Deadlock: Pilgrimage, Volume 6

by Dorothy M. Richardson

“You needn’t” she said rising as he rose, and going buoyantly to move about in the neighbourhood of the scattered results of his last operation, the symbols of her narrowly rescued continuity. She was not yet free to touch them. He was still, wandering about the other part of the room, lingering with thoughtful bent head in the mazes of her outrageous halting statements. But a good deal of his resentment had gone. It was something outside herself, something in the world at large, that had forced him to act against his “better judgment.” He was still angry and feeling a little shorn, faced, in the very presence of the offender, with the necessity of disposing of the fact that he had been driven into inconsistency.

Miriam drew a deep sigh, clearing her personal air of the burden of conflict. Was it an affront? It had sounded to her like a song. His thoughts must be saying, well, there you are, it’s all very well to throw it all off like that. His pose stiffened into a suggested animation with regard to work delayed. If only now there could be an opportunity for one of his humorous remarks so that she could laugh herself back into their indestructible impersonal relationship. It was, she thought, prophetically watching his gloriously inevitable recovery, partly his unconscious resentment of the blow she had struck at their good understanding that had made him so repeatedly declare that if they started again it must be on a new footing; that all possibility of spontaneity between them had been destroyed.

How could it be, with the events of daily life perpetually building it afresh?

CHAPTER IX

The power of London to obliterate personal affairs depended upon unlimited freedom to be still. The worst suffering in the days of uncertainty had been the thought of movements that would make time move..... Now that the stillness had returned, life was going on, dancing, flowing, looping out in all directions able to bear its periods of torment in the strength of its certainty of recovery, so long as time stayed still. Life ceased when time moved on. Out in the world life was ceasing all the time. All the time people were helplessly doing things that made time move; growing up, old people growing onwards, with death suddenly in sight, rushing here and there with words that had lost their meaning, dodging and crouching no matter how ridiculously, to avoid facing it. Young men died in advance; it was visible in their faces, when they took degrees and sat down to tasks that made time begin to move; never again free from its movement, always listening and looking for the stillness they had lost... But why is the world which produces them so fresh and real and free, and then seizes and makes them dead old leaves whirled along by time, so different to people alone in themselves when time is not moving? People in themselves want nothing but reality. Why can’t reality exist in the world? All the things that happen produce friction because they distract people from the reality they are unconsciously looking for. That is why there are everywhere torrents of speech. If she had not read all those old words in the train and had been silent. Silence is reality. Life ought to be lived on a basis of silence, where truth blossoms. Why isn’t such an urgent thing known? Life would become like the individual; alive .... it would show, inside and out, and people would leave off talking so much. Life does show, seen from far off, pouring down into stillness. But the contemplation of it, not caring for pain or suffering except as part of a picture, which no one who is in the picture can see, seems mean. Old women sitting in corners, suddenly making irrelevant remarks and chuckling, see; they make a stillness of reality, a mind picture that does not care, out of the rush of life. Perhaps they do not fear death. Perhaps people who don’t take part don’t fear death ...... the outsider sees most of the game; but that means a cynical man who does not care for anything; body and mind without soul. Lying dead at last, with reality left unnoticed on his dressing-table, along the window sill, along the edge of things outside the window....

But one day in the future time would move, by itself, not through anything one did, and there would be no more life.... She looked up hurriedly towards the changing voice. He was no longer reading with a face that showed his thoughts wandering far away.

“The thought of death is, throughout life, entirely absent from the mind of the healthy man.” His brilliant thought filled eyes shone towards her at the end of the sentence.

“There is indeed a vulgarity in perfect health,” he exclaimed.

“Yes,” she said hurriedly, carrying off the statement for examination, as peacefully he went on reading. What did vulgarity mean, or perfect health? Nobody knew. Dante ennobled the vulgar tongue.... People went on forever writing books using the same words with different meanings. Her eyes returned to the relaxed unconscious form. He thought too much of books. Yet it did not appal him to think of giving up his free intellectual life and taking to work. ‘I shall still be an interested amateur.’ ... He would go on reading, all his life, sitting as he was sitting now, grave and beautiful; with a mind outspread in a mental experience so wide that he was indifferent to the usual ideas of freedom and advantage. Yet he did not seem to be aware how much the sitting like this, linked to the world by its deep echo in the book, was a realisation of life as he saw it. It did not occur to him that this serenity, in which were accumulated all the hours they had passed together, was realisation, the life of the world in miniature, making a space where everything in human experience could emerge like a reflection in deep water, with its proportions held true and right by the tranquil opposition of their separate minds. She summoned onlookers, who instantly recognised themselves in this picture of leisure. It was in every life that was not astray in ceaseless movement. It was the place where everything was atoned. He fitted placed thus, happy, without problems or envies, in possession of himself and his memories in the room where he had voiced them, into the centre of English life where all turned to good, in the last fastness of the private English mind where condemnation could not live. He reinforced it with a consciousness that was not in the English, making it show as an idea, revealing in plain terms their failure to act it out...... Thus would his leisure always be. But it was no part of her life. In this tranquillity there was no security .... we will always sit like this; we must, she said within herself impatiently towards his unconsciousness. Why did he not perceive the life there was, the mode of life, in this sitting tranquilly together? Was he thinking of nothing but his reading? She listened for a moment half carried into the quality of the text. There was reality there, Spinoza, by himself, sounding as if the words were being traced out now, for the first time. One day in a moment of blankness, she would read it and agree and disagree and carry away some idea and lose and recover it and go on, losing and recovering, agreeing and disagreeing....

When he went away her life would be swept clear of intelligently selected books and the sting of conflict with them .... that would not matter; perhaps; books would come, somehow, in the unexpected way they always did. But it was impossible to face the ending of these settled tranquil elderly evenings of peaceful unity, the quiet dark-bearded form, sitting near, happily engrossed......