Deadlock: Pilgrimage, Volume 6

by Dorothy M. Richardson

“Oh well, I’ve got the sack.”

“Are you serious” he said in a low frightened tone. The heavens were clear, ringing with morning joy; from far away in the undisturbed future she looked back smiling upon the episode that lay before her growing and pressing.

“I’m not serious. But they are. This is a solemn, awfully nice little note from Mr. Orly; he had to write, because he’s the senior partner, to inform me that he has come to the conclusion that I must seek a more congenial post. They have absolutely made up their minds. Because they know quite well I have no training for any other work, and no resources, and they would not have done this unless they were absolutely obliged.”

“Then you will be obliged to leave these gentlemen?”

“Of course long before I had finished talking I was thinking about all sorts of other things; and seeing all kinds of points of view that seemed to be stated all round us by people who were looking on. I always do when I talk to Mr. Hancock. His point of view is so clear-cut and so reasonable that it reveals all the things that hold social life together, and brings the ghosts of people who have believed and suffered for these things into the room, but also all kinds of other points of view..... But I’m not going to leave. I can’t. What else could I do? Perhaps I will a little later on, when this is all over. But I’m not going to be dismissed in solemn dignity. It’s too silly. That shows you how nice they are. I know that really I must leave. Anyone would say so. But that’s the extraordinary thing; I don’t believe in those things; solemn endings; being led by the nose by the necessities of the situation. That may be undignified. But dignity is silly; the back view. Already I can’t believe all this solemnity has happened. It’s simply a most fearful bother. They’ve managed it splendidly, waiting till Saturday morning, so that I shan’t see any of them again. The Orlys will be gone away for a month when I get there to-day and Mr. Hancock is away for the week-end and I am offered a month’s salary in lieu of notice, if I prefer it. I had forgotten all this machinery. They’re perfectly in the right, but I’d forgotten the machinery..... I knew yesterday. They were all three shut up together in the den, talking in low tones, and presently came busily out, each so anxious to pass the dismissed secretary in hurried preoccupation, that they collided in the doorway, and gave everything away to me by the affable excited way they apologised to each other. If I had turned and faced them then I should have said worse things than I had said to Mr. Hancock. I hated them, with their resources and their serenity, complacently pleased with each other because they had decided to smash an employee who had spoken out to them.”

“This was indeed a scene of remarkable significance.”

“I don’t know..... I once told Mr. Hancock that I would give notice every year, because I think it must be so horrible to dismiss anybody. But I’m not going to be sent away by machinery. In a way it is like a family suddenly going to law.”

But with the passing of the park and the coming of the tall houses on either side of the road, the open June morning was quenched. It retreated to balconies, flower-filled by shocked condemning people, prosperously turned away towards the world from which she was banished. Wimpole Street, Harley Street, Cavendish Square. The names sounded in her ears the appeal they had made when she was helplessly looking for work. It was as if she were still waiting to come.....

Within the Saturday morning peace of the deserted house lingered the relief that had followed their definite decision. They were all drawn together to begin again, renewed, freshly conscious of the stabilities of the practice; their enclosed co-operating relationship.....

She concentrated her mental gaze on their grouped personalities, sharing their long consultations, acting out in her mind with characteristic gesture and speech, the part each one had taken, confronting them one by one, in solitude, with a different version, holding on, breaking into their common-sense finalities.... It was all nothing; meaningless ..... like things in history that led on to events that did not belong to them because nobody went below the surface of the way things appear to be joined together but are not ..... but the words belonging to the underlying things were far away, only to be found in long silences, and sounding when they came out into conversations, irrelevant, often illogical and self-contradictory, impossible to prove, driving absurdly across life towards things that seemed impossible, but were true ..... there were two layers of truth. The truths laid bare by common-sense in swift decisive conversations, founded on apparent facts, were incomplete. They shaped the surface, made things go kaleidoscoping on, recognisable, in a sort of general busy prosperous agreement; but at every turn, with every application of the common-sense civilised decisions, enormous things were left behind, unsuspected, forced underground, but never dying, slow things with slow slow fruit ..... the surface shape was powerful, everyone was in it, that was where free-will broke down, in the moving on and being spirited away for another spell from the underlying things, but in everyone, alone, often unconsciously, was something, a real inside personality that was turned away from the surface. In front of everyone, away from the bridges and catchwords, was an invisible plank, that would bear ..... always .... forgotten .... nearly all smiles were smiled from the bridges .... nearly all deaths were murders or suicides ....