Interim: Pilgrimage, Volume 5

by Dorothy M. Richardson

1

A day of blazing heat changed the season suddenly. Flat threatening sunlight travelled round the house. The shadowy sun-blinded flower-scented waiting-room held street-baked patients in its deep armchairs. Some of them were languid. But none of them suffered. They kept their freshness and freedom from exhaustion by living away from toil and grimy heat; in cool clothes, moving swiftly through moving air in carriages and holland-blinded hansoms; having ices in expensive shade; being waited on in the cool depths of west-end houses; their lives disturbed only by occasional dentistry. The lean dark patients were like lizards, lively and darting and active even in the sweltering heat.

Miriam’s sunless room was cool all day. Through her grey window she could see the sunlight pouring over the jutting windows of Mr. Leyton’s small room and reflected in the grimy sheen of the frosted windows of the den. Her day’s work was unreal, as easy as a dream. All about her were open sunlit days that her summer could not bring, and that yet were hers as she moved amongst them; a leaf dropped in the hall, the sight of a summer dress, summer light coming through wide-open windows took her out into them. Summer would never come again in the old way, but it set her free from cold, and let her move about unhampered in the summers of the past. Summer was happiness.... Individual things were straws on the stream of summer happiness.

At tea time in the den there was a darkening hush. It was like a guest, turning everyone’s attention to itself, abolishing differences, setting free unexpected sympathies. Everyone spoke of the coming storm and looked beautiful in speaking. The day’s work was discussed as if in the presence of an unseen guest.

She set out from the house of friends to meet the darkened daylight ... perhaps the sudden tapping of thunder-drops upon her thin blouse. The street was a livid grey, brilliant with hidden sunlight.

The present can be judged by the part of the past it brings up. If the present brings up the happiness of the past, the present is happy.

Purgatory. The waters of Lethe and Eunoe ‘forgetfulness and sweet memory’; and then Heaven. The Catholics are right about expiation. If you are happy in the present something is being expiated. If life contains moments of paradise you must be in purgatory looking across the vale of Asphodel. You can’t be in hell.... Yet hell would not be hell without a knowledge of heaven. If once you’ve been in heaven you can never escape. Yet Dante believed in everlasting punishment.

Bathing in the waters of Lethe and Eunoe unworthily is drinking one’s own damnation. But happiness crops up before one can prevent it. Perhaps happiness is one long sin, piling up a bill.... It is my secret companion. Waiting at the end of every dark passage. I did not make myself. I can’t help it.

Brilliant ... brilliant; and someone was seeing it. There was no thunderstorm, no clouds or pink edges on the brilliant copper grey. She wandered on down the road hemmed by flaring green. The invisible sun was everywhere. There was no air, nothing to hold her body separate from the scene. The grey brilliance of the sky was upon the pavement and in the green of the park, making mauve shadows between the trees and a mist of mauve amongst the further green. The high house fronts stood out against the grey, eastern-white, frilled below with new-made green, sprouting motionlessly as you looked ... white plaster houses against the blue of the Mediterranean, grey mimosa trees, green-feathered lilac of wisteria. Between the houses and the park the road glared wooden grey, dark, baked grey, edged with the shadowless stone grey of the pavement. Summer. Eternity showing....

The Euston Road was a narrow hot channel of noise and unbreathable odours, the dusty exhausting cruelty of the London summer, leading on to the feathery green floored woods of Endsleigh Gardens edged by grey house fronts, and ending in the cool stone of St. Pancras Church.

In the twilit dining-room one’s body was like a hot sun throbbing in cool dark air, ringed by cool walls holding darkness in far corners; coolness poured out through the wide-open windows towards the rain-cool grey facades of the opposite houses, cool and cool until the throbbing ceased.

All the forms seated round the table were beautiful; far-away and secret and separate, each oneself set in the coming of summer, unconscious. One soul. Summer is the soul of man. Through all the past months they had been the waiting guests of summer.

The pain of trying to get back into the moment of the first vision of spring, the perfect moment before the thought came that spring was going on in the country unseen, was over. The moment came back of itself ... the green flush in the squares, the ripples of emerald fringed pink geraniums along the balconies of white houses.

After dinner Miriam left the dining-room, driven joyfully forth, remaining behind, floating and drifting happily about, united with everyone in the room as her feet carried her step by step without destination, going everywhere, up through the staircase twilight....

