Revolving Lights: Pilgrimage, Volume 7

by Dorothy M. Richardson

They had influenced even Michael ... steeping him in sunlit gaiety. By breaking up the strain of unrelieved association they had made him seem charming again. Their immense respect for him turned him, in their presence, once more into a proud uncriticised possession.

Rambles round the squares with him, snatched late at night, had been easy to fill with hilarious discussions of the many incidents; serious exhausting talk held in check by the near presence of unquestioning people, and the promise of the lively morrow. Yet every evening, when they had her set down and surrounded at the piano, there came the sense of division. They cared only for music that interpreted their point of view.

Captain Gradoff ... large flat lonely face, pock-marked, eyes looking at nothing, with an expression of fear. Improper, naked old grizzly head, suggesting other displayed helpless heads, above his stout neat sociable Russian skipper’s jacket ... praying in his room at the top of his voice, with howls and groans. Suddenly teaching us all to make a long loud syren-shriek with half a Spanish nutshell. He had an invention for the Admiralty ... lonely and frightened, in a ghostly world; with an invention to save the lives of ships.

Engström and Sigerson!

Engström’s huge frame and bulky hard red face, shining with simplicity below his great serene intellectual brow and up-shooting hair. His first evening at Mrs. Bailey’s right hand, saying gravely out into the silence of the crowded dinner table, “there is in Pareece very much automobiles, and good wash. In London not. I send much manchettes, and all the bords are cassed.” Devout reproachfulness in his voice; and his brow pure, motherly serenity. Sweden in the room amongst all the others. Teased, like everyone else, with petty annoyances. But with immense strength to throw everything off. Everyone waiting in the peaceful silence that surrounded the immense gently booming voice; electing him president as he sat burying his jests with downcast eyes that left the mask of his bluntly carven face yielded up to friendship. Waves of strength and kindliness coming from him, bringing exhilaration. Making even the Canadians seem pale and small and powerless. At the mercy of life. And then the harsh kind blaze of his brown eyes again. More unhesitating phrases. He had brought strength and happiness into the house. A rough, clump-worded Swedish song, rawly affronting the English air, words of his separate country, the only words for his deepest meanings, making barriers ... till he leapt, he was so light in his strength, on to a chair to bring out the top note, and the barriers fell.... He pealed his notes in farcical agony towards the ceiling. In that moment he was kneeling, bowed before the coldest, looking through to the hidden sunlight in everybody.... Conducting an imaginary orchestra from behind the piano. Sind the Trommels in Ordna? Everybody had understood, and loved each word he spoke.

“Wo ist the Veoleena Sigerson? I shall bring.” Springing from his place near the door, lightly in and out amongst the seated forms, leaping obstacles all over the room on his way back to the open door, struggling noiselessly with all his strength, strong legs sliding under him as he pulled at the handle to open the open door. He and Sigerson had stayed on after the spring visitors. Evenings, voyaging alone with the two of them into strange new music. He had forgotten that he had said, I play nor sing not payshionate musics in bystanding of Miss—little—Hendershon. And the German theatre ... a shamed moving forward into suspicion, even of Irving, in the way they all played, working equally, together ... all taking care of the play ... play and acting, rich with life.

Sigerson was jealous. He wanted all the bright sunlight to himself and tried to hold it with his cold scornful brains. Waspy Schopenhauerism. They went to Peckham. The little weepy dabby assistant of the Peckham landlady, her speech ready-made quotations in the worst London English. Impure vowels, slobbery consonants. She reflected his sunlight like a dead moon. There was a large old garden. His first English garden in summer. He had loved it with all the power of the Swedish landscape in him turned on to its romantic strangeness, and identified the dabby girl with it. She fainted when he went away. A despair like death. He had come faithfully back and married her. What could she, forever Peckham, seeing nothing, distorting everything by her speech, make of Stockholm?

