3
Dr. Densley, hands outstretched, had made his smiling rush down the room and taken her lightly by the shoulders when the door opened to admit Michael. Summoning Densley from the hearthrug to the bright central light, she introduced them. They stood in a strange little silence. Densley, robbed of his usual soft-voiced flow of words and laughter by the spectacle of Michael, of whom he had heard so much, was taking a moment for contemplation, sure no doubt that she, like all the women of his world, would immediately emit suitable remarks. She ignored the obligation, flouted a suddenly realised desire to please him by filling up the measure of his large admiration, for the sake of watching these two old friends for the first time confronted.
It made them strangers to herself, people seen for the first time. Divested of their relationship to her they were at once diminished and enlarged. Large and separate, each set in the stream of his own life. And small; small figures in a moving crowd.
It was Michael who broke the silence, announcing with stern shyness and courteously bent head that the profession of medicine was arduous and at the same time most fascinating. Miriam saw the other man, as he stood listening with a dawning smile to the slow stately English, read Michael’s gentle spirit and hand him on the spot a protective affection. They stood talking. Michael bowing to punctuate his phrases but with a pleased smile shining behind his pale features, ready to emerge when the gravity he thought fitting to the occasion should have had its due. Densley, below a brow grave and thoughtful as Michael’s but without its sadness, smiled his smile that was laughter, the laughter of his everlasting enchantment.
She left them to spy from the landing for any sign of the arrival of the Taylors. The silent empty hall brought her a vision of Dora, hurrying home to dress, meeting a friend on an island in the midst of traffic, one of those encounters that occur whenever one is in a hurry, and to which Dora would give herself as if space and time had no existence.
The gong rang out and residents became audible descending from the upper rooms.
She went back to summon the men and warn Densley that he had committed himself to a meal prepared in honour of the Taylors, without meat. Also that he would hear from Mrs. Taylor all about the medical profession. His to-and-fro gust of laughter left him open-mouthed like a mask of Comedy, silently gazing at her his assurance of his readiness for all her friends might do.
Through the open door she heard the continuous rustling descent of residents. All the tables would be full. So much the better, in case her oddly asserted party should produce long silences. She felt no desire for conversation and wondered as she led the way downstairs whether hostesses in general suffered the indifference that now held her in its grip. And if they did, why the business of entertainment was not abolished. She remembered how porous to the onlooking eye were people gathered talking at a feast. To be merely a silent guest was troublesome enough, but it was nothing to the burden of being obliged to produce, before the assembled eyes of the twenty residents even the semblance of a dinner-party.
The dining-room was full of sound as she went in followed by the two men, held a little in the rear by the backward sweep of her long gown; a fabric of sound unbroken at any point in the rows of tables set against the walls, and all, even the one she had selected, fully occupied. All heads were averted, intent towards centres.
Gentlewomen. Yes; but those were just the people who saw without looking.
Here was the secretary at her elbow, smilingly indicating.... Miss Holland was right, there in the central pool of light, well away from the serried ranks of small square tables, was the club’s settlement of the problem of five diners, a round table, gleaming with silver and glass and festive with bowls of flowers.
As they took their places, falling accidentally into the best distribution for her serenity, herself facing away from the main wall and its unbroken row of diners, Michael on her right giving them his impressive profile, and Densley across the way, his fine easy presence set full towards them, a servant announced the arrival of the Taylors. She left her party begun, with Densley, grave and kindly, set towards Michael to draw from him and cherish, just anything it might occur to him to say.
Dora and George, unbelievably there, brought to the decorous hall its furthest reach of odd experience. They came from so much further than the long distance they had travelled across London to spend an evening in the land that to them was not even Philistia, but just Bedlam. The Bedlam of an illusion so monstrous as to be comic—for all observers but those who toiled helplessly at its provisioning; George’s “under-dog.”