The drawing-room was filled with saffron light, filtering in through the curtains hanging motionless before the high French windows. Within the air of the room, just inside the faint smell of dusty upholstery was the peace of the new found summer. Mrs. Bailey’s gift. There had been no peace of summer last year in her stifling garret. This year the summer was with her, in the house where she was. Far away within the peace of the room was the evening of a hot summer day at Waldstrasse, the girls sitting about, beautiful featureless forms together forever in the blissful twilight of the cool saal and sitting in its little summer house Ulrica, everybody, her dark delicate profile lifted towards the garden, her unconscious pearly beauty grouped against the undisturbing presence of Fraulein Pfaff. Miriam turned to the near window and peered through the thick mesh of the smoke-yellowed lace curtain. Behind it the french window stood ajar. Drawing aside the thick dust-smelling lace she stepped out and drew the door to behind her. There were shabby drawing-room chairs standing in an irregular row on the dirty grey stone, railed by a balustrade of dark maroon painted iron railings almost colourless with black grime. But the elastic outer air was there and away at the end of the street a great gold pink glow stood above and showed through the feathery upper branches of the trees in Endsleigh Gardens. A number of people must have been sitting out before dinner. That was part of their dinner-time happiness. Presently some of them would come back. She scanned the disposition of the chairs. The little comfortable circular velvet chair stood in the middle of the row, conversationally facing the high-backed wicker chair. The other chairs were the small stiff velvet-seated ones. The one at the north end of the balcony could be turned towards the glowing sky with its back to the rest of the balcony. She reached and turned it and sat down. The opposite houses with their balconies on which groups were already forming stood sideways, lost beyond the rim of her glasses. The balcony of the next house was empty; there was nothing between her and the vista of green feathering up into the intense gold-rose glow.... She could come here every night ... filling her life with green peace; preparing for the stifling heat of the nights in her garret. This year, with dinner in the cool dining-room and the balcony for the evening, the summer would not be so unbearable. She sat still, lifted out into garden freshness.... Benediction.... People were stepping out on to the balcony behind her, remarking on the beauty of the evening, their voices new and small in the outer air.... If she never came out again this summer would be different. It had begun differently. She knew what lay ahead and could be prepared for it.

She would find coolness at the heart of the swelter of London if she could keep a tranquil mind. The coolness at the heart of the central swelter was wonderful life, from moment to moment, pure life. To go forward now, from this moment, alive, keeping alive, through the London summer. Even to go away for holidays would be to break up the wonder, to snap the secret clue and lose the secret life....

The rosy gold was deepening and spreading.

Miriam found herself rested as if by sleep. It seemed as if she had been sitting in the stillness for a time that was longer than the whole of the working day. To recover like this every day ... to have at the end of every day a cool solid clear head and rested limbs and the feeling that the strain of work was so far away that it could never return. The tireless sense of morning and new day that came in moving from part to part of her London evenings, and strongest of all at the end of a long evening, going on from a lecture or a theatre to endless leisure, reading, the happy gaslight over her book under the sloping roof, always left her in the morning unwilling to get up, and made the beginning of the day horrible with languor and breakfast a scramble, taken to the accompaniment of guilty listening for the striking of nine o’clock from St. Pancras church, and the angry sense of Mr. Hancock already arriving cool and grey clad at the morning door of Wimpole Street. To-night, going strong and steady to her hot room, sleep would be silvery cool. She would wake early and fresh, and surprise them all at Wimpole Street arriving early and serene after a leisurely breakfast.

The rosy light shone into far-away scenes with distant friends. They came into her mind rapidly one by one, and stayed grouped in a radiance, sharper and clearer than in experience. She recalled scenes that had left a sting, something still to be answered. She saw where she had failed; her friends saw what she had meant, in some secret unconscious part of them that was turned away from the world; in their thoughts with themselves when they were alone. Her own judgments, sharply poised in memory upon the end of some small incident, reversed themselves, dropped meaningless, returned reinforced, went forward, towards some clearer understanding. Her friends drifted forward, coming too near, as if in competition for some central place. To every claim, she offered her evening sky as a full answer. The many forms remained, grouped, like an audience, confronted by the evening.

