Interim: Pilgrimage, Volume 5

by Dorothy M. Richardson

Purgatory. The waters of Lethe and Eunoe ‘forgetfulness and sweet memory’; and then Heaven. The Catholics are right about expiation. If you are happy in the present something is being expiated. If life contains moments of paradise you must be in purgatory looking across the vale of Asphodel. You can’t be in hell.... Yet hell would not be hell without a knowledge of heaven. If once you’ve been in heaven you can never escape. Yet Dante believed in everlasting punishment.

Bathing in the waters of Lethe and Eunoe unworthily is drinking one’s own damnation. But happiness crops up before one can prevent it. Perhaps happiness is one long sin, piling up a bill.... It is my secret companion. Waiting at the end of every dark passage. I did not make myself. I can’t help it.

Brilliant ... brilliant; and someone was seeing it. There was no thunderstorm, no clouds or pink edges on the brilliant copper grey. She wandered on down the road hemmed by flaring green. The invisible sun was everywhere. There was no air, nothing to hold her body separate from the scene. The grey brilliance of the sky was upon the pavement and in the green of the park, making mauve shadows between the trees and a mist of mauve amongst the further green. The high house fronts stood out against the grey, eastern-white, frilled below with new-made green, sprouting motionlessly as you looked ... white plaster houses against the blue of the Mediterranean, grey mimosa trees, green-feathered lilac of wisteria. Between the houses and the park the road glared wooden grey, dark, baked grey, edged with the shadowless stone grey of the pavement. Summer. Eternity showing....

The Euston Road was a narrow hot channel of noise and unbreathable odours, the dusty exhausting cruelty of the London summer, leading on to the feathery green floored woods of Endsleigh Gardens edged by grey house fronts, and ending in the cool stone of St. Pancras Church.

In the twilit dining-room one’s body was like a hot sun throbbing in cool dark air, ringed by cool walls holding darkness in far corners; coolness poured out through the wide-open windows towards the rain-cool grey facades of the opposite houses, cool and cool until the throbbing ceased.

All the forms seated round the table were beautiful; far-away and secret and separate, each oneself set in the coming of summer, unconscious. One soul. Summer is the soul of man. Through all the past months they had been the waiting guests of summer.

The pain of trying to get back into the moment of the first vision of spring, the perfect moment before the thought came that spring was going on in the country unseen, was over. The moment came back of itself ... the green flush in the squares, the ripples of emerald fringed pink geraniums along the balconies of white houses.

After dinner Miriam left the dining-room, driven joyfully forth, remaining behind, floating and drifting happily about, united with everyone in the room as her feet carried her step by step without destination, going everywhere, up through the staircase twilight....

The drawing-room was filled with saffron light, filtering in through the curtains hanging motionless before the high French windows. Within the air of the room, just inside the faint smell of dusty upholstery was the peace of the new found summer. Mrs. Bailey’s gift. There had been no peace of summer last year in her stifling garret. This year the summer was with her, in the house where she was. Far away within the peace of the room was the evening of a hot summer day at Waldstrasse, the girls sitting about, beautiful featureless forms together forever in the blissful twilight of the cool saal and sitting in its little summer house Ulrica, everybody, her dark delicate profile lifted towards the garden, her unconscious pearly beauty grouped against the undisturbing presence of Fraulein Pfaff. Miriam turned to the near window and peered through the thick mesh of the smoke-yellowed lace curtain. Behind it the french window stood ajar. Drawing aside the thick dust-smelling lace she stepped out and drew the door to behind her. There were shabby drawing-room chairs standing in an irregular row on the dirty grey stone, railed by a balustrade of dark maroon painted iron railings almost colourless with black grime. But the elastic outer air was there and away at the end of the street a great gold pink glow stood above and showed through the feathery upper branches of the trees in Endsleigh Gardens. A number of people must have been sitting out before dinner. That was part of their dinner-time happiness. Presently some of them would come back. She scanned the disposition of the chairs. The little comfortable circular velvet chair stood in the middle of the row, conversationally facing the high-backed wicker chair. The other chairs were the small stiff velvet-seated ones. The one at the north end of the balcony could be turned towards the glowing sky with its back to the rest of the balcony. She reached and turned it and sat down. The opposite houses with their balconies on which groups were already forming stood sideways, lost beyond the rim of her glasses. The balcony of the next house was empty; there was nothing between her and the vista of green feathering up into the intense gold-rose glow.... She could come here every night ... filling her life with green peace; preparing for the stifling heat of the nights in her garret. This year, with dinner in the cool dining-room and the balcony for the evening, the summer would not be so unbearable. She sat still, lifted out into garden freshness.... Benediction.... People were stepping out on to the balcony behind her, remarking on the beauty of the evening, their voices new and small in the outer air.... If she never came out again this summer would be different. It had begun differently. She knew what lay ahead and could be prepared for it.

She would find coolness at the heart of the swelter of London if she could keep a tranquil mind. The coolness at the heart of the central swelter was wonderful life, from moment to moment, pure life. To go forward now, from this moment, alive, keeping alive, through the London summer. Even to go away for holidays would be to break up the wonder, to snap the secret clue and lose the secret life....