Deadlock: Pilgrimage, Volume 6

by Dorothy M. Richardson

A gracieuse effect means always deliberate behaving. Madame de Something. But people who keep it up can never let thoughts take their course. They must behave to their thoughts as they behave to people. When they are by themselves they can only go on mincing quietly, waiting for their next public appearance. When they are not talking they wait in an attitude, as if they were talking; ready to behave. Always on guard. Perhaps that was what Mr. Wilson meant when he said it was the business of women to be the custodians of manners...... Their “sense of good form, and their critical and selective faculties.” Then he had no right to be contemptuous of them..... “Donald Braden ... lying across the dinner table ... a drink sodden hull, swearing that he would never again go to a dinner-party where there were no ladies” ...... “Good talk and particularly good stories are not expected of women, at dinner tables. It’s their business to steer the conversation and head it off if it gets out of bounds.” .... To simper and watch, while the men were free to be themselves, and then step in if they went beyond bounds. In other words to head the men off if they talked “improperly”; thus showing their knowledge of improprieties .... “tactfully” ignoring them and leading on to something else with a gracious pose. Those were the moments when the improprieties streamed from their hair...... Somebody saying ssh, superior people talking together, modern friends-in-council, a week end in a beautiful house, subjects on the menu, are you high church or low church, the gleam of a woman’s body through water. “Ssh.” Why?.......

But her impression to himself was good. A French impression; that was the extraordinary thing. Without any consideration that was the impression she had made. Perhaps everyone had a sort of style, and people who liked you could see it. The style of one’s family would show, to strangers as an unknown strange outside effect. Everyone had an effect.... She had an effect, a stamp, independent of anything she thought or felt. It ought to give one confidence. Because there would certainly be some people who would not dislike it. But perhaps he had not observed her at all until that moment and had been misled by her assumption of animation.

If I tried to be gracious, I could never keep it up, because I always forget that I am visible. She called in her eyes, which must have been staring all the time blankly about the table, so many impressions had she gathered of the various groups, animated now in their unconscious relief at the approaching end of the long sitting. Here again was one of those moments of being conscious of the strange fact of her incurable illusion, and realising its effects in the past and the effects it must always have if she did not get away from it. Nearly always she must appear both imbecile and rude, staring, probably with her mouth half open, lost. Well-brought-up children were trained out of it. No one had dared to try and train her for long. They had been frightened, or offended, by her scorn of their brisk cheerful pose of polite interest in the surface of everything that was said. It was not worth doing. Polite society was not worth having. Every time one tried for awhile, holding oneself in, thinking of oneself sitting there as others were sitting, consciousness came to an end. It meant having opinions. Taking sides. It presently narrowed life down to a restive discomfort......

Jan went about the streets thinking she was invisible ... “and then quite suddenly I saw myself in a shop mirror. My dear. I got straight into an omnibus and went home. I could not stand the sight of my hips.” But with people, in a room, she never forgot she was there.

The sight of Mr. Shatov waiting for her under the gas in the drawing-room gathered all her thoughts together, struggling for simultaneous expression. She came slowly across the room, with eyes downcast to avoid the dimly-lit corner where he stood, and sought rapidly amongst the competing threads of thought for some fragment that could be shaped into speech before he should make the communication she had seen waiting in his face. The sympathetic form must listen and make some understanding response. She felt herself stiffening in angry refusal to face the banishment of her tangled mass of thought by some calmly oblivious statement, beginning nowhere and leading them on into baseless discussion, impeded on her part by the pain of unstated vanishing things. They began speaking together and he halted before her formal harsh-voiced words.

“There is always a bad light on Saturday evenings because nearly every one goes out” she said and looked her demand for his recognition of the undischarged burden of her mind impatiently about the room.

“I had not observed this” he said gently, “but now I see the light is indeed very bad.” She watched him as he spoke, waiting, counting each syllable. He paused, gravely consulting her face; she made no effort to withhold the wave of anger flowing out over the words that stood mocking her on the desolate air, a bridge, carrying them up over the stream of her mind and forward, leaving her communications behind for ever. She waited, watching cynically for whatever he might offer to her dumbness, wondering whether it surprised him, rebuked as she regarded him, by his unchanged gentle lustre.

“Oh please” he said hurriedly, his downcast inturned smile suddenly irradiating his forehead, bringing down the eyebrows that must have gone singing thoughtfully up as he spoke about the light ... a request of some kind; one of his extraordinary unashamed demands.... “You must help me. I must immediately pawn my watch. Where is a pawning shop?”

Miriam stared her consternation.

“Ah, no” he said, his features working with embarrassment “it is not for myself. It is my friend, the Polish Doctor, who was only now here,” Miriam gazed, plunging on through relief into a chaos of bewildered admiration.