The gold was fading, a soft mistiness spreading through the deepening rose, making the leafage darker and more opaque. Presently the sky would be mother-of-pearl above a soft dark mass and then pure evening grey outlining the dark feathery tree tops of a London square turning to green below in the lamplight, sinking to sleep, deeply breathing out its freshness to meet the freshness pouring through the streets from the neighbouring squares. Freshness would steal over the outside walls of the houses already cool within. Only in the garrets would the sultry day remain under the slowly cooling roofs.

There was still a pale light flowing into the dusk of the garret. It must be only about nine o’clock ... the gas flared out making a winter brilliance ... Four sermons on Dante.... Kuenen’s Life of Dante ... Gemma Donati, Gemma, busily making puddings in the world lit by the light of the Mystic Rose; swept away by the rush of words ... a stout Italian woman ... Gemma; Bayatrichay ... they were bound to reach music ... a silent Italian woman in a hot kitchen scolding, left out of the mystic rose ... Lourdes ... Le Nabab ... atroce comédie de bonheur conjugale sans relâche ... the Frenchman expressing what the Englishman only thinks ... “the wife” ... I met my WIFE! ... red nose and check trousers, smoky self-indulgent married man, all the self-indulgent married men in the audience guffawing ... “You must be ready to face being taken for granted, you must hide your troubles, learn to say nothing of your unnoticed exhausting toil, wear a smile above the heart that you believe is breaking; stand steady in face of the shipwreck of all your dreams. Remember that although he does not know it, in spite of all his apparent oblivion and neglect, if you fail, his universe crumbles” ... men live their childish ignorant lives on a foundation of pain and exhaustion. Down in the fevered life of pain and exhaustion there is a deep certainty. There is no deep certainty in the lives of men. If there were they would not be forever talking with conceited guilty lips as if something were waiting if they stopped, to spring on them from behind.... The evolution of the Idea of God.... I have forgotten what that is about ... a picture of a sort of Madonna ... corn goddess, with a child and sheaves of corn.... The Mechanism of Thought.... Thirty Sane Criticisms.... Critique de la Pensée Moderne; traduit par H. Navray, Mercure de France.... How did he begin? Where was he when he came out and began saying everybody was wrong? How did he get to know about it all? She took down a volume unwillingly ... there was something being lost, something waiting within the quiet air of the room that would be gone if she read. It was not too late. Why did men write books? Modern men? The book was open. Her eyes scanned unwillingly. Fabric. How did he find his words. No one had ever said fabric about anything. It made the page alive ... a woven carpet, on one side a beautiful glowing pattern, on the other dull stringy harshness ... there is a dangerous looseness ... her heart began beating apprehensively. The room was dead about her. She sat down tense, and read the sentence through. There is a dangerous looseness in the fabric of our minds. She imagined the words spoken, looseness was ugly, making the mouth ugly in speech. There is a looseness in the fabric of our minds. That is what he would have said in conversation, looking nowhere and waiting to floor an objection. There is a dangerous, he had written. That introduced another idea. You were not supposed to notice that there were two statements, but to read smoothly on, accepting. It was deliberate. Put in deliberately to frighten you into reading more. Dangerous. The adjective in the sentence, personal, a matter of opinion. People who read the books do not think about adjectives. They like them. Conversation is adjectives! ... all the worry of conversation is because people use adjectives and rush on.... But you can’t describe ... but dangerous is not a descriptive adjective ... there is a twisted looseness, that describes ... that is Saxon ... Abendmahl ... dangerous, French ... the Prince of Wales uses the elegant Norman idiom ... dangerous is an idea, the language of ideas. It expresses nothing but an opinion about life ... a threat daring you to disagree. Dangerous to what?... Man is a badly made machine ... an oculist could improve upon the human eye ... and the mind wrong in some way too ... logic is a cheap arithmetic. Imagination. What is imagination? Is it his imagination that has found out that mind is loose? Is not imagination mind? It is his imaginative mind. A special kind of mind. But if mind discovers that mind is unreliable, its conclusion is also unreliable. That’s logic ... Barbara. All Mind is unreliable. Man is mind, therefore man is unreliable.... Then it is useless to try and know anything ... books go on ... he has invented imagination. Images. Fabric. But he did not invent dangerous. That is cheek. By this sin fell the angels. Perhaps he is a fallen angel. I was right when I told Eve I had sold my soul to the devil.... “Quite a good afterglow” and then wheeling alertly about to capture and restate some thread ... and then later, finding you still looking. “M’yes; a fine ... fuliginous ... pink ... God’s had a strawberry ice for supper” ... endless inexhaustible objections ... a cold grim scientific world ... Alma knew it. In that clear bright house with the satisfying furniture ... now let’s all make Buddhas. Let’s see who can make the best Buddha.... Away from them you could forget; but it was going on all the time ... somehow ahead of everything else that was going on.... She got up and replaced the book. It was on her shelf; a signed copy; extraordinary. It was an extraordinary privilege. No one else could write books like that; no one else knew so much about everything. Right or wrong it was impossible to give up hearing all he had to say ... and they were kind, alive to one’s life in a way other people were not....