They stood face to face, not seeing her. George in the half-light and against the dark ancient furniture, looking more than ever like the young Beethoven, his searching eyes bent beneath a frowning brow upon Dora’s serene face of an intellectual madonna upturned in absent-minded protest, while he explained, certainly not for the first time, exactly where, in their passage across London, they had missed their way. For an instant Miriam watched them, the beauty that together they made standing there in perfect physical contrast, a rare pure balance, as rare as their unmistakable equality of spirit. She rejoiced in the thought of them set down with Michael and Densley. Four widely separated worlds met together.
When actually they were so set down, George on her left and Dora all delicately harmonious colour between Michael’s and Densley’s black and white, the enchantment was so strong that she felt it must radiate to the four corners of the room. It served to support her in face of the absence in her thoughts of anything that could form a starting-point for general conversation.
She took refuge with Dora. Dora’s was the mind that could enclose all the others, and gaze over each of their territories in turn. She began at once by accusing Dora. Making her the culprit of the wandering pilgrimage.
Delicately flushing, her limpid absent eyes aware of the presence about her of disturbed people waiting for conversational openings, aware also of the restraining influence of her serene beauty, Dora defended herself in the leisurely dimpling way that showed her armed for no matter what conflict. Dora was at her best. Densley hung towards her delighted at once.
Here in strange garb and unfamiliar bearing was yet, he was assuming, the woman he understood, the woman existing in such numbers in his own set, and vocal, until Miriam had revolted and silenced her, in all his conversation; the woman who professes to be either amused or shocked by sexual allusions, disguised in commonplace remarks, and jests back, or tactfully heads off. How far, she wondered, would Dora, with her hobby of endless cool sampling of humanity, go out to meet this naïve masculinity? So far she sat screened, gently glowing, harmless.
If she held to this mood, went on turning upon him her lovely mild eyes, and Densley’s warm-hearted worldliness took the field, then it was George, indulgent to Dora’s adventure, who would be the enclosing, contemplating mind. Already, amidst the jests that carried them through the first courses, he was gathering fuel for the sole recreation afforded him by chance social festivities. For mirth over the spectacle of evasions. To-night the spectacle was all about him, all over the room, rampant and unconscious, distracting him almost completely.
4
By the time the sweets appeared there were two groups at the table, Dora and Densley, averted towards each other in animated talk. George and Michael responding to everything Miriam offered, usually both at once, refusing to blend. Here, already, at her first party, was the English separation. No general conversation. Not even the English alternative, the duel between two men; the prize-fight. The party had fallen to bits. But it was worth while. For on the far side of the table, Dora’s sweet mezzo was dominating Densley’s baritone. She had tackled him. It was his opportunity, perhaps his utmost chance of being lifted outside his complacent dogmas.
It was presently evident that he was remaining impermeable. Though still listening and responding, he had lost interest, discovered that she did not for all her soft appeal, fall into either of the classes he thought he understood, either into the fascinating, the maternal, or the saintly. His mind gave her its ear, but his eyes with their everlasting message went again and again to a far corner of the room. Which of the disdainful club residents had become his chosen companion?
Dora was questioning him now, collecting physiology. Her voice penetrated the subdued, rapidly thinning talk coming from the small tables. Glancing round as if in search of an attendant, Miriam discovered the long row of diners, lingering over their coffee, one and all intent upon the centre table. And in the far corner that was drawing Densley’s glances, Mrs. Wheeler, talking with Miss Holland and her daughter, both with their backs to the room and unable to see the distant bourne of her eyes, dark and gleaming above the heightened flush upon her cheeks as she sat there, mutely wise, telling him a plain tale of gallant endeavour.
The women at the table near the fireside were now openly staring.
As if by arrangement, by some operation of the fascinated attention of these two listeners, there was a sudden silence all over the room.
“Of course,” said Dora’s voice into the midst of it, dreamy as her pose, elbow on table, hand supporting chin, brow lifted in thought above eyes gazing into space: “we shan’t get parthenogenesis until we want it.”
The silence ended in abrupt risings and departures.
