinds, neatly arranged, each having only
one type of experience, while men have both, and their work, into
which women can only come as Hindus, obediently carrying out
tasks set by men, dressed in uniform, deliberately sexless and
deferential. How can anyone feel romantic about him? Alma. But
that is the real old-fashioned romance of everyday, from her
girlhood. Hidden through loyalty to his shifting man’s ideas? Half
convinced by them? How can people be romantic impermanently,
just now and again?
Romance is solitary and permanent. Always there. In everybody.
That is why the things one hears about people are like stories, not
referring to life. Why I always forget them when the people
themselves are there. Or believe, when they talk of their
experiences, that they misread them. I can’t believe even now in the
reality of any of his experiences. But then I don’t believe in the
experiences of anyone, except a few people who have left sayings I
know are true.... Everything else, all the expressions, history and
legend and novels and science and everybody’s talk, seems
irrelevant. That’s why I don’t want experience, not to be caught into
the ways of doing and being that drive away solitude, the marvellous
quiet sense of life at first hand.... But he knows that too. “Life drags
one along by the hair shrieking protests at every yard.”
“Hullo! What is she doing all alone?”
The surrounding scene that had gradually faded, leaving her eyes
searching in the past for the prospect she could never quite recall,
shone forth again.
“I’ve got to do a review.”
“What’s the book?”
“When you are in France, does a French river look different to
you; French?”
“No, Miriam. It—doesn’t look different.”
He glanced for a moment shaggily from point to point of the sunlit
scene and sat companionably down, turned towards her with a smile
at her discomfiture. “What’s the book, Miriam? It’s jolly down here.
We’ll have some chairs. Yes? You can’t write on a bench.”
He was gone. Meaning to come back. In the midst of the morning;
in the midst of his preoccupations sociably at leisure. She felt herself
sink into indifference. The unique opportunity was offering itself in
vain. He came back just as she had begun to imagine him caught,
up at the house, by a change of impulse. Or perhaps an unexpected
guest.
“What’s the review?”
“The House of Lords.”
“Read it?”
“I can’t. It’s all post hoc.”
“Then you’ve read it.”
“I haven’t read it. I’ve only sniffed the first page.”
“That’s enough. Glance at the conclusion. Get your statement,
three points; that’ll run you through a thousand words. Look here—
shall I write it for you?”
“I’ve got fifty ideas,” she said beginning to write.
“That’s too many, Miriam. That’s the trouble with you. You’ve got
too many ideas. You’re messing up your mind, quite a good mind,
with too swift a succession of ideas.” She wrote busily on, drinking in
his elaboration of his view of the state of her mind. “H’m,” he
concluded, stopping suddenly; but she read in the sound no
intention of breaking away because she had nothing to say to him.
He was watching, in some way interested. He sat back in his chair;
sympathetically withheld. Actually deferring to her work....
She tore off the finished page and transfixed it on the grass with a
hatpin. Her pencil flew. The statement was finished and leading to
another. Perhaps he was right about three ideas. A good shape. The
last must come from the book. She would have to consult it. No. It
should be left till later. Her second page joined the first. It was
incredible that he should be sitting there inactive, obliterated by her
work.
She tore off the third sheet and dropped her pencil on the grass.
“Finished? Three sheets in less than twenty minutes. How do you
do it, Miriam?”
 “It’ll do. But I shall have to copy it. I’ve resisted the temptation to
say what I think about the House of Curmudgeons. Trace it back to
the First Curmudgeon. Yet it seems somehow wrong to write in the
air, so currently. The first time I did a review, of a bad little book on
Whitman, I spent a fortnight of evenings reading.”
“You began at the Creation. Said everything you had to say about
the history of mankind.”
“I went nearly mad with responsibility and the awfulness of
discovering the way words express almost nothing at all.”
“It’s not quite so bad as that. You’ve come on no end though, you
know. The last two or three have been astonishingly good. You’re
not creative. You’ve got a good sound mind, a good style and a
curious intense critical perception. You’ll be a critic. But writing,
Miriam, should be done with a pen. Can’t call yourself a writer till
you do it direct.”