She strolled to the window, finding renewal in the familiar creaking of her floor in the house, here.... She went back across the happy creaking and turned out the gas and came again to the window. The sky was dark enough to show a brilliant star; here and there in the darkness of the opposite house fronts was an oblong of golden light. The faint blue light coming up from the street lit up the outer edges of the grey stone window-sills. The air under the wooden roof of the window space was almost as close as it was under the immense height of upper coolness.... Down at the end of the road were the lamplit green trees; plane-tree shadows on the narrow pavement. She put on her hat in the dark.

Crossing the roadway to reach the narrow strip of pavement running along under the trees she saw single dark figures standing at intervals against the brilliant lamplit green and swerved back to the wide pavement. She had forgotten they would be there. They stood like sentinels.... Behind them the lamplit green flared feverishly.... In the shadow of St. Pancras church there were others, small and black in a desert ... lost quickly in the great shadow where the passers-by moved swiftly through from light to light. Out in the Euston Road along the pavements shadowed by trees and left in darkness by the high spindling shaded candles of the lamps along the centre of the roadway, they came walking, a foreign walk, steadily slow and wavy and expressive, here and there amongst the shapeless expressionless forms of the London wayfarers. The high stone entrance of Euston Station shone white across the way. Anyone can go into a station. Within the entrance gravelled darkness opened out on either side. Silence all round and ahead where silent buildings had here and there a lit window. Where was the station? Immense London darkness and stillness alone and deserted like a country place at night, just beyond the noises of the Euston Road. A murder might happen here. The cry of an engine sounded, muffled and far away. Just ahead in the centre of the approaching wide mass of building was a wide dimly lit stone archway. The rattle of a hansom sounded from an open space beyond. Its light appeared swaying swiftly forward and lit the archway. The hansom bowled through in startling silence, nothing but the jingle and dumb leathery rattle of the harness, and passed, the plonking of the horse’s hoofs and the swift slur of the wheels sounding out again in the open space. The archway had little side pathways for passengers roofed by small arching extensions of the central arch ... indiarubber ... pavement to muffle ... the building was a hotel; Edwards daylight Family Hotel ... expensive people lodging just above the arch, travelling, coming to London, going away from London, with no thought of the dark secret neighbourhood. A courtyard opened out beyond the arch. It was not even yet the station. There was a road just ahead going right and left, with lamps; just in front to the left across the road a lit building with a frosted lower window and a clock ... a post office. Miriam went through the swing door into warm yellow gaslight. At the long counter people stood busily occupied or waiting their turn, with their backs to the dusty floor space, not noticing the grey space of dusty floor and the curious warm gleam of the light falling upon it from behind the iron grille along the counter. The clerks were fresh and serene and unhurried, making a steady quiet workaday feeling; late at night. It swung the day round, morning and evening together in the gaslit enclosure. She stood at the counter sharing the sense of affairs. She could be a customer for a penny stamp. Waiting outside was the walk back through the various darkness, the indiarubber pathway ... knowing her way.

She let herself into the hall with an air of returning from a hurried necessary errand. Beyond the mysterious Bailey curtains partly screening the passage to the front door she saw Dr. Hurd standing at the dining-room door; good night he laughed back into the room and turned, meeting her as she emerged into the light. He paused smiling. Here’s Miss Henderson he said into the room. Miriam was passing the door. Aren’t you coming in he urged smiling. Ho, I’ve just been to the post office said Miriam passing into the room. Ho, isn’t it a perfect evening she announced taking in Dr. Wayneflete standing tall with small bent pale face at the end of the table and the other two rising from their places by the fireside. Dr. Hurd closed the door and came and flopped down in the easy chair in front of the piano. I know you won’t sit here Miss Henderson. No Miss Henderson doesn’t care for cushions murmured Dr. von Heber at her side. Take this chair he pursued and sat near as she sat down in a little stiff chair facing the fireplace, Dr. Winchester subsiding a little behind her on the other side.