“Not in our time,” Densley had said, encircling the departing ladies with a smile that was not only homage and benediction, but glee. Private glee over the addition to his store of anecdotes, of such a fine new specimen. He, at least, thought Miriam, as they rose from the table, would not regret the evening spent outside his world.
Michael, half risen, bowing towards the centre of the group, had something to say. One of his generalisations. The party was united at last.
“These speculations,” he announced to the group Miriam rejoiced to see not only arrested by the inevitable topic but charmed by his gentleness, feeling the pull of him in their midst, “are most-interesting. There are it is sure in these matters no absolute certainties, but what is sure is, that the realisation of this idea would be, not advance, but retrogression.”
“Hear, hear,” said Densley, in his smoothest girlish falsetto.
As they all went down Fleet Street on their way to the Lycurgan meeting, Miriam wondered whether she would be asked to resign from the club. But much more pressing than this question was the feeling that her party had, in bringing together three of her worlds, shown her more clearly than she had known it before, that there was no place for her in either one of them. So clearly that she now wished it could end and leave her to go to the meeting alone.
There was in Lycurgan meetings some sort of reality, either coming from the platform or more often from irrelevant things rising in her own mind as she sat surrounded by so many speculative minds.
But to-night she would not reach unconsciousness of her surroundings. And the ideas coming from the platform would be severely tested by these alien presences. Already in advance, these ideas looked like a mere caprice of her leisure hours, a more or less congenial background of thought upon which presently might emerge a sudden enlargement of her own life. More and more lately they had been growing to mean things shared with Hypo, bright with life because they were his, and for the same reason suspect, suspect because of his unrivalled expressiveness, a faculty that might be turned with equal conviction in a quite opposite direction.
And once they were in the hall and she was sitting with the serene worlds of Michael and Densley and the Taylors close to her, the urgency of all the Lycurgans stood for grew immediately less. This world of clear ideas summoning mankind to follow like an army, seemed again, as when she had first met it, to contain a trick, to be too clear, too hard, too logical to embrace the rich fabric of life. She experimented in unthinking it; and a silence fell on many of the flagrant cruelties of civilisation. They lost their voice. Their only educated, instructed voice. The Lycurgans were a league to arrest cruelties. But a cold, cynical, jesting league, cold and hard as thought, cynical as paganism and cultivating a wit that left mankind small and bleak, in a darkness where there was no hope but in intelligent scheming. Even the women. The Lycurgan women were all either as hopelessly logical as men, or methodically pink. And the men; the everlasting prize-fight, the perfect unsociability underlying their cold ideas. Except for one or two. And they were idealists, blind with the illusion that humanity moves with one accord.
Each one moves singly. To join the movements of others is harmful until you have moved yourself. Movement is with the whole of you. Ideas come afterwards.
How much time had passed? Only a moment or two. The chairman was still bleating. And they had not noticed her inattention.
They were sitting in a row at the back of the hall. The proceedings seemed very far away. Held off by their nearness to each other, by the way after one short hour and in spite of their incompatibilities, they were, when placed amongst strangers, in touch with each other.
It was worth while. Worth while to miss the intensities. To be happily surrounded. And this way, the social and domestic way of meeting things, the cool easy way of normal people, was perhaps the best way. It robbed things of all but their obvious surfaces, the practical data of life. Reduced them to the terms of what could be said about them and handed round from one to the other. Small wonder that reformers tended to become tub-thumpers, so immense must be the resistance offered by people living as nearly everyone did, in groups, closely related and drawn this way and that by perpetual single instances.
Less wonder that most people assumed the fact of life, took it without amazement, for granted, so thinly of necessity was spread their awareness of anything whatever. Homeopathic.
She gave herself up to joy in her party, in being linked with them in profane, mirthful detachment from all that was going forward, shockingly accompanied by the crackling of Michael’s disgraceful bag of hardbake. Was it her fault that they were so detached? The result of some demoralising influence at work behind her imagined interest in socialism? She felt it was not. They were all on a moral holiday, not only from their own worlds, but from any world whatsoever. Happy in being together, passing through an uncalculated interval, a strange small time that they would remember with pleasure.