Interim: Pilgrimage, Volume 5

by Dorothy M. Richardson

2

“Antoine Bowdoin.” If she had had a solemn letter from him first she would never have undertaken to go and hear him play. The formal courtly old-fashioned phrases had nothing to do with the hours of music. She had thought of nothing but the music on the good piano and now when she had forgotten all about it there was this awful result; the “few friends” gathered together in his room on a fixed date so that she might go and hear him play. She would have to sit, with a party, and afterwards find something to say.... An Englishman, solemn and polite, playing foreign music, with English friends politely and solemnly sitting round. There was no word of Mr. Mendizabal. He was not going. If he had been Mr. Bowdoin would not have said I will call at six-thirty for the purpose of escorting you to my rooms. He was like a gaoler. Perhaps the walk would be an opportunity of getting over nervousness. There would be music at once, no meal to get through. She would thank him very much for the great treat and when it was over there would only be Eve and the accomplishment of having heard a good piano played by a musician. He could be dropped.... He could be asked to come just once and play for Eve. That would be a great London evening for Eve.... The sense of a complex London life crowded with engagements made her pace in spite of her weariness up and down the platform at Gower Street. Its familiar sulphurous gloom, the platform lights shining murkily from the midst of slowly rolling clouds of grey smoke, the dark forms and phantom white faces of waiting passengers emerging suddenly as she threaded the darkness, revived her. By the time the train rolled slowly in behind its beloved black dumpy high-shouldered engine with its large unshrieking mushroom bell-whistle the journey had changed from being an expedition to a spot within five minutes’ walk of Sarah’s, unconfessed to Sarah, and had become a journey on the Metropolitan; going indeed outside the radius into blackness, but going so far only because the Dante lecture, wandered out of London was waiting there; and to be repeated at the end of the evening safely returning through increasing gloom until the climax of Gower Street was reached again.... Miss Scott was Scotch.

She reached the little hall in the suburban road in good time and sat in a forward row staring at the little platform where presently the educative voice would be standing. She was conscious of a stirring and buzzing all about her that had been absent in the London hall. The first series of lectures had not brought any sense of an audience. Here the many audible centres of culture, the eager discussions and sudden incisive remarks, the triumphant intensity on the faces of some of the women caught as she glanced now and then fearfully about, the curious happy briskness of the men, made her feel that the lecturer was superfluous. All these people were the cultured refined kind who did not trouble much about their clothes. There were no furs to be seen; the women wore large rather ugly coats or ulsters or capes and bashed muddly looking hats and had mufflers or long scarves. In the London audience herself and her clothes had been invisible, here they were just right, a sort of hall-mark. In her black dress with her clumsy golf-cape thrown back from her shoulders, her weather-worn felt hat softened perhaps to harmony with her head in the soft light she could perhaps pass for a cultured person. Bianchi and Neri whispered her neighbour eagerly in the midst of a long sentence addressed to a girl at her side. She was an Englishwoman. But her mind was so at home in the Middle Ages that she spoke the names and used the Italian pronunciation without a touch of pedantry, and as eagerly and interestedly as anyone else might say “they’re engaged!” The clergyman in the row in front would drawl out the words with an unctuous suggestion of superior knowledge. He would use them to crush someone. Most of the men present were a little like that, using their knowledge like a code or a weapon. But the women were really interested in it, they were like people who had climbed a hill and were eagerly intent on what they could see on the other side. It was refreshing and also in some way comforting to be with them. They represented something in life that was going to increase. Perhaps it would increase too much; they seemed so headlong and unaware of anything else. Did she want a world made up of women like this? If she spoke to them they would assume she was one of themselves and look busily at her with unseeing eyes, fixed only on all the things they thought about, until they perceived that she was a fraud. Long intercourse with them might make her able to talk like they did, but never to think in the way they did. Never to have the extraordinary busy assured appearance presented by their persons when you could not see their eager faces; a look that made them seem to be going very fast in some direction that completely satisfied them, so that if a fire broke out behind them suddenly they would regard it not as an adventure that might have been expected but as an annoying interruption, like tripping over a stone....

She could see that when he read the sonnets he forgot how learned he was. The little lecture had had its own fascination. But it was a lecture; something told by a specialist to an audience. This was Dante’s voice, and they all listened as they could; the lecturer as well. All his knowledge was put aside and he listened as he read. She sat listening, her shocked mind still condemning her for not having discovered for herself that it was wrong to have a post-office savings account and that betting and gambling and lotteries were wrong because they produced nothing. For a time she flashed about with the searchlight of the new definition of vice ... money can’t produce money ... then all trade was wrong in some way ... dissipation of value without production ... there was some principle that all civilisation was breaking ... how did this man know that it was wrong to imagine affection if there was no affection in your life, that dreaming and brooding was a sort of beastliness ... love was actual and practical, moving all the spheres and informing the mind. That was true. That was the truth about everything. But who could attain to it? Dante knew it because he loved Beatrice. How could humanity become more loving? How could social life come to be founded on love? How can I become more loving? I do not know or love anyone but myself ... it did not mean being loved. It was not anything to do with marriage. Dante only saw Beatrice. But this is the awful truth; however one may sit as if one were not condemned and forget again. This is the difficult thing that everyone has to do. Not dogmas. This man believes that there is a God who loves and demands that man shall be loving. That is what will be asked. That is the judgment. It is true because it breaks into you and condemns you. Everything else is distraction and sham. The humble yearning devotion in the voice reading the lines made it a prayer, the very voice a prayer to a spirit waiting all round, present in himself, in every one listening, in the very atmosphere. It was there, to be had. It was like something left far behind one on a dark road and still there; to be had for the asking, to be had by merely turning towards it.... She looked into the eyes of Dante across the centuries as into the eyes of a friend. But then these people were the same. It was the truth about everybody “the goodwill in all of us”....

