Deadlock: Pilgrimage, Volume 6

by Dorothy M. Richardson

The quiet forgotten sky was there again; intelligent, blotting out unanswered questions, silently reaching down into the life that rose faintly in her to meet it, the strange mysterious life, far away below all interference, and always the same.

Teaching, being known as a teacher, had brought about Mrs. Bailey’s confident promise to the Russian student. There was no help for that. If he were cheated, it was part of the general confusion of the outside life. He also was subject to that. It would be a moment in his well-furnished life, caught up whenever his memory touched it, into the strand of contemptible things. He would see her drifting almost submerged in the flood of débris that made up the boarding-house life, its influence not recognised in the first moments because she stood out from it, still bearing, externally, the manner of another kind of life. The other kind of life was there, but able to realise itself only when she was alone. It had been all round her, a repelling memory, just now in the dining-room .... blinding her .... making her utterly stupid .... and there they were, in another world, living their lives; their smiling patience taking its time, amused that she did not see. Of course that was what he had meant. There was no other possible meaning .... behind barred gates, closed against her, they had sat, patiently impatient with her absurdity .... Mrs. Bailey and Mr. Gunner....

He had had the clearness of vision to discover what she was ...... behind her half-dyed grey hair and terrible ill-fitting teeth. Glorious. Into the midst of her failing experiment, at the very moment when the shadow of on-coming age was making it visibly tragic, had come this man in his youth, clear-sighted and determined, seeing her as his happiness, his girl. She was a girl, modest and good.... Circumstances could do nothing. There as she stood at bay in the midst of them, the thing she believed in, her one test of everything in life, always sure of her defence and the shelter of her curious little iron strength, had come again to her herself, all her own ... it was the unasked reward of her unswerving faith. She stood decorated by a miracle.

Mrs. Bailey had triumphed; justified her everlasting confident smile.

She was enviable; her qualities blazoned by success in a competition whose judges, being blind, never failed in discovery......

But the miracle gleams only for a moment, and the personal life, no longer threading its way in a wonderful shining mysteriously continuous and decisive pattern freely in and out of the world-wide everything, is henceforth labelled and exposed, repeating until the eye wearies of its fixity, one little lustreless shape; and the outside world is left untouched and unchanged. Is it worth while? A blind end, in which death swiftly increases....... But without it, in the end, there is no shape at all?

The hour had been such a surprising success because of a smattering of knowledge: until the moment when he had said I have always from the first been interested in philosophy. Then knowing that the fascinating thing was philosophy and being ignorant of philosophy, brought the certainty of being unable to keep pace..... Philosophy had come, the strange nameless thread in the books that were not novels, with its terrible known name at last and disappeared in the same moment for ever away into the lives of people who were free to study... But if, without knowing it, one had been for so long interested in a subject, surely it gave a sort of right? Perhaps he would go on talking about philosophy without asking questions. No matter what failure lay ahead, it might be possible, even if the lessons lasted only a little while, to find out all he knew about philosophy. It was a privilege, another of those extraordinary privileges coming suddenly and unexpectedly in strange places, books or people knowing all about things one had already become involved in without knowing when or why, people interested and attracted by a response that at first revealed no differences, so that they all in turn took one to be like themselves, and looking at life in their way. It made a relationship that was as false as it was true. What they were, they were permanently; always true to the same things. Why being so different, was one privileged to meet them? There must be some explanation. There was something that for a while attracted all kinds of utterly different people, men and women—and then something that repelled them, some sudden revelation of opposition, or absolute difference, making one appear to have been playing a part. Insincere and fickle.

What is fickleness? He is fickle, people say, with a wise smile. But one always knows quite well why people go away, and why one goes oneself. Not having the sense of fickleness probably means that one is fickle. There is something behind the accusation and the maddening smile with which it is always made, that makes you say thank heaven. People who are not what they call fickle, but always the same, are always, in the midst of their bland security, depressed about life in general, and have “a poor opinion of humanity.” “Humanity does not change,” they say. It is the same as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be. Oooo. And now to Godthefather .... and they find even their steadfast relationships dull. They are the people who talk about “ordinary everyday life” and approve of “far horizons” and desert islands and the other side of the moon, as if they were real and wonderful and life was not. If they went there it would be the same to them; they would be just the same there; but something in the way their lives are arranged prevents them from ever suddenly meeting Mr. Shatov. They meet only each other. The men make sly horrible jokes together ..... the Greeks had only one wife; they called it monotony.

...... But I find my daily round at Wimpole Street dull. No, not dull; wrong in some way. I did not choose it; I was forced into it. I chose it; there was something there; but it has gone. If it had not gone I should never have found other things. “But you would have found something else my child.” No. I am glad it has gone. I see now what I have escaped. “But you would have developed differently and not got out of touch. People don’t if they are always together.” But that is just the dreadful thing.... Cléo de Mérode going back sometimes, with just one woman friend, to the little cabarets.... Intense sympathy with that means that one is a sort of adventuress ... the Queen can never ride on an omnibus.

Why does being free give a feeling of meanness? Being able to begin all over again, always unknown, at any moment; feeling a sort of pity and contempt for the people who can’t; and then being happy and forgetting them. But there is pain all round it that they never know. It is only by the pain of remaining free that one can have the whole world round one all the time.... But it disappears....