Deadlock: Pilgrimage, Volume 6

by Dorothy M. Richardson

“They are so far in you unconscious.” He spoke with extreme gentleness, and Miriam looked uneasily ahead, wondering whether with this strange knowledge at her side she might be passing forward to some fresh sense of things that would change the English world for her. English prejudices. He saw them as clearly as he saw that she was not beautiful. And gently, as if they were charming as well as funny to him. Their removal would come; through a painless association. For a while she would remain as she was. But even seeing England from his point of view, was being changed; a little. The past, up to the last few moments, was a life she had lived without knowing that it was a life lived in special circumstances and from certain points of view. Now, perhaps moving away from it, these circumstances and points of view suddenly became a possession, full of fascinating interest. But she had lived blissfully. Something here and there in his talk threatened happiness.

He seemed to see people only as members of nations, grouped together with all their circumstances. Perhaps everything could be explained in this way.... All her meaning for him was her English heredity, a thing he seemed to think the finest luck in the world, and her free English environment, the result of it; things she had known nothing about till he came, smiling at her ignorance of them, and declaring the ignorance to be the best testimony .... that was it; he gave her her nationality and surroundings, the fact of being England to him made everything easy. There was no need to do or be anything, individual. It was too easy. It must be demoralising .... just sitting there basking in being English.... Everything she did, everything that came to her in the outside world turned out to be demoralising .... too easy ... some fraud in it..... But the pity she found herself suddenly feeling for all English people who had not intelligent foreign friends gave her courage to go on. Meanwhile there was an unsettled troublesome point. Something that could not be left.

“Perhaps,” she said, “I daresay. But at any rate, I have an open mind. Do you think that the race is sacred, and has purposes, super-man you know what I mean, Nietzsche, and that individuals are fitted up with the instincts that keep them going, just to blind them to the fact that they don’t matter?”

“If one must use these terms, the race is certainly more sacred than the individual.”

“Very well then; I know what I think. If the sacred race plays tricks on conscious human beings, using them for its own sacred purposes and giving them an unreal sense of mattering, I don’t care a button for the race and I’d rather kill myself than serve its purposes. Besides, the instincts of self preservation, and reproduction are not the only human motives .... they are not human at all....”

CHAPTER VII

The picturesque building had been there, just round the corner, all these years, without once attracting her interested notice. The question she directed towards it, crossing the road for a nearer view, went forth, not from herself, but from the presence, close at her side, of Michael Shatov. During the hour spent in her room, facing the empty evening, she had been aware of nothing, outside the startling disturbance of her own movements, but the immense silence he had left. Driven forth to walk away its hours out of doors, she found, accompanying her through the green-lit evening squares, the tones and gestures of his voice, the certainty, that so long as she should frequent the neighbourhood, she would retain the sense of his companionship. The regions within her, of unexpressed thought and feeling, to which he had not reached, were at once all about her as she made her old, familiar, unimpeded escape through the front door, towards the blur of feathery green standing in the bright twilight at the end of the grey street; but beyond these inner zones, restored in a tumult of triumphant assertion of their indestructibility, the outer difficult life of expression and association was changed. If, as she feared, he should finally disappear into the new world towards which, with such urgent irritated determination, she had driven him, she would, for life, have reaped a small fund of his Russian courage and indifference.... It was with his impulse and interest, almost it seemed, actually in his person, that she drew up in front of the placard at the side of the strange low ecclesiastical looking porch. But as she read its contents, he left her, sped into forgetfulness by the swift course of her amazement. She had come, leaving her room at exactly the right moment, directly, by appointment, to this spot. Glancing once more for perfect assurance, at the liberal invitation printed in large letters at the foot of the heavenly announcement, she went boldly into the porch.

At the top of the shallow flight of grey stone steps up which she passed almost directly from the ecclesiastical doorway, a large black-draped figure, surmounted by the sweeping curves of an immense black hat voluminously swathed in a gauze veil of pale grey, stood bent towards a small woman standing on the step below her in dingy indoor black. The large outline, standing generously out below the broad low stone archway curving above the steps, against the further grey stone of what appeared to be part of a low ceiled corridor, was in extraordinary contrast to the graciously bending, surrendered attitude of the figure. Passing close to the group, Miriam caught a glimpse of large plump features, bold eyebrows, and firm dark eyes. The whole face, imagined as unscreened, was rounded, simple and undistinguished; blurred by the veil, it swam, without edges, a misty full moon. Through the veil came a voice that thrilled her as she moved on, led by a card bearing an arrowed instruction, down the grey stone corridor, with the desire for immediate audible mimicry. The behaviour of the voice was a perfect confirmation of deliberate intentional blurring of the large face. The little scanty frugally upstanding woman who had appeared to be of the artisan class, was either a humorous brick, or a toady, or of the old-fashioned respectful servant type, to stand it. The superfluous statement might, at least, even if the voice had become second nature, she might be thirty, have been delivered at an ordinary conversational pace. But to make the unimportant comment in the deliberately refined distressed ladylike voice, with pauses, as if every word were a precious gift .... She was waiting for some occasion, keeping her manner going, and the little woman had to stand out the performance.

