Interim: Pilgrimage, Volume 5

by Dorothy M. Richardson

2

Eve’s shop was a west-end blaze of flowers. The window was blocked with flowers in jars, tied up in large bundles. In front were gilt baskets of hot-house flowers. Propped in the middle were a large flower anchor and a flower horseshoe, both trimmed with large bows of white satin ribbon—women in white satin evening dresses with trains, bowing from platforms—on either side were tight dance buttonholes pinned on to heart-shaped velvet mounts.

It was strange to be able to go in.... Going in to see an employee was not the right way to go into a west-end shop.... There was Eve; standing badly in a droopy black dress on a bare wet wooden floor. Cut flowers in stone jam pots, masses of greenery lying on a wet table. Hulloh aren’t your feet wet demanded Miriam irritably. Eve started and turned, looking. She was exhausted and excited, grappling dreamily with abrupt instructions with a conservatory smell competing with them; trying to become part of a clever arrangement to collect the conservatory smell for sale. She stepped slenderly forward; all her old Eve manner, but determined to guard against disturbance; making sounds without speaking, and the faint shape of a tired smile. She was worn out with the fatigue of trying to make herself into something else, but liking it and determined not to be reminded of other things. Even her hair seemed to be changed. Full of pictures of Eve, gracefully dressed and with piled brown hair Miriam’s eyes passed in fury over the skimpy untidy sham shop-assistant, beginning a failure defensively, imagining behind it that she was taking hold of London.... Won’t you catch cold? You get used to it mouthed Eve nervously turning her head away and waiting, fumbling a scattered spray of smilax. Eve had always loved smilax. Did it seem the same to her now? Fancy you said Miriam, in all this damp. They were both miserable and Eve was not going to put it right. All her strength and interest was for this new thing. Do you like it? said Miriam beginning again. Yes awfully flushed Eve looking as if she were going to cry. It was too late. I suppose its awfully interesting asked Miriam formally, opening a conversation with a stranger. Mps said Eve warmly I simply love it. It makes you frightfully tired at first, but I find I can do things I never dreamed I could. I don’t mind standing in the wet a bit now. You have to if you’re obliged to. Eve was liking hardness imposed by other people. Liking the prices of her new life. Accepting them without resentment. People would despise and like her for that. Perhaps she would succeed in staying on if her strength did not give way. Her graceful dresses and leisurely brown hair going further and further away.... Do you serve? Ssh. I’m learning to. Eve would not look, and wanted her to be gone. I’m free for lunch said Miriam snappily, holding to the disappearing glory of her first coming out into London in the middle of a week-day. Eve should have guessed and stopped being anything but Eve being taken out to lunch. We could go to an A.B.C. Oh I can’t come out murmured Eve ignoringly.

3

Miriam ordered another cup of coffee and went on reading. There was plenty of time. Eve would not appear at Tansley Street until half-past. In looking up at the clock she had become aware of detailed people grouped at tables. She plunged back into Norway, reading on and on. Each line was wonderful; but all in a darkness. Presently on some turned page something would shine out and make a meaning. It went on and on. It seemed to be going towards something. But there was nothing that anyone could imagine, nothing in life or in the world that could make it clear from the beginning, or bring it to an end. If the man died the author might stop. Finis. But it would not make any difference to anything. She turned the pages backwards re-reading passages here and there. She could not remember having read them. Looking forward to portions of the dialogue towards the end of the book she found them familiar; as if she had read them before ... she read them intently. They had more meaning read like that, without knowing to what they were supposed to refer. They were the same, read alone in scraps, as the early parts. It was all one book in some way, not through the thoughts, or the story, but something in the author. People who talked about the book probably understood the strange thoughts and the puzzling hinting story that began and came to an end and left everything as it was before. The author did not seem to suggest that you should be sorry. He seemed to know that at the end everything was as before, with the mountains all round.... The electric lights flashed out all over the A.B.C. at once.... Miriam remained bent low over her book. Only you had been in Norway, in a cottage up amongst the mountains and out in the open. She read a scene at random and another and began again and read the first scene through and then the last. It was all the same. You might as well begin at the end.... In Norway, up among the misty mountains, in farms and cottages looking down on fiords with glorious scenery about them all the time are people, sitting in the winter by fires and worrying about right and wrong. They wonder but more gravely and clearly than we do. Torrents thunder in their ears and they can see mountains all the time even when they are indoors. “Ibsen’s Brand” is about all those worrying things, in magnificent scenery. You are in Norway while you read. That is why people read books by geniuses and look far-away when they talk about them. They know they have been somewhere you cannot go without reading the book.... Brand. You are in the strangeness of Norway—and then there are people saying things that might be said anywhere. But with something going in and out of the words all the time. Ibsen’s genius. You can’t understand it or see where it is. Each sentence looks so ordinary, making you wonder what it is all about. But taking you somewhere, to stay, forgetting everything, until it is finished. An hour ago Ibsen was just a name people said in a particular way, a difficult wonderful mystery, and improper. Why do people say he is improper? He is exactly like everyone else, thinking and worrying about the same things. But putting them down in a background that is more real than people or thoughts. The life in the background is in the people. He does not know this. Why did he write it? A book by a genius is alive. That is why “Ibsen” is superior to novels; because it is not quite about the people or the thoughts. There is something else; a sort of lively freshness all over even the saddest parts, preventing your feeling sorry for the people. Everyone ought to know. It ought to be on the omnibuses and in the menu. All these people fussing about not knowing of Ibsen’s Brand. A volume, bound in a cover. Alive. Precious. What is Genius? Something that can take you into Norway in an A.B.C.