“How can I write with a pen, in bed, on my knee, at midnight or
dawn?”
“A fountain pen?”
“No one can write with a fountain pen.”
“Quite a number of us do. Quite a number of not altogether
unsuccessful little writers, Miriam.”
“Well, it’s wrong. How can thought or anything, well thought
perhaps can, which doesn’t matter and nobody really cares about,
wait a minute, nothing else can come through a hand whose fingers
are held stiffly apart by a fat slippery barrel. A writing machine. A
quill would be the thing, with a fine flourishing tail. But it is too
important. It squeaks out an important sense of writing, makes
people too objective, so that it’s as much a man’s pen, a mechanical,
see life steadily and see it whole (when nobody knows what life is)
man’s view sort of implement as a fountain pen. A pen should be
thin, not disturbing the hand, and the nib flexible and silent, with up
and down strokes. Fountain pen writing is like ... democracy.”
“Why not go back to clay tablets?”
“Machine-made things are dead things.”
“You came down here by train, Miriam.”
“I ought to have flown.”
 “You’ll fly yet. No. Perhaps you won’t. When your dead people
have solved the problem, you’ll be found weeping over the rusty
skeleton of a locomotive.”
“I don’t mean Lilienfeld and Maxim. I can be fearfully interested in
all that when I think of it. But to the people who do not see the
beginning of flying it won’t seem wonderful. It won’t change
anything.”
“It’ll change, Miriam, pretty well everything. And if you don’t mean
Lilienfeld and Maxim what do you mean?”
“Well, by inventing the telephone we’ve damaged the chances of
telepathy.”
“Nonsense, Miriam. You’re suffering from too much Taylor.”
“The most striking thing about Taylor is that he does not want to
develop his powers.”
“What powers?”
“The things in him that have made him discover things that you
admit are true; that make you interested in his little paper.”
“They’re not right you know about their phosphoric bank; energy
is not a simple calculable affair.”
“Now here’s a strange thing. That time you met them, the first
thing you said when they’d gone, was what’s wrong with them? And
the next time I met them they said there’s something wrong with
him. The truth is you are polar opposites and have everything to
learn from each other.”
“Elizabeth Snowden Poole.”
“Yes. And without him no one would have heard of her. No one
understood. And now psychology is going absolutely her way. In fifty
years’ time her books will be as clear as daylight.”
“Damned obstructive classics. That’s what all our books will be.
But I’ll give you Mrs. Poole. Mrs. Poole is a very wonderful lady.
She’s the unprecedented.”
“There you are. Then you must admit the Taylors.”
“I’m not so sure about your little Taylors. There’s nothing to be
said, you know, for just going about not doing things.”
“They are wonderful. Their atmosphere is the freest I know.”
 “I envy you your enthusiasms, Miriam. Even your misplaced
enthusiasms.”
“You go there, worn out, at the end of the day, and have to walk,
after a long tram-ride through the wrong part of London, along raw
new roads, dark little houses on either side, solid, without a single
break, darkness, a street-lamp, more darkness, another lamp; and
something in the air that lets you down and down. Partly the
thought of these streets increasing, all the time, all over London. Yet
when someone said walking home after a good evening at the
Taylors’ that the thought of having to settle down in one of those
houses made him feel suicidal, I felt he was wrong; and saw them,
from inside, bright and big; people’s homes.”
“They’re not big, Miriam. You wanted to marry him.”
“Good Heavens. An Adam’s apple, sloping shoulders and a
Cockney accent.”
“I have a Cockney accent, Miriam.”
“...”
“Don’t go about classifying with your ears. People, you know, are
very much alike.”
“They’re utterly different.”
“Your vanity. Go on with your Taylors.”
“They are very much like other people.”
“With my Taylors. I’m interested; really.”
“Well, suddenly you are in their kitchen. White walls and
aluminium and a smell of fruit. Do you know the smell of root
vegetables cooking slowly in a casserole?”
