“Excellent. You will yet be a socialist.” They walked on, to the sound of his resumed singing. Presently the turning into Wimpole Street was in sight. His singing must end. Dipping at a venture she stumbled upon material for his arrest.
“It it nay-cessary; deere bruthren;” she intoned dismally in a clear interval “to obtain; the mAhstery; o-ver-the Vile; bhuddy.”
“What? What?” he gurgled delightedly, slackening his pace. “Please say this once more.”
Summoning the forgotten figure, straining out over the edge of the pulpit she saw that there was more than the shape and sound of his abruptly ending whine. She saw the incident from Mr. Shatov’s point of view and stood still to laugh his laugh; but it was not her kind of joke.
“It was in a University church, presided over by a man they all say has a European reputation; it was in Lent; this other man was a visitor, for Lent. That was the beginning of his sermon. He began at once, with a yell, flinging half out of the pulpit, the ugliest person I have ever seen.”
“Hoh,” shouted Mr. Shatov from the midst of immense gusts of laughter, “that is a most supreme instance of unconscious ironic commentary. But really, please you shall say this to me once more.”
If she said, you know he was quite sincere, the story would be spoiled. This was the kind of story popular people told. To be amusing must mean always to be not quite truthful. But the sound. She was longing to hear it again. Turning to face the way they had come she gave herself up to howling the exhortation down the empty park-flanked vista.
“It is a chef d’œuvre,” he sighed.
He ought not to be here she irritably told herself, emerging as they turned and took the few steps to her street, tired and scattered and hopelessly late, into the forgotten chill of her day. It was all very well for him with his freedom and leisure to begin the first thing in the morning with things that belonged to the end of the day.... She took swift distracted leave of him at the corner and hurried along the length of the few houses to her destination. Turning remorsefully at the doorstep to smile her farewell, she saw the hurrying form of Mr. Hancock crossing the road with grave appraising glance upon the strange figure bowing towards her bareheaded in the wind from the top of the street. He had seen her loitering, standing still, had heard her howls. Mercifully the door opened behind her, and she fled within .... the corner of the very street that made him, more than any other street, look foreign, and, in the distance, disgraceful......
For days she read the first two stories in the little book, carrying it about with her, uneasy amongst her letters and ledgers unless it were in sight. The project of translation vanished in an entranced consideration at close quarters of some strange quality coming each time from the printed page. She could not seize or name it. Both stories were sad, with an unmitigated relentless sadness, casting a shadow over the spectacle of life. But some spell in their weaving, something abrupt and strangely alive, remaining alive, in the text, made a beauty that outlived the sadness. They were beautiful. English people would not think so. They would only see tragedy of a kind that did not occur in the society they knew. They would consider Andrayeff a morbid foreigner, and a liking for the stories an unhealthy pose. Very well. It was an unhealthy pose. The strange beauty in the well known sentences that yet were every time fresh and surprising, was an unshareable secret. Meanwhile the presence of the little book exorcised the everyday sense of the winding off of days in an elaborate unchanging circle of toil.