And all the time the Wimpole Street days had glowed more and more with the forgotten story. Thanks to the scraps of detail in Mr. Leyton’s confidences she had lived in the family of girls, centred round their widowed mother in the large old suburban house, garden girt, and bordering on countrified open spaces. She imagined it always sunlit, and knew that it rang all the morning with the echoes of work and laughter, and the sharp-tongued ironic commentary of a family of Harrietts freed from the shadows that had surrounded Harriett’s young gaiety, by the presence of an income, small but secure. The bustle of shared work, all exquisitely done in the exacting, rewarding old-fashioned way, nothing bought that could be home-made, filled each morning with an engrossing life of its own, lit, by a surrounding endless glory, and left the house a prepared gleaming orderliness, and the girls free to retreat to a little room where a sewing machine was enthroned amidst a licensed disorder of fashion papers, with coloured plates, and things in process of making according to the newest mode, from oddments carefully selected at the west-end sales. When they were there, during the times of busy work following on consultations and decisions, gossip broke forth; and thrilling the tones of their gossiping voices, and shining all about them, obliterating the walls of the room and the sense of the day and the hour, was a bright eternity of recurring occasions, when the sum of their household labours blossomed unto fulfilment ... at-home days; calls; winter dances; huge picnic parties in the summer, to which they went, riding capably, in their clever home-made cycling costumes on brilliantly gleaming bicycles. And all the year round, shed over each revolving week, the glamour of Sunday ... the perpetual rising up, amongst the varying seasons and days, of a single unvarying shape, standing, in the morning quiet, chill and accusing between them and the warm, far-off everyday life. The relief of the descent into the distractions of dressing for church and bustling off in good time; the momentary return of the challenging shape with the sight of the old grey ivy-grown church; escape from it again into the refuge of the porch amongst the instreaming neighbours, and the final fading of its outlines into the colour and sound of the morning service, church shapes in stone and wood and metal, secure round about their weakness, holding them safe. The sermon, though they suffered it uncritically, could not, preached by an intelligent or stupid man, but secure, soft-living and married, revive the morning strength of the challenging shape, and as it sounded on towards its end, the grey of another Sunday morning had brought in sight the rest of the day, when, at the worst, if nobody came, there was the evening service, the escape in its midst into a state of bliss that stilled everything, and went on forever, making the coming week, even if the most glorious things were going to happen, wonderful only because it was so amazing to be alive at all ... That was too much ... these girls did not consciously feel like that; perhaps partly because they had a brother, were the kind of girls who would have at least one brother, choking things back by obliviousness, but breezy and useful in many ways. It’s good to have brothers; but there is something they kill, if they are in the majority, absolutely, so that one girl with many brothers rarely becomes a woman, but can sometimes be a nice understanding jolly sort of man. Brothers without sisters are worse off than sisters without brothers; unless they are very gifted ... in which case they are really, as people say of the poets, more than three parts women. But Sundays, for all girls, were in a way the same. And though these girls did not reason and were densely unconscious of the challenge embodied in their religion, and enjoyed being snobbish without knowing it, or knowing the meaning and good of snobbishness, their unconsciousness was harmless, and the huge Sunday things they lived in, held and steered their lives, making, in England, in them and in all of their kind, a world that the clever people who laughed at them had never been inside.... They did not laugh, except the busy enviable blissful laughter permitted by God, from the midst of their lives, about nothing at all. They thought liberals vulgar—mostly chapel people; and socialists mad. But in the midst of their conservatism was something that could never die, and that these other people did not seem to possess....

And the best, most Charlotte Yonge part of the story, was the arrival of Mr. Leyton and his cousin, whilst these girls were still at home amongst their Sundays; and the opening out, for two of them at once, of a future; with the past behind it undivided.

And they had suddenly asked her to their picnic. And she had been back, for the whole of that summer’s afternoon, in the world of women; and the forgotten things, that had first driven her away from it, had emerged again, no longer mysterious, and with more of meaning in them, so that she had been able to achieve an appearance of conformity, and had felt that they regarded her not with the adoration or half-pitying dislike she had had from women in the past, but as a woman, though only as a weird sort of female who needed teaching. They had no kind of fear of her; not because they were massed there in strength. Any one of them, singly, would, she had felt, have been equal to her in any sort of circumstances; her superior; a rather impatient but absolutely loyal and chivalrous guide in the lonely exclusive feminine life.