She wandered out into Oxford Street. There was a vast fresh gold-lit sky somewhere behind the twilight. Why did Ibsen sit down in Norway and write plays? Why did people say Ibsen as if it were the answer to something? Walking along Oxford Street with a read volume of Ibsen held against you is walking along with something precious between two covers which makes you know you are rich and free.... She wandered on and on in an expansion of everything that passed into her mind out and out towards a centre in Norway. She wondered whether Ibsen were still alive. A vast beautiful Norway and a man writing his thoughts in a made-up play. Genius. People go about saying Ibsen’s Brand as if it were the answer to something and Ibsen knows no more than anyone else.... She arrived at Tansley Street as from a great distance, suddenly wondering about her relationship with the sound of carts and near footfalls. Mrs. Bailey was standing in the doorway seeing someone off. Eve. Forgotten. I couldn’t get here before; I’m so sorry. Mrs. Bailey had disappeared. Eve stepped back into the hall and stood serenely glowing in the half-light. Are you going? I must, in a minute. Eve was looking sweet; slenderly beautiful and with her crimson-rose bloom; shy and indulgent and unenviously admiring as she had been at home; and Mrs. Bailey had been having it all. Can’t you come upstayers? Not this time; I’ll come again some time. Well; you must just tell me; wot you been doing? Talking to Mrs. Bailey? Yes. Eve had been flirting with Mrs. Bailey; perhaps talking about religion. Isn’t she funny? I like her; she’s perfectly genuine, she means what she says and really likes people. Yes; I know. Isn’t it funny? I don’t think it’s funny; it’s very beautiful and rare. Would you like to be here always? Yes; I could be always with Mrs. Bailey. Every day of your life for ever and ever? Rather. Yes; I know. And y’know there are all sorts of interesting people. I wish you lived here Eve. Eve glanced down wisely smiling and moved slenderly towards the door. What about Sunday? Couldn’t you come round for a long time? No breathed Eve restrainingly, I’m going to Sallies. All Eve’s plans were people. She moved, painfully, through things, from person to person.