It’s a purfect evening murmured Dr. Wayneflete. Miriam turned and searched his white bent face. She had never seen him speaking in a room. The thought behind the white slightly bulging forehead was his own, Wayneflete, brilliant, keeping him apart; the little narrowing peak of livid white face, the green shadows about the small pale mouthing lips, the fact of his heart-disease and his Irish parentage were things that dared to approach and attach themselves to him; that people knew.

A purfect evening he repeated plucking gently at the threads of the table cloth. He would never originate a remark or ask a question except of patients or an engineer standing near some difficult machinery. He knew everything by just being about. He was head and shoulders above the other three. Delicate, of gentle blood and narrow fragile body; a strong spirit; impossible of approach by speech; everything she said would carry her away from him; perhaps he was already planning his escape. One day he would suddenly fall down, dead; young and unknown to anyone in the world, carrying away his mystery.

“Eleven o’clock.” She had shattered the silence he had built.

“You don’t call that late” said Dr. von Heber released and rushing to rescue her. He sat bland and square and simple beneath the coming long procession of years and days; but his firmly dimpled swift Canadian smile, brilliant with the flash of the flawless perfect arch of his strong even teeth brought past and future into the moment, giving them to the sudden charm of this meeting, referring back to that first evening by the table.

“Oh no; it’s frightfully early.”

“That’s a most delightful hyperbole.”

“I shall summons you for calling me an isosceles triangle.”

Dr. Wayneflete laughed too ... a small sound drowned by Dr. Hurd’s thwack on the arm of his chair as he flung back his head for his laugh.

“It has been wonderful to-day, don’t you think? Did you see the extraordinary light this afternoon?”

“Well no; we were all of us immured, but we were out this evening; we thought it the best specimen of London weather we’d struck so far.”

“There’s nothing whatever the matter with London weather. It’s perfect; the most perfect in the world.” Dr. Hurd resumed his shakings of laughter, restrained to listen. Dr. Winchester was sitting bent forward smiling dreamily.

“I know you won’t like me to call that a hyperbole, but you won’t quite expect me to say I unreservedly agree.”

“It isn’t a question of agreement or disagreement. It’s a simple fact.” Dr. Hurd again struck his chair and sat forward feeling for a handkerchief in a side pocket, his face a tearful grin turned upon Dr. von Heber.

“You are a loyal champion.”

“English weather does not want a champion. It’s so wonderful. Perhaps you are thinking of Italian skies and that sort of thing; in countries where the weather does not change or not suddenly; only at fixed seasons. That’s very nice in a way. You can make plans. But I know I should long for grey days and changes in the sky. A grey day is not melancholy; it’s exciting. You can see everything. The sun makes everything pale and blinds you.”

“There I think you mistaken. Nothing beautifies like sunlight, and if you’ve the sun behind you, you get the ahead prospect without being blinded.”

“I know what you mean; but I want both; for contrast perhaps; no, that’s silly; the grey days for their own sake, the misty atmosphere. Fog. I think a real London fog is perfection; everything and the shapes and outlines of things looming up only as you pass them. Wonderful.”

“Well, there you leave us behind. I can’t see anything either beautiful or in the least wonderful in your town fogs.”

“Quite so. A taste for town fog is an artificial taste. Town fog’s not a natural phenomenon. It’s just, town dirt.”

“I don’t care how it begins. It’s perfect. It makes the whole day an adventure even if you’re indoors. It’s perfect to have the light on and nothing to be seen outside but a copper glare. Outside is a glorious adventure in a new unknown world.... In a way all our weathers are that. In a way the weather’s enough, in itself, without anything else.”

“That seems to me a remarkable, a very extra-ordinairy point of view. You can’t in any circumstances make it a general defence of your climate. It’s a purely personal notion.”

“It isn’t. Even people who say they don’t like fogs are different; interested in the effect while it is on.”

“Uneasy, no doubt, like animals in a trap.”