She travelled back towards London in a dream. Her compartment was empty. All the people in the world, full of goodwill without troubling or even thinking about it were away somewhere else. Just as she had learned what people were there was nobody. There was no love in her nature. If there were any she would not have been sitting here alone. If a man love not his brother whom he hath seen how shall he love God whom he hath not seen? There was a catch in that like a riddle. Heads I win tails you lose.... If you keep quite quiet and gentle, asking for nothing, not being anything, not holding on to anything in your life, nor thinking about anything in your life there is something there ... behind you ... that must be God, the way to Christ; the edge of the way to Christ. Keeping quiet and coming to that you feel what you are and that you have never begun being anything but your evil natural self. You feel thick with evil ... oh ... that was prayer. One could become more loving. It is answered at once. Just turning towards that something, in a desire to be different, begins to change you! At Praed Street the carriage began to fill with seated forms. This was the beginning of new life.... Keeping perfectly still and looking at no one she realised the presence of her fellow-travellers, all just like herself, living from within by the contact with the edge of Christ ... all knowing the thing that to her was only a little flicker just dawning in a long life of evil. It made them kindly in the world and able to understand each other. Perhaps it was the explanation of all the fussing. Everyone in the world was bathed in the light of love except herself.... It was not certain that a whole lifetime of prayer and gentleness and self-control would destroy enough of the thick roots of evil in her to bring her through into the Paradiso.... But if prayer, just the turning away from all one knew begging to be destroyed and made loving brought such an immediate sense of the evil in oneself and the good in everyone else, there was no end to what it might do. Prayer was the work to do in life, nothing else. But the turning to the unseen God of love and giving up one’s self-will meant being changed in a way one could not control or foresee; dropping everything one had and cherished secretly and having things only in common with other people. It would mean going forward with nothing into an unknown world; always being agreeable, and agreeing. I love all these people she murmured in her mind and felt a glow that seemed to radiate out to all the corners of the compartment. It’s true. This is life. This is the only way in. It may be that I am so bad that I can only sit with all my evil visible silent amongst humanity for the rest of my life, learning to love them, and then die out completely because I am too bad to be quite new-born ... her eyes were drawn towards the face of the woman sitting opposite to her; a shapeless body, a thin ravaged face strained and sheeny with fatigue and wearing an expression of undaunted sweetness and patience. Children and housework and a selfish husband and nothing in life of her own. She was at the disposal of everyone for kind actions. She would be really sympathetic and shocked about an earthquake in China. Was that it? Was that being inside? Was that all there was? The woman did not see the wonderful gold brown light in the carriage; nor the beauty of the blackness outside. In her brain was the pain and pressure of everything she had to do. She was good and sweet; perfectly good and sweet. But there was something irritating about her ... her obliviousness of everything but “troubles,” other people’s as much as her own. Yet she would love a day in the country. The fields and the flowers would make her cry. It was her obliviousness that made one afraid of associating with her. Being in conversation with her or in any way associated with her life there would always be the dreadful imprisoned feeling of knowing she did not think.... Her glance slid over the other seated forms and fell, leaving her struggling between her desire to feel in loving union with them and her inability to ignore the revelations pouring from their bearing and shapes, their clothes and the way they held their belongings. They were terrible and hateful because all their thoughts were visible. The terrible maddening thing about them was the thoughts they did not think. It made them worse than the woman because to get on with them one would have to pretend to see life as they saw it. It would be so easy and deceitful with each one alone, knowing exactly what line to take. She wrenched herself back to her prayer ... instantly the thought came that all these people far away in themselves wanted to be more loving. She drew herself together and sat up staring out towards the darkness. That was an answer again! A state of mind that came from the state of prayer. But then one would need always to be in a state of prayer. It would be very difficult. It would be almost impossible even to remember it in the rush of life ... it would mean being a sort of fool ... having no judgments or opinions. It would spoil everything. There would be no time for anything. Nothing beyond one’s daily work and all the rest of the time being all things to all men. It meant that now at this moment one must give up the sense of the train going along in the darkness and the sense of the dark streets waiting lamplit under the dark sky and go out to the people in the carriage and then on to the people at Tansley Street ... she thought of people she knew who did this, appearing to see nothing in life but people, and recoiled. Places to them were nothing but people; there was something they missed out that could not be given up. Something goes if you lose yourself in humanity. You cannot find humanity by looking for God only there. Making up your mind that God is to be found in humanity is humanism.... It was Comte’s idea. Perhaps Unitarians are all Comtists. That is why they dress without style. They are more interested in social reform than the astoundingness of there being people anywhere. But to see God everywhere is pantheism. What is Christianity? Where are Christians? Evangelicals are humanitarians; rushing about in ulsters. Anglicans know all about the beauty of life and like comfort. But they are snobs and afraid of new ideas ... convents and monasteries stop your mind. But there is a God or a Christ, there is something always there to answer when you turn away to it from everything. Perhaps one would have to remain silent, for years, for a lifetime, and in the end begin to understand.