4

Dr. Hurd held the door wide for Miriam to pass out and again his fresh closely knit worn brick-red face was deeply curved by the ironically chuckling hilarious smile with which he had met the incidents of the “awful German language.” That of the fatherland, the happy fatherland, nearly dislocates my jaw she could imagine him heartily and badly singing with a group of Canadian students. She smiled back at him without saying anything, rapidly piecing together the world that provoked his inclusive deeply carved smiles; himself, the marvellous little old country he found himself in as an incident of the business of forcing himself to be a doctor, his luck in securing an accomplished young English lady to prepare him for the struggle with the great medical world of Germany; his triumphant chuckling satisfaction in getting in first before the other fellows with an engagement to take her out.... The grandeur of this best bedroom of Mrs. Bailey was nothing to him. The room was just a tent in his wanderings.... For the moment he was going to take a young lady to a concert. That was how he saw it. He was a simple boyish red-haired open extension of Dr. von Heber. When she found herself out in the large grime and gloom of the twilit landing she realised that he had lifted her far further than Dr. von Heber into Canada; he was probably more Canadian. The ancient gloom of the house was nothing to him, he would get nothing of the quality of England in his personal life there, only passing glimpses from statements in books and in the conversation of other people. He did not see her as part of it all in the way Dr. von Heber had done talking at the table that night and wanting to talk to her because she was part of it. He saw her as an accomplished young lady, but a young lady like a Canadian young lady and a fellow was a fool if he did not arrange to take her out quick before the other fellows. But there was nothing in it but just that triumph. “I’ll get a silk hat before Sunday”; he would prepare for her to go all the way down to the Albert Hall as a young lady being taken to a concert; the Albert Hall on Sunday was brass bands; he thought they were a concert. His world was thin and open; but the swift sunlit decision and freedom of his innocent reception of her in his bedroom lifted the dingy brown house of her long memories into a new background. She was to be fêted, in an assumed character and whether she liked it or no. The four strange men in the little back sitting-room were her competing friends, the friends of all nice young ladies. He was the one who had laughed the laugh she had heard in the hall, of course. They never appeared but somehow they had got to know of her and had their curious baseless set ways of thinking and talking about her. Being doctors and still students they ought to be the most hateful and awful kind of men in relation to women, thinking and believing all the horrors of medical science; the hundred golden rules of gynæcology; if they had been Englishmen they would have gone about making one want to murder them; but they did not; Dr. Hurd was studying gyn’kahl’jy, but he did not apply its ugly lies to life; to Canadians women were people ... but they were all the same people to Dr. Hurd.