“I refer to Miss Henderson’s extra-ordinairy valuation of weather as enough in itself. I consider that is one of the most extra-ordinairy points of view I ever heard stated.”

“No one can deny the quahl-ty of interest to the vagaries of your western European climut; from our point of view it’s all interest and no climut; ye can’t tell from day to day what season ye’ll be in and they all seem—stormy.”

“The seasons crop up all the year round, sometimes three in one day. That’s just the fascinating thing.”

“Quite so, we find that varry disturbing.”

“Our sudden changes of temperature keep us hardy.”

“That’s true; you’re a hardy people. Your weather suits you, beyond a doubt.”

“In Ireland, the weather changes every few minutes.”

“Hah, Wayneflete.”

“Granted. No doubt that assisted my parents to decide to leave; I don’t wonder at it.”

“You’re temperate. You’ve got the sea at a stone’s throw all round. You don’t have notable extremes. But there’s our trouble. Your extremes when they come ain’t arranged for. There’s no heat like your English heat, and my word your English houses in the winter’d take some beating.”

“You mean boarding-houses.”

“Not entirely. Though I admit your English hoames are unique in the matter of comfort. There’s nothing in the world like a real good English hoame. And not only in the matter of comfort.”

“Yes but look here von Heber. I know your fine English parlours with fine great fires to sit around, what they call ‘cosy’ over here, but my life why don’t they warm their corridors and sleeping rooms?”

“We don’t because it’s unhealthy. A cold bedroom keeps you hardy and you sleep better.”

“And not only warm them but light them. My word when they take you out of their warm parlours into cold corridors and land you in an ice-house with a little bit of a flickering candle.”

“You’re not tempted to read in bed and you go to sleep in healthy bracing air; it keeps you hardy.”

“Do you never read after you retire?”

“I do; and have the gas and a lamp to keep warm. I like warm rooms and I think in many ways it must be lovely to be able to wear muslin dresses indoors in snowy weather and put on a fur coat to go out; but I should be sorry to see the American warm house idea introduced into England.”

“You’re willing to be inconsistent then.”

“Consistency is the something of something minds.”

“I guess our central-heated residences would appeal to you.”

“I know they would. But I should freeze in the winter; because I shouldn’t be able to wear a fur coat.”

“How so?”

“I’m an anti-vivisectionist.”

“Then you’d best stay where they’re not needed. Your winters don’t call for them. It’s the funniest thing in life the way your wimmun go around in furs.”

“Furs are frightfully becoming; like lace and violets.”

“Then you exonerate them although you’re against the slaying evidently, as well as the use of beasts for experiment.”

“They don’t think.”

“My word that’s true; but all the thinking in creation won’t keep an Esquimau warm without furs.”

“There’s no need for anyone to live up there. The Hudson’s Bay Commissioners are tradespeople.”

“That’s a big proposition.”

“Well?”

“You’d advocate everyone living in temperate climes to spare the beasts?”

“There’s no reason except trade for anyone to live in snow.”

“There’s a mighty except.”

“Well?”

“What about phthisical subjects who need dry cold climes?”

“Wool and astrakhan.”

“Well I guess furs’ll be worn for a bit yet.”

“That doesn’t affect the question.”

“I gather you reckon the beasts oughtn’t help advance science.”

“They don’t. Doctors are as ill as anybody.”

“True enough. You consider that invalidates medical science?”

“Of course they are over-worked and many of them splendid. But illness doesn’t decrease. If one disease goes down another goes up.”

“Great Cæsar, where did you come across that?”

“Even so; but suppose they all went up?”

“Besides, you talk about animals advancing science. Even if there wasn’t that great French physiologist or chemist or something who looked at the result of experiments on animals and said hélàs, nous avons les mains vides. He declared that there’s nothing to be learned about human bodies from animals and even if there were the thing is that the animals have no choice. We’ve no right to force them to suffer.”

“An animal’s constituted differently to a man. You can’t compare them in the matter of sensitiveness to pain.”

“I knew you’d say that. If people really want to advance science by experiments on bodies they should offer their own bodies.”

“Someone’s been working on your mind if you believe animals suffer more than men.”

“I’d rather see a woman suffer than a man and a man rather than a child and a child rather than an animal. Animals are bewildered and don’t understand. They have nothing to help them. They don’t understand their sufferings.”