On her way down the corridor she met a young man with a long neck above a low collar, walking like an undergraduate, with a rapid lope and a forward hen-like jerk of the head, but with kind religious looking eyes. Underneath his conforming manner and his English book and talk-found thoughts, he was acutely miserable, but never alone long enough to find it out; never even long enough to feel his own impulses. Two girls came swiftly by, bare-headed, in reform dresses, talking eagerly in high-pitched out-turned cultured voices, their uncommunicating selves watchfully entrenched behind the polite Norman idiom. She carried on their manner of speech at lightning speed in her mind, watching its effect upon everything it handled, of damming up, shaping, excluding all but ready-made thought and opinion. Just ahead was an arched doorway and a young man with a sheaf of pamphlets standing within it. “It may” she announced in character to an imaginary companion, “prove necessary to have some sort of conversational interchange with this individual.” Certainly it left one better prepared for the interview than saying Good Lord shall we have to say something to this creature? She got safely through the doorway, exchanging a slight bow with the young man as he provided her with a syllabus, and entered a large lofty quietly-lit room, where a considerable audience sat facing a raised platform more brightly illuminated, and from which they were confronted by a row of seated forms. She went down the central gangway, bold in her desire for a perfect hearing and slipped into a seat in the second row of chairs. The chairman was taking his place and in the dying down of conversation she heard a quiet flurry of draperies approaching with delicate apologetic rhythm up the gangway. It was the tall young woman. She passed, a veiled figure with bent head and floating scarf, along the little passage between the front row of the audience and the fern-edged platform, upon which she presently emerged, taking her place next to a lady who now rose and came forward, tall and black robed, and whose face, sharply pointing beneath the shadow of a plumy hat, had the expression of an eagle searching the distance with calm piercing eyes. In rousing ringing grievous tones she begged to be allowed to precede the chairman with an important announcement. Miriam inwardly groaned as the voice chid tragically on, demanding a realisation on the part of all, of the meaning for London of the promised arrival in its midst of a world-famed authority in Greek letters. She felt the audience behind her quelled into absolute stillness, and took angry refuge in the cover of her syllabus. “The Furthermore Settlement” she read, printed boldly at the head of the page. It was one of those missions; to bring culture amongst the London poor ..... “devoted young men from the Universities.” Those girls in the corridor, wrapped in their code, were doing “settlement work.” They did not look philanthropic. What they loved most was the building, the grey stone corridors and archways, and being away from home on a prolonged adventure, free to weave bright colours along the invisible edges of life. She could not imagine them ever becoming in the least like the elderly philanthropists on the platform. But they were not free. The place was a sort of monastery of culture. If they wore habits they would be free and deeply inspiring. But they went about dressed longingly in the colours of sunlit landscapes, and lived their social life with ideas. There was something monastic about the lofty hall, with its neutral tinted walls and high-placed windows. But the place was modern and well-ventilated, even sternly chilly. Turning on her shoulder to examine the dutiful audience, she was startled by its effect of massed intellectuality. These people were certainly not the poor of the neighbourhood. By far the larger number were men, and wherever she looked she met faces from which she turned quickly away lest she should smile her pleasure. Even those that were heavy with stoutness and beards had the same lit moving look of kindly adventurous thought. They were a picked gathering; like the Royal Institution; but more glowing. She turned back to the platform in high hope amidst the outburst of applause greeting the retirement of the distressful lady and deepening to enthusiasm as there emerged timidly from behind one of the large platform screens a tall figure in evening dress, a great grown-up boy, with a large fresh face and helpless straight hanging arms and hands. He sat big and fixed, like an idol, whilst the chairman standing bowing over his table hurriedly remarked that an introduction was superfluous, and gazed at the audience with large moist blue eyes that seemed permanently open and expressionless and yet to pray for protection, or permission to retreat once more behind his screen. Miriam pitied him from the bottom of her heart and saw with relief when he rose that he produced a roll of papers for which a little one-legged ecclesiastical reading desk was conveniently waiting. He was going to read. But he placed his papers with large incapable fingers and she feared they would flutter to the ground, till he turned and took one fumbling expressionless step clear of the little desk and standing just as he was, his arms hanging once more heavy and helpless at his side, his eyes motionlessly fixed neither on the distance nor on any part of the audience, as if sightlessly focussing everything before him, began, without movement, or warning gesture, to speak. With the first sound of his voice, Miriam surrendered herself to breathless listening. It sounded out, at conversational pitch, with a colourless serenity that instantly explained his bearing, revealing him beyond the region either of diffidence or temerity. It was a voice speaking to no one, in a world emptied of everything that had gone before.

“The progress of philosophy” went the words, in letters of gold across the dark void “is by a series of systems; that of science by the constant addition of small facts to accumulated knowledge.” In the slight pause Miriam held back from the thoughts flying out in all directions round the glowing words, they would come again, if she could memorise the words from which they were born, coolly, registering the shape and length of the phrases and the leading terms. Before the voice began again she had read and re-read many times; driving back an exciting intruder trying, from the depths of her mind to engage her on the subject of the time-expanding swiftness of thought.