5

That evening both Dr. Heber and Dr. Hurd appeared at dinner. Mrs. Bailey tumultuously arranged them opposite each other to her right and left. Miriam could not believe they were going to stay until they sat down. She retreated to the far end of the table taking her place on Sissie’s right hand, separated from Dr. von Heber by the thin Norwegian and the protruding bulk of Mrs. Barrow. Mr. Mendizabal with a pencil and paper at the side of his plate was squarely opposite to her. His méfiant sallies to the accompaniment of Sissie’s giggles and Miss Strong’s rapid sarcastic remarks, made a tumult hiding her silence. She heard nothing of the various conversations sprouting easily all round the table. The doctors were far-off strongholds of serenity, unconscious of their serenity, unconscious of her and of their extraordinary taking of the Baileys and Mr. Gunner for granted.... Dr. von Heber was a silence broken by small courteously curving remarks. Dr. Hurd laughed his leaping delighted laugh in and out of an unmeditated interchange with Mr. Gunner and Mrs. Bailey. If she had been at their end of the table they would not have perceived her thoughts, but they would have felt her general awareness and got up at last disliking her. They changed the atmosphere but could not make her forget the underlying unchanged elements nor rid her of her resentment of their unconsciousness of them. There was a long interval before the puddings appeared. Mrs. Bailey was trying to answer questions about books. Dr. Hurd did not care for reading, but liked to be read to, by his sisters, in the evening, and had come away, at the most exciting part of a book ... a wonderful authoress, what’s her name now——Rosie——Newchet.... He was just longing to know how it ended. Was it sweet and wonderful, or too dreadful for anything to contemplate a student, a fully qualified doctor having Rosa Nouchette Carey read to him by his sisters? Dr. von Heber was not joining in. Did he read novels and like them? No one had anything to say; no one here knew even of Rosa Nouchette Carey ... and that man Hunter ... he’s great ... he’s father’s favourite; what’s this, Mr. Barnes of New York.... Archibald Clavering Gunter said Miriam suddenly, longing to be at the other end of the table. Beg pardon? said Sissie turning aside for a moment from watching Mr. Mendizabal’s busy pencil. There he is shouted Mr. Mendizabal flinging out his piece of paper—gastric ulcer—there he is. There was a drawing of a sort of crab with huge claws.—My beautiful gastric ulcer—Have you been to the ’ospital to-day Mr. Mendizzable asked Mrs. Bailey through the general laughter. I have been madame and I come away. They say they welcome me inside again soon. Je m’en fiche. The faces of both doctors were turned enquiringly. Dr. Hurd’s look of quizzical sympathy passed on towards Miriam and became a mask of suppressed hysterical laughter. Perhaps he and Dr. Heber would scream and yell together afterwards and make a great story of a man in a London pension. Dr. Hurd would call him a cure. My word isn’t that chap a cure? Brave little man. Caring for nothing. How could he possibly have a gastric ulcer and look so hard and happy and strong. What was Dr. von Heber silently thinking? The doctors disappeared as soon as dinner was over, Dr. von Heber gravely rounding the door with some quiet formal phrases of politeness, and the group about the table broke up. He’s a bit pompous Mr. Gunner was saying presently to someone from the hearthrug. Was he daring to speak of Dr. von Heber? Presently there were only the women left in the room. Miriam felt unable to depart and hung about until the table was cleared and sat down under the gas protected by her note-book. The room was very quiet. Sissie and Mrs. Bailey were mending near a lamp at the far end of the table. Miriam’s thoughts left her suddenly. The tide of life had swept away leaving an undisturbed stillness, a space swept clear. She was empty and nothing. In all the clamour that had passed she had no part. In all the noise that lay ahead, no part. Strong people came and went and never ceased, coming and going and acting ceaselessly, coming and going, and here, at her centre, was nothing, lifeless thoughtless nothingness. The four men studied apart in the little room, away from the empty lifeless nothingness ... the door opened quietly. Mrs. Bailey and Sissie looked expectantly up and were silent. Something had come into the room. Something real, clearing away the tumult and compelling peaceful silence. She exerted all her force to remain still and apparently engrossed, as Dr. von Heber placed an open note-book and a large volume on the table exactly opposite to where she sat and sat down. He did not see that she was astonished at his coming nor her still deeper astonishment in the discovery of her unconscious certainty that he would come. A haunting familiar sense of unreality possessed her. Once more she was part of a novel; it was right, true like a book, for Dr. Heber to come in in defiance of everyone, bringing his studies into the public room in order to sit down quietly opposite this fair young English girl. He saw her apparently gravely studious and felt he could ‘pursue his own studies’ all the better for her presence. She began writing at random, assuming as far as possible the characteristics he was reading into her appearance. If only it were true; but there was not in the whole world the thing he thought he saw. Perhaps if he remained steadily like that in her life she could grow into some semblance of his steady reverent observation. He did not miss any movement or change of expression. Perhaps you need to be treated as an object of romantic veneration before you can become one. Perhaps in Canada there were old-fashioned women who were objects of romantic veneration all their lives, living all the time as if they were Maud or some other woman from Tennyson. It was glorious to have a real, simple homage coming from a man who was no simpleton, coming simple, strong and kindly from Canada to put you in a shrine.... I have always liked those old-fashioned stories because I have always known they were true. They have lived on in Canada. Canadian men have kept something that Englishmen are losing. She turned the pages of her note-book and came upon the scrap crossed through by Mr. Mendizabal. She read the words through forcing them to accept a superficial meaning. Disturbance about ideas would destroy the perfect serenity that was demanded of her. Be good sweet maid and let who will be clever. Easy enough if one were perpetually sustained by a strong and adoring hand. Perhaps more difficult really to be good than to be clever. Perhaps there were things in this strong man that were not perfectly good and serene. He exacted his own serenity by sheer force; that was why he worshipped and looked for natural serenity.... Presently she stirred from her engrossment and looked across at him as if only just aware of his presence. He did not meet her look but a light came on his face and he raised his head and turned towards the light to aid her observation. The things that are beginning to be called silly futile romances are true. Here is the strong silent man who does not want to talk and grin.... He would love laughter. Freed from worries and sustained by him one could laugh all one’s laughter out and dance and sing through life to a happy sunsetting.... Was he religious? She found she had risen to her feet with decision and began collecting her papers in confusion as if she had suddenly made a great clamour. Dr. Heber rose at once and with some quiet murmuring remark went away from the room. Miriam felt she must get into the open and go far on and on and on. Going upstairs through the house and into her room for her outdoor things she found her own secret belongings more her own. In the life she shyly glanced at, out away somewhere in the bright blaze of Canadian sunshine her own secret belongings would be more her own. That was one of the secrets of the sheltered life ... one of the things behind the smiles of the sheltered women; their own secret certainties intensified because they were surrounded; perhaps in Canada men respected the secret certainties of women which they could never share. With your feet on that firm ground what would it matter how life went on and on? There was someone in the hall. Mr. Mendizabal in a funny little short overcoat.