Revolving Lights: Pilgrimage, Volume 7

by Dorothy M. Richardson

“Diplomatic Miriam.”

“Not at all. It’s useless to talk to instincts. I know; because I have tried. Poor little man. I am afraid, now that I am not going to marry him, of hurting and tiring him. I talked one night. We had been agreeing about things, and I went on and on, it was in the drawing-room in the dark, after a theatre, talking almost to myself, very interested, forgetting that he was there. Presently a voice said, trembling with fatigue, ‘Believe me, Miriam, I am profoundly interested. Will you perhaps put all this down for me on paper?’ Yes. Wasn’t it funny and appalling. It was three o’clock. Since then I have been afraid. Besides, he will marry a Jewess. If I were not sure of that I could not contemplate his loneliness. It’s heartbreaking. When I go to see friends in the evening, he waits outside.”

“I say. Poor chap. That’s quite touching. You’ll marry him yet, Miriam.”

“There are ways in which I like him and am in touch with him as I never could be with an Englishman. Things he understands. And his absolute sweetness. Absence of malice and enmity. It’s so strange too, with all his ideas about women, the things he will do. Little things like cleaning my shoes. But look here; an important thing. Having children is just shelving the problem, leaving it for the next generation to solve.”

That stood out as the end of the conversation; bringing a sudden bright light. The idea that there was something essential, for everybody, that could not be shelved. Something had interrupted. It could never be repeated. But surely he must have agreed, if there had been time to bring it home to him. Then it might have been possible to get him to admit uniqueness ... individuality. He would. But would say it was negligible. Then the big world he thinks of, since it consists of individuals, is also negligible....

Something had been at work in the conversation, making it all so easy to recover. Vanity? The relief of tackling the big man? Not altogether. Because there had been moments of thinking of death. Glad death if the truth could once be stated. Disinterested rejoicing in the fact that a man who talked to so many people was hearing something about the world of women. And if anyone had been there to express it better, the relief would have been there, just the same, without jealousy. But what an unconscious compliment to men, to feel that it mattered whether or no they understood anything about the world of women....

The remaining days of the visit had glowed with the sense of the beginning of a new relationship with the Wilsons. The enchantment that surrounded her each time she went to see them and always as the last hours went by, grew oppressive with the reminder of its impermanence, shone, at last, wide over the future. The end of a visit would never again bring the certainty of being finally committed to an overwhelming combination of poverties, cut off, by an all-round ineligibility, from the sun-bathed seaward garden, the joyful brilliant seaside light pouring through the various bright interiors of the perfect little house; the inexpressible charm, always renewed, and remaining, however deeply she felt at variance with the Wilson reading of life, the topmost radiance of her social year; ignored and forgotten nearly all the time, but shining out whenever she chanced to look round at the resources of her outside life, a bright enduring pinnacle, whose removal would level the landscape to a rolling plain, its modest hillocks, easy to climb, robbed of their light, the bright reflection that came, she half-angrily admitted, from this central height.

But there had been a difference in the return to London after that visit, that had filled her with misgiving. Usually upon the afterpain of the wrench of departure, the touch of her own returning life had come like a balm. That time, she had seemed, as the train steamed off, to be going for the first time, not away from, but towards all she had left behind. There had been a strange exciting sense of travelling, as everyone seemed to travel, preoccupied, missing the adventure of the journey, merely suffering it as an unavoidable time-consuming movement from one place to another. She, like all these others, had a place and a meaning in the outside world. She could have talked, if opportunity had offered, effortlessly, from the surface of her mind, borrowing emphasis and an appearance of availability and interest, from a secure unshared possession. She had suddenly known that it was from this basis of preoccupation with secure unshared possessions that the easy shapely conversations of the world were made. But also that those who made them were committed, by their preoccupations, to a surrounding deadness. Liveliness of mind checked the expressiveness of surroundings. The gritty interior of the carriage had remained intolerable throughout the journey. The passing landscape had never come to life.

But the menace of a future invested in unpredictable activities in a cause that seemed, now that she understood it, to have been won invisibly since the beginning of the world, was lost almost at once in the currents of her London life. Things had happened that had sharply restored her normal feeling of irreconcilableness; of being altogether differently fated, and to return, if ever they should wish it, only at the bidding of the inexpressible charm. There had been things moving all about her with an utterly reassuring independent reality. Mr. Leyton’s engagement ... bringing to light as she lived it through chapter by chapter, sitting at work in the busy highway of the Wimpole Street house, a world she had forgotten, and that rose now before her in serene difficult perfection; a full denial of Mr. Wilson’s belief in the death of family life. In the midst of her effort to launch herself into a definite point of view, it had made her swerve away again towards the beliefs of the old world. Meeting them afresh after years of oblivion, she had found them unassailably new. The new lives inheriting them brought in the fresh tones, the thoughts and movement of modern life, and left the old symphony recreated and unchanged.

The Tansley Street world had been full and bright all that summer with the return of whole parties of Canadians as old friends. With their untiring sociability, their easy inclusion of the abruptly appearing unintroduced foreigners and provincials, they had made the world look like one great family party.