“You rate men lower than women in power to endure pain.”

“They get more practice.”

“You’re right there.”

“They’re less sensitive.”

“That’s debateable, Wayneflete.”

“Women appear to be callous over the sufferings of other women and to make a fuss over men. It’s because sick men are more helpless and pitiful. Women appear to be. But the sun appears to go round the earth.”

“I doubt if ever there’ll come a time when we’ll have live humanity in our experimental laboratories.”

“Science has got to go ahead anyway.”

“But if it goes ahead by forcing; sensitive creatures; with ... sensitive nervous systems, to bear fear and pain ... we shall lose more morally than we shall gain scientifically even if we gain scientifically and we don’t because nearly everyone is ill.”

“You consider knahludg can be bought at too high a price.”

“Well; look at the continental luminaries; where there are no restrictions; they don’t even care about their patients, only diseases interest them, and in general, not only in science, they don’t really know anything, the Germans and the French, you have only to look at them. They are brutal.”

“That’s a large statement. If you’ll pardon me I should say there’s a certain amount of insular prejudice in that.”

“I have not a scrap of insular prejudice. I like foreigners. They are more intelligent than Englishmen. But there’s something they don’t know that makes them all alike. I once heard a wealthy old Jew say that he’d go to Germany for diagnosis and to England for treatment, and he’d had operations and illnesses all over the world. That expresses it.”

“You infer that the English have more humanity.”

“They don’t regard the patient as a case in the way continentals do.”

“Well I guess when we’re sick we all like to go home.”

“You mean the Jew had no home. But he chose the English to go home to when he was ill.”

“That’s true in more senses than one. This country’s been a home for the Jews right away back.”

“It’s a great country. That’s sure.”

“Science has got to go away ahead. If you’re going to be humanitarians over here you must leave continental science out of your scheme. So long as you carry out their results you can’t honestly cry down their methods.”

“You must cry down their methods if you don’t approve of them.”

“You can’t put back. You can’t prevent association between the different lands; especially in matters of science.”

“What I’m saying. You’ve got to accept the goods, even supposing your particular constitution of mind inclines you to bulleave them ill-gotten.”

“It’s a case of good coming out of evil.”

“That’s Jesuitical, the end justifying the means. I don’t believe that. Why should science go ahead so fast? Where’s the hurry as you say in Canada?”

“Well, you’ve only to look around to see that.”

“I don’t see it. Do you mean that people who make scientific experiments do it because they want to improve the world. They don’t. It’s their curiosity.”

“Divine curiosity I’ve heard it called.”

“The divine curiosity of Eve ... that’s the answer to the Mosaic fable about woman. She was interested in the serpent, and polite to him and gossiped with him. Science is scandal-mongering; gossip about the universe. Men talk about women gossiping. My word.”

“Stars. I’d like some of our chaps to hear you say that.”

“It is. Darwin gossiped about monkeys and in his old age he looked exactly like one and regretted that he had neglected music.”

“You can’t have it both ways. Each man must pursue one line or another.”

“Poor dears yes.”

“You’re inclined to pity us all.”

“That’s English humanitarianism may be.”

“I’m not a humanitarian. I can’t bear humanity, in the mass. I think it’s a frightful idea.”

“A fairly solid idea.”

“I prefer ... the equator, and the moon, and the plane of the ecliptic; I think the plane of the ecliptic is a perfectly lovely thing.”

“It’s a scientific discovery.”

“Yes but not on the body of an animal.”

“The body of the chap who began all that had some pretty hard sufferings.”

“Do you know the schoolboy’s definition of the equator?”

“No, but I guess it’s a good one.”

“A menagerie lion running round the world once in every twenty-four hours. I think it’s an absolutely perfect idea.”

“I guess that’s good enough to stop on.”

“You off Winchester?”

In the breaking of the group Dr. von Heber came near with his smile. Dr. Hurd was noisily stretching himself, laughing and coughing. No one was listening. They were quite alone among their friends, his friends, Canada. This has been a charming ending to a very lovely day he said quietly. Miriam beamed and was silent. Did you see the afterglow, she asked humbly. His smile reappeared. He took in what she said, but beamed because they were talking. She tried to beat back her words, but they were on her lips and she was already moving away when she spoke. “A fine ... fuliginous ... pink wasn’t it?”