“I don’t know anything whatever about laws; but I have met lawyers, barristers and solicitors, and I think they are the most ignorant, pig-headed people in the world. They have no minds at all. They don’t affect me. But if I were ever before a judge I should shoot him. They use cases to show off their silly wit, sitting thinking of puns; and people are put to death.”
“You are in this matter both prejudiced and unjust, believe me. You cannot in any case make individuals responsible in this matter of capital punishment. That is for all humanity. I see you are like myself, a dreamer. But it is bad to let what might be, blind you to actuality. To the great actuality, in this case, that in matters of justice between man and man England has certainly led the civilised world. In France, it is true, there is a certain special generosity towards certain types of provoked crime; but France has not the large responsibilities of England. The idea of abstract justice, is stronger in England than anywhere. But what you do not see is that in confessing ignorance of your law you pay it the highest possible tribute. You do not know what individual liberty is because you know nothing of any other condition. Ah you cannot conceive what strangeness and wonder there is for a Russian in this spectacle of a people so free that they hold their freedom as a matter of course.”
Decked. Distinguished. Marked among the nations, for unconscious qualities. What is England? What do the qualities mean?
“I’m not interested in laws. If I knew what they were I should like to break them. Trespassers will be prosecuted always makes me furious.”
“That is merely a technical by-law. That is just one of your funny English high-churchishnesses this trespassers ...... ah I must tell you I was just now in the Hyde Park. There was a meeting, ah it was indeed wonderful to me all these people freely gathered together! There was some man addressing them, I could not hear, but suddenly a man near me on the outskirt of the crowd shouted in full voice “Chamberlain is a damned liar!” Yes, but wait for your English laughter. That is not the whole. There was also quite near me, a very big John Bull bobby. He turned to pass on, with a smile. Ah that indeed for a Russian was a most wonderful spectacle.”
“We ought to be hurrying,” said Miriam, burning with helpless pity and indignation, “you will be late for dinner.”
“That is true. Shall you not also take dinner? Or if you prefer we can dine elsewhere. The air is most pure and lovely. We are in some Park?”
“Regent’s Park” she said hastily, breathing in its whole circumference, her eyes passing, through the misty gloom, amongst daylit pictures of every part. He had not known even where he was; completely foreign, a mind from an unknown world, obliviously at her side. A headlong urgency possessed her; the coming back to London had not yet been; perhaps this time she would miss it; already she was tired with thought and speech. Incoherently improvising an appointment she hurried along, her mind set excitedly towards Tansley Street. There was always some new thing waiting there when she returned from an absence; she could hear about it and get over her greetings and out for an hour by herself. She increased her pace until Mr. Shatov panted for breath as he plunged along by her side. The random remarks she made to cover her thoughts hurtled about in the darkness, stabbing her with vindictive unhelpful comments on her English stiffness, embarrassing her gait and increasing her angry fatigue. He responded in breathless shouts as if they were already in the crowded streets. They reached pavement, big houses loomed up out of the mist, the gates were just ahead. We had better rather at once take an omnibus, he shouted as they emerged into the Euston Road and a blue umbrella bus passed heavily by. She hurried forward to catch it at the corner. That goes only to Gower Street, thundered his following voice. She was in amongst the crowd at the corner and as again the bus lumbered off, inside it in the one remaining seat.
In the dimly lit little interior, moving along through the backward flowing mist-screened street lights, she dropped away from the circling worlds of sound, and sat thoughtless gazing inward along the bright kaleidoscopic vistas that came unfailing and unchanged whenever she was moving, alone and still, against the moving tide of London. When the bus pulled up for a moment in a block, she searched the gloom-girt forms within her view. The blue light of the omnibus lamp lit up faces entangled in visible thoughts, unwillingly suffering the temporary suspension of activity, but in the far corner there was one, alive and aware, gazing untrammelled at visions like her own, making them true, the common possession of all who would be still. Why were these people only to be met in omnibuses and now and again walking sightless along crowded streets? Perhaps in life they were always surrounded with people with whom they did not dare to be still. In speech that man would be a little defensive and cynical. He had a study, where he went to get away from everything, to work; sometimes he only pretended to work. He did not guess that anyone outside books, certainly not any women anywhere .... the bus rumbled on again; by the time it reached Gower Street she had passed through thoughtless ages. The brown house and her room in it called to her recreated. Once through the greetings awaiting her, she would be free upstairs amongst its populous lights and shadows; perhaps get in unseen and keep her visions untouched through the evening. She would have an evening’s washing and ironing. Mr. Shatov would not expect her to-night.
Mrs. Bailey, hurrying through the hall to dinner, came forward dropping bright quiet cries of welcome from the edge of her fullest mood of excited serenity, gently chiding Miriam’s inbreaking expectant unpreparedness with her mysterious gradual way of imparting bit by bit, so that it was impossible to remember how and when she had begun, the new thing; lingering silently at the end of her story to disarm objections before she turned and flitted, with a reassuring pleading backward smile, into her newly crowded dining-room. A moment later Miriam was in the drawing-room, swiftly consulting the profile of a tweed-clad form bent busily writing at the little table under the gas. The man leapt up and faced her with a swift ironic bow, strode to the hearth-rug and began to speak. She remained rooted in the middle of the room amplifying her impression as his sentence went on, addressed not to her, though he occasionally flung a cold piercing glance her way, but to the whole room, in a high, narrowly-rounded, fluting tone as if he were speaking into a cornet. His head had gone up above the level of the brighter light but it looked even more greyish yellow than before, the sparse hair, the eyes, the abruptly branching moustache moving most remarkably with his fluting voice, the pale tweed suit, all one even yellowish grey, and his whole reared up, half soldierly form, at bay, as if the room were full of jeering voices. His long declamation contained all that Mrs. Bailey had said and told her also that the lecture was about Spanish literature. London was extraordinary. A Frenchman, suddenly giving a lecture in English on Spanish literature; at the end of next week. He wound up his tremendous sentence by telling her that she was a secretary, and must excuse his urgency, that he required the services of an English secretary and would now, with her permission read the first part of the lecture that she might tell him whenever his intonation was at fault. That would be immensely interesting and easy she thought, and sat down on the music stool while he gathered up his sheaf of papers and explained that foreign intonation was the always neglected corner-stone of the mastery of a foreign tongue.