“I’ll imagine it. Right. Where are the Taylors?”
“You are all standing about. Happy and undisturbed. None of that
feeling of darkness and strangeness and the need for a fresh
beginning. Tranquillity. As if someone had gone away.”
“The devil; exorcised, poor dear.”
“No but glorious. Making everyone move like a song. And talk. You
are all, at once, bursting with talk. All over the flat, in and out of the
rooms. George washing up all the time, wandering about with a dish
and a cloth and Dora probably doing her hair in a dressing-gown,
and cooking. It’s the only place where I can talk exhausted and
starving.”
“What do you talk about?”
“Everything. We find ourselves sitting in the bathroom, engrossed
—long speeches—they talk to each other, like strangers talking
intimately on a ’bus. Then something boils over and we all drift back
to the kitchen. Left to herself Dora would go on forever and sit down
to a few walnuts at midnight.”
“Mary.”
“But she is an absolutely perfect cook. An artist. She invents and
experiments. But he has a feminine consciousness, though he’s a
most manly little man with a head like Beethoven. So he’s practical.
Meaning he feels with his nerves and has a perfect sympathetic
imagination. So presently we are all sitting down to a meal and the
evening begins to look short. And yet endless. With them everything
feels endless; the present I mean. They are so immediately alive.
Everything and everybody is abolished. We do abolish them I assure
you. And a new world is there. You feel language changing, every
word moving, changed, into the new world. But, when their friends
come in the evening, weird people, real cranks, it disappears. They
all seem to be attacking things they don’t understand. I gradually
become an old-fashioned Conservative. But the evening is
wonderful. None of these people mind how far or how late they
walk. And it goes on till the small hours.”
“You’re getting your college time with these little people.”
“No. I’m easily the most stupidly cultured person there.”
“Then you’re feeding your vanity.”
“I’m not. Even the charlatans make me feel ashamed of my sham
advantage. No; the thing that is most wonderful about those
Tuesdays is waking up utterly worn out, having a breakfast of cold
fruit in the cold grey morning, a rush for the train, a last sight of the
Taylors as they go off into the London Bridge crowd and then
suddenly feeling utterly refreshed. They do too. It’s an effect we
have on each other.”
“How did you come across them?”
 “Michael. Reads Reynolds’s. A notice of a meeting of London
Tolstoyans. We rushed out in the pouring rain to the Edgware Road
and found nothing at the address but a barred up corner shop-front.
Michael wanted to go home. I told him to go and stood staring at
the shop waiting for it to turn into the Tolstoyans. I knew it would. It
did. Just as Michael was almost screaming in the middle of the road,
I turned down a side street and found a doorway, a bead of gas
shining inside just showing a stone staircase. We crept up and found
a bare room, almost in darkness, a small gas jet, and a few rows of
kitchen chairs and a few people sitting scattered about. A young
man at a piano picked out a few bars of Grieg and played them over
and over again. Then the meeting began. Dora, reading a paper on
Tolstoy’s ideas. Well, I felt I was hearing the whole truth spoken
aloud for the first time.... But oh the discussion.... A gaunt man got
up and began to rail at everything, going on till George gently asked
him to keep to the subject. He raved then about some self-help book
he had read. Quite incoherent; and convincing. Then the young man
at the piano made a long speech about hitching your waggon to a
star and at the end of it a tall woman, so old that she could hardly
stand, stood up and chanted, in a deep laughing voice, Waggons
and Stars. Waggons and stars. Today I am a waggon. Tomorrow a
star. I’m reminded of the societies who look after young women.
Meet them with a cup of tea, call a cab, put the young woman and
the cup of tea into the cab. Am I to watch my brother’s blunderings?
No. I am his lover. Then he becomes a star. And I am a star. Then an
awful man, very broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, with a low
forehead and a sweeping moustache bounded up and shouted; I am
a God! You, madam, are a goddess! Tolstoy is over-civilised! That’s
why he loves the godlike peasant. All metaphysicians, artists and
pious people are sensualists. All living in unnatural excesses. The
Zulu is a god. How many women in filthy London can nurse their
children? What is a woman? Children. What is the glory of man?
