The same group of days had contained the relief of the beginning of generalisations; the end, on her part, of stories about people, told with an eye upon his own way of observing and stating. These stories had, during the earlier time, kept him so amused and, with his profane comments and paraphrases, so perpetually entertaining, that a large part of her private councils during the visits were spent in reviewing the long procession of Tansley Street boarders, the patients at Wimpole Street, and people ranged far away in her earlier lives, as material for anecdote. But throughout the delight of his interest and his surprising reiterated envy of the variety of her contacts, there had been a haunting sense of misrepresentation, and even of treachery to him, in contributing to his puzzling almost unvarying vision of people as pitifully absurd, from the small store of experiences she had dropped and forgotten, until he drew them forth and called them wealth.
His refusal to believe in a Russian’s individuality because no one had heard of him had set a term to these communications, leaving an abrupt pain. It was so strange that he should fail to recognise the distinction of the Russian being, the quality of the Russian attitude towards life. He had followed with interest, gentle and patient at first before her overwhelming conviction, allowing her to add stroke after stroke to her picture, seeming for a moment to see what she saw and then——What has he done? Either it was that his pre-arranged picture of European life had no place for these so different, inactive Russians, or her attempts to represent people in themselves, without borrowed methods of portrayal, were useless because they fell between the caricature which was so uncongenial to her and the methods of description current in everyday life, which equally refused to serve by reason of their tacit reference to ideas she could not accept.
But the beginnings of abstract discussion had brought a most joyful relief, and a confirming intensification of the beauty of the interiors and of the surrounding landscape, in which their talks were set. Discussing people, save when he elaborated legend and profanity until privately she called upon the hosts of heaven to share this brightest terrestrial mirth, cast a spell of sadness all about her. With every finished vignette there came a sense of ending. Sacrificed to its sharp expressiveness were the real moments of these people’s lives; and the moments of the present, counting themselves off, ignored and irrecoverable, offering, as their extension, time that was unendurably narrow and confined, a narrow featureless darkness, its walls grinning with the transfixed features of consciousness that had always been, and must, if the pictures were accepted as true, forever be, a motionless absurdity.
Launched into wide opposition, no longer trying to see with his eyes, while still hoarding, as a contrasting amplification of her own visions, much that he had given her, she found people still there; rallying round her in might, ranging forward through time, each one standing clear of everything that offered material for ironic commentary, in a radiant individuality.
Wide generalisation was, she had immediately vowed, the way to illuminating contemplation of humanity. Its exercise made the present moment a life in itself, going on forever; the thought of the speakers and the surroundings blended in an unforgettable whole; her past life gleaming about her in a chain of moments; leaping glad acceptances or ardent refusals, of large general views.
The joy of making statements not drawn from things heard or read but plumbed directly from the unconscious accumulations of her own experience was fermented by the surprise of his interested attention, and the pride of getting him occasionally to accept an idea or to modify a point of view. It beamed compensation for what she was losing in sacrificing, whenever expression was urgent in her, his unmatchable monologue to her own shapeless outpourings. But she laboured, now and then successfully, to hold this emotion in subjection to the urgency of the things she longed to express.
“Women, everybody knows nowadays, have made civilisation, the thing civilisation is so proud of—social life. It’s one of the things I dislike in them. There you are, by the way, women were the first socialists.” Havelock Ellis; and Emerson quoting Firdusi’s description of his Persian Lilla ... but the impression, remaining more sharp and deep than the event, became one’s own by revealing an inborn sharing of the view expressed. And waiting behind it now, was the proof, in life, as she had seen it.
“I don’t mean that idea of public opinion ‘the great moulding and civilising force steered by women’ that even the most pessimistic men admit, in horror.”
“What do you mean, Miriam?” Patient scepticism.
“Something quite different. It’s amazing, the blindness in men, even in you, about women. There must be a reason for it. Because it’s universal. It’s no good looking, with no matter what eyes, if you look in the wrong place. All that men have done, since the beginning of the world, is to find out and give names to and do, the things that were in women from the beginning, and that the best of them have been doing all the time. Not me.”