Deadlock: Pilgrimage, Volume 6

by Dorothy M. Richardson

“Remember; I did not know you would come.”

Why did men not know? That was the strange thing. Why did they make their first impressions of women such as would sully everything that came after? That was the extraordinary thing about the average man and many men who were not average at all. Why?

The answer must be there if she could only get through to it. Some immovable answer. The wrong one perhaps, but sufficient to frame an irreversible judgment. There was an irreversible judgment at the heart of it all that would remain, even if further fuller truer reasons were reached later on. Anything that could take the life out of the sunlight was wrong. Every twist and turn of the many little side roads along which she made her way told her that. It was useless to try to run away from it. It remained, the only point of return from the wilderness of anger into which with every fresh attempt at thought, she was immediately flung. The more angry she grew the further she seemed to move from the possibility of finding and somehow expressing, in words that had not sounded in her mind before, the clue to her misery.

She reached the park at tea-time. Its vistas were mercifully empty. She breathed more freely within its greenery. Hidden somewhere here, was relief for the increasing numbness of her brain and the drag of her aching heart. The widening sky understood and would presently, when she had reached the statement that lay now, just ahead, offer itself in the old way, for companionship. Wandering along a little path that wound in and out of a thicket of shrubs, she heard a subdued rumble of voices and came in a moment upon two men, bent-headed in conversation side by side on a secluded seat. They looked up at her and upon their shiny German faces, and in the cold rheumy blue eyes beneath their unconscious intelligent German foreheads, was the horrible leer of their talk. Looking up from it, scanning her in the spirit of the images of life they had evoked in their sequestrated confidential interchange, they identified her with their vision. She turned back towards the wide empty avenues. But there was no refuge in them. Their bleak emptiness reflected the thoughtless lives of English men. Behind her the two Germans were immovably there, hemming her in. They were the answer. Sitting hidden there, in the English park, they were the whole unconscious male mind of Europe surprised unmasked. Thought out and systematised by them, openly discussed, without the cloudy reservations of Englishmen, was the whole masculine sense of womanhood. One image; perceived only with the body, separated and apart from everything else in life. Men were mind and body, separated mind and body, looking out at women, below their unconscious men’s brows, variously moulded and sanctified by thought, with one unvarying eye. There was no escape from its horrible blindness, no other life in the world to live .... the leer of a prostitute was .... reserved .... beautiful, suggesting a daily life lived independently amongst the impersonal marvels of existence, compared to the headlong desirous look of a man. The greed of men was something much more awful than the greed of a prostitute. She used her last strength to wrench herself away from the hopeless spectacle and wandered impatient and thoughtless in a feverish void. Far away from this barren north London, the chosen perfect stage for the last completion of a misery as wide as the world, was her own dream world at home in her room, her strange unfailing self, the lovely world of lovely things seen in silence and tranquillity, the coming and going of the light, the myriad indescribable things of which day and night, in solitude, were full, at every moment; the marvellous forgetfulness of sleep, followed by the smiling renewal of inexhaustible sameness .... thought flashed in, stabbing her weakness with the reminder that solitude had failed and from its failure she had been saved by the companionship of a man; of whom until to-day she had been proud in a world lit by the glory and pride of achieved companionships. But it was an illusion, fading and failing more swiftly than the real things of solitude ..... there was no release save in madness; a suddenly descending merciful madness, blotting everything out. She imagined herself raging and raving through the park, through the world, attacking the indifferent sky at last with some final outbreaking statement, something, somewhere within her she must say, or die. She gazed defiance upwards at the cloudless blue. The distant trees flattened themselves into dark clumps against the horizon. Swiftly she brought her eyes back to the diminishing earth. Something must be said; not to the sky, but in the world. She grew impatient for Mr. Shatov’s arrival. If only she could convey to him all that was in her mind, going back again and again endlessly to some central unanswerable assertion, the truth would be out. Stated. At least one man brought to book, arrested and illuminated. But what was it? That men are not worthy of women. He would agree, and remain pleading. That men never have, never can, understand the least thing about even the worst woman in the world? He would find things to say. She plunged back groping for weapons of statement, amongst the fixities of the world, there from the beginning, and pressing at last with their mocking accomplishment, against her small thread of existence. Long grappling in darkness against the inexorable images, she fell back at last upon wordless repudiation, and again the gulf of isolation opened before her. The struggle was not to be borne. It was monstrous, unforgivable, that it should be demanded of her. Yet it could not be given up. The smallest glance in the direction of even the simulation of acceptance, brought a panic sense of treachery that flung her back to cling once more to the vanishing securities of her own untouched imagination.

When at last he appeared, the sight of the familiar distinctive little figure plunging energetically along, beard first, through the north London Sunday evening crowd drifting about the park gates, their sounds quenched by the blare of the Salvation Army’s band marching townwards along the battered road, for one strange moment while a moving light came across the gravel pathway at her feet, decking its shabby fringe of grass with the dewy freshness of some remembered world far away and unknown to this trampling blind north London, she asked herself what all the trouble was about. What after all had changed? Not herself, that was clear. Walking in fevered darkness had not destroyed the light. But he had joined her, pulling up before her with white ravaged face and hands stretched silently towards her.

“For pity’s sake don’t touch me,” she cried involuntarily and walked on, accompanied, examining her outcry. It was right. It had a secret knowledge. They rode in silence on tram and bus. Below them on the dimly-lit pavements people moved, shadows broken loose and scattered in the grey of night. Gaslit, talking faces succeeded each other under the street lamps; not one speaking its thoughts; no feeling expressed that went even as deep as the screening chatter of words in the mind. But presently all about her, as she sat poised for the length of the journey between the dead stillness within her and the noise of the silence without, a world most wonderful was dawning with strange irrelevance, forcing her attention to lift itself from the abyss of her fatigue. Look at us, the buildings seemed to say, sweeping by massed and various and whole, spangled with light. We are here. We, are the accomplished marvel. Buildings had always seemed marvellous; and in their moving, changing aspects an endless fascination, except in North London, where they huddled without distinction, defaced in feature and outline by a featureless blind occupancy. But to-night, it was North London that was revealing the marvel of the mere existence of a building. North Londoners were not under the spell; but it was there. Their buildings rising out of the earth where once there had been nothing, proclaimed it as they swept dreaming by, making roadways that were like long thoughts, meeting and crossing and going on and on, deep alleyways and little courts where always was a pool of light or darkness, pouring down from their secret communion with the sky a strange single reality upon the clothed and trooping multitude below. And all the strange unnoticed marvel of buildings and clothes, the even more marvellously strange unnoticed clothing of speech, all existing alone and independent outside the small existence of single lives and yet proclaiming them ..... an exclamation of wonder rose to her lips, and fell back checked, by the remembered occasion, to which for an instant she returned as a stranger seeing the two figures side by side chained in suspended explanations that would not set them free, and left her gazing again, surrendered, addressing herself with a deepening ease of heart to the endless friendly strength flowing from things unconsciously brought about. It brought a balm that lulled her almost to sleep, so that when at last their journey was at an end she found herself wordless and adrift in a tiresome pain, that must be removed only because it blotted out marvels.

He began at once, standing before her, relating in simple unbroken speech the story of his student days, without pleading or extenuation; waiting at the end for her judgment.

“And that first photograph that I liked, was before; and the other, after.”

“That is so.”

“In the first there is someone looking out through the eyes; in the other that someone has moved away.”