Unimaginable to town slaves. They go through life ignorant of
manhood, and the metaphysicians wallow in pleasures. Men and
women are divine. There is no other divinity. Let them not sell their
godhead for filthy food and rotting houses and moloch factories.
What stands in the way? The pious people, the artists and the
metaphysicians.... Then a gentleman, in spectacles at the back,
quietly said that Tolstoy’s ideas were eclectic and could never apply
generally.... Of course he was right, but it doesn’t make Tolstoy any
the less true. And you know when I hear all these convincing
socialists planning things that really would make the world more
comfortable, they always in the end seem ignorant of humanity;
always behind them I see little Taylor, unanswerable, standing for
more difficult deep-rooted individual things. It’s individuals who must
change, one by one.”
“Socialism will give the individual his chance.”
“Yes, I know. I agree in a way. You’ve shown me all that. I know
environment and ways of thinking do partly make people. But Taylor
makes socialism, even when its arguments floor him, look such a
feathery, passing thing.”
“You stand firm, Miriam. Socialism isn’t feathery. You’re feathery.
One thinks you’re there and suddenly finds you playing on the other
side of the field.”
“It’s the fact that socialism is a side that makes it look so shaky.
And then there’s Reich; an absolute blaze of light ... on the outside
side of things.”
“Not a blaze of anything, my dear Miriam ... a poor, hard-working,
popular lecturer.”
“Everybody in London is listening. Hearing the most illuminating
things.”
“What do they illuminate?”
“Ourselves. The English. Continuing Buckle. He’s got a clear cool
hard unprejudiced foreign mind.”
“Your foreigners, Miriam. They haven’t the monopoly of
intelligence.”
“I know. You think the English are the people. But so does Reich.
Really he would interest you. You must let me tell you his idea. Just
the shape of it. Badly. He puts it so well that you know he has
something up his sleeve. He has. He’s a Hungarian patriot. That is
his inspiration. That England shall save Europe, and therefore
Hungary, from the Germans. You must let me just tell you without
interrupting. Two minutes.”
“I’m intelligent, Miriam. You’re intelligent. You have distinction of
mind. But a really surprising lack of expression you know. You
misrepresent yourself most tremendously.”
“You mean I haven’t a voice, that way of talking about things that
makes one know people don’t believe what they say and are
thinking most about the way they are talking. Bah.”
“Clear thought makes clear speech.”
“Well. Reich says that history so far is always one thing. The
Hellenisation of Europe.... The Greeks were the first to evolve
universal ideals. Which were passed on. Through two channels. Law-
giving Rome. And the Roman church; Paul, who had made
Christianity a universal working scheme. So Europe has been
Hellenised. And the Hellenisation of the rest of the world will be
through its Europeanisation. The enemy to this is the rude
materialistic modern Germany. The only hope, England. Which he
calls a nation of ignorant specialists, ignorant of history; believing
only in race, which doesn’t exist—a blindfold humanitarian giant,
utterly unaware that other people are growing up in Europe and
have the use of their eyes. The French don’t want to do anything
outside their large pleasant home. They are the sedentary Greeks;
townspeople. The English are Romans, official, just, inartistic. Good
colonists, not intrinsically, but because they send so much of their
best away from their little home. A child can see that the English and
Americans care less for money than any people in the western
world, are adventurous and wandering and improvident; the only
people with ideals and a sense of the future. Inartistic....”
“Geography he calls the ground symphony of history, but nothing
more, or Ireland would play first fiddle in Great Britain. The rest is
having to fight for your life and being visited by your neighbours.
England has attracted thousands of brilliant foreigners, who have
made her, including the Scotch, who until they became foreigners in
England were nothing. And the foreigner of foreigners is the
permanently alien Jew. And the genius of all geniuses Loyola,
because he made all his followers permanent aliens. Countries
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