Three months ago the Christmas had been a goal for which she could hardly wait. It had offered her, this time, more than its usual safe deep firelit seclusion beyond which no future was visible. It was to pay her in full for having missed the beginning of Eve’s venture, taking her down into the midst of it when everything was in order and the beginnings still near enough to be remembered. But having remained during the engrossing months, forgotten, at the same far-distant point, Christmas now suddenly reared itself up a few days off, offering nothing but the shadow of an unavoidable interruption. For the first time she could see life going on beyond it. She would go down into its irrelevance, taking part in everything with absent-minded animation, looking towards her return to town. It would not be Christmas, and the long days of forced absence threatened the features of the year that rose, far away and uncertain, beyond the obstruction.
But the afternoon she came home with four days holiday in her hand, past and future were swept from her path. To-morrow’s journey was a far-off appointment, her London friends remote shadows, banished from the endless continuance of life. She wandered about between Wimpole Street and St. Pancras, holding in imagination wordless converse with a stranger whose whole experience had melted and vanished like her own, into the flow of light down the streets; into the unending joy of the way the angles of buildings cut themselves out against the sky, glorious if she paused to survey them; and almost unendurably wonderful, keeping her hurrying on pressing, through insufficient silent outcries, towards something, anything, even instant death, if only they could be expressed when they moved with her movement, a maze of shapes, flowing, tilting into each other, in endless patterns, sharp against the light; sharing her joy in the changing same same song of the London traffic; the bliss of post-offices and railway stations, cabs going on and on towards unknown space; omnibuses rumbling securely from point to point, always within the magic circle of London.
Her meal was a crowded dinner-party, all the people in the restaurant its guests, plunging with her, released from experience, unhaunted by hope or regret, into the endless beginning. Into the wrapped contemplation of the gathering, the thought of her visit flashed like a star, dropping towards her, and when she was gathering things together for her packing, her eagerness flamed up and lit her room.
....... The many Christmasses with the Brooms had been part of her long run of escape from the pain-shadowed family life; their house at first a dream-house in the unbroken dream of her own life in London, a shelter where agony was unknown, and lately a forgetfulness, for the long days of the holiday, of the challenge that lived in the walls of her room. For so long the walls had ceased to be the thrilled companions of her freedom, they had seen her endless evening hours of waiting for the next day to entangle her in its odious revolution. They had watched her in bleak daylight listening to life going on obliviously all round her, and scornfully sped her desperate excursions into other lives, greeting her empty glad return with the reminder that relief would fade, leaving her alone again with their unanswered challenge. They knew the recurring picture of a form, drifting, grey face upwards, under a featureless grey sky, in shallows, “unreached by the human tide” and had seen its realisation in her vain prayer that life should not pass her by; mocking the echoes of her cry, and waiting indifferent, serene with the years they knew before she came, for those that would follow her meaningless impermanence. When she lost the sense of herself in moments of gladness, or in the long intervals of thought that encircled her intermittent reading, they were all round her, waiting, ready to remind her, undeceived by her daily busy passing in and out, relentlessly counting its secret accumulating shame.
During the last three months they had not troubled her. They had become transparent, while the influence of her summer still had them at bay, to the glow shed up from the hours she had spent downstairs with Mrs. Bailey, and before there was time for them to close round her once more, the figure of Michael Shatov, with Europe stretching wide behind him, had forced them into companionship with all the walls in the world. She had been conscious that they waited for his departure; but it was far away out of sight, and when she should be once more alone with them, their attack would find her surrounded; lives lived alone within the vanquished walls of single poor bare rooms in every town in Europe would come visibly to her aid, driving her own walls back into dependence.
But to-night they were radiant. On no walls in the world could there be a brighter light. Streaming from their gaslit spaces, wherever she turned, was the wide brilliance that had been on everything in the days standing behind the shadow that had driven her into their enclosure. Eve and Harriett, waiting for her together, in a new sunlit life, were the full answer to their challenge. She was going home. The walls were traveller’s walls. That had been their first fascination; but they had known her only as a traveller; now as she dipped into the unbroken life that would flow round her with the sound of her sisters’ blended voices, they knew whence she came and what had been left behind. They saw her years of travel contract to a few easily afforded moments, lit though she had not known it, by light instreaming from the past and flowing now visibly ahead across the farther years.
The distant forgotten forms of the friends of her London life, turning away slighted, filled her, watching them, with a half-repenting solicitude. But they had their mysterious secret life, incomprehensible, but their own; they turned away towards each other and their own affairs, all of them set, at varying angles, unquestioningly towards a prospect she did not wish to share.
She went eagerly to sleep and woke in a few moments in a morning whose sounds coming through the open window, called to her as she leapt out towards them, for responsive demonstrations. Her desire to shout, thrilled to her feet, winged them.
Sitting decorously at the breakfast-table, she felt in equal relationship to all the bright assembly, holding off Mr. Shatov’s efforts to engage her in direct conversation, that she might hear, thoughtless and uncomprehending, the general sound of interwoven bright inflections echoing quietly out into the vast morning. She ran out into it, sending off her needless telegram for the joy of skimming over the well-known flags with endless time to spare. The echoing London sky poured down upon them the light of all the world. Within it her share gleamed dancing, given to her by the London years, the London life, shining now, far away, in multitudinous detail, the contemplated enviable life of a stranger.
The third-class carriage was stuffy and cold, crowded with excited travellers whose separate eyes strove in vain to reach the heart of the occasion through a ceaseless exclamatory interchange about what lay just behind them and ahead at the end of the journey..... At some time, for some moments during the ensuing days, each one of them would be alone..... Consulting the many pairs of eyes, so different yet so strangely alike in their method of contemplation, so hindered and distracted, she felt, with a stifling pang of conviction, that their days would pass and bring no solitude, no single touch of realisation, and leave them going on, with eyes still quenched and glazed, striving outwards, now here now there, to reach some unapprehended goal.