Revolving Lights: Pilgrimage, Volume 7

by Dorothy M. Richardson

Surprised by the unanticipated joy of a summer holiday in miniature, their gift, wrested by their energies from the midst of the sweltering London July, and with their world and its ways pulling at her memory, and the door of their good fellowship wide open before her, for an hour she had let go and gone in and joined them, holding herself teachable, keeping in check, while she contemplated the transformation of Mr. Leyton under the fire of their chaff, her impulse to break into the ceaseless jesting with some shape of conversation. And she had felt that they regarded her as a postulant, a soul to be snatched from outer darkness, a candidate as ready to graduate as they were, to grant a degree. And the breaking of the group had left her free to watch the way, without any gap of silence or difficulty of transition, they had set the men to work on the clearing up and stowing away of the paraphernalia of the feast; training them all the while according to the Englishwoman’s pattern, an excellent pattern, she could not fail to see, imagining these young males as they would be, undisciplined by this influence, and comparing them with the many unshaped young men she had observed on their passage through the Tansley Street house.

But all the time she had been half aware that she was only watching a picture, a charmed familiar scene, as significant and as unreal as the set figure of a dance. Giving herself to its discipline she would reap experience and knowledge, confirming truths; but only truths with which she was already familiar, leading down to a lonely silence, where everything still remained unanswered, and the dancers their unchanged unexpressed selves. Individual converse with these young men on the terms these women had trained them to accept, was impossible to contemplate. Every word would be spoken in a dark void.

Breaking in, as the little feast ended in a storm of flying buns and eggshells, a little scene that she had forgotten completely at the moment of its occurrence had risen sharply clear in her mind.... A family party of quiet soberly dressed Scotch Canadian people from the far-west, seated together at the end of the Tansley Street dinner-table, coming out, on the eve of their departure, from the enclosure of their small, subduedly conversing group, to respond, in level friendly tones, to some bold person’s enquiries as to the success of their visit. The sudden belated intimacy, ripened in silence, had seemed very good, compressed into a single occasion that would leave the impression of these homely people single and strong, so well worth losing that their loss would be a permanent acquisition. Suddenly from their midst, the voice of the youngest daughter, a pale, bitter-faced girl with a long thin pigtail of sandy hair, had rung out down the table.

“London’s fine. But the folks don’t all match it. The girls don’t. They’re just queer. I reckon there’s two things they don’t know. How to wear their waists, and how to go around with the boys. When I hear an English girl talking to boys, I just have to think she’s funny in the head. If Canadian girls were stiff like that, they’d have the dullest time on earth.” Her expressionless pale blue eyes had fixed no one, and she had concluded her speech with a little fling that had settled her back in her chair, unconcerned.

And in the interval before the ride home, when the men had been driven off, and she was alone with the sisters and saw them relax and yawn, speak in easy casual tones and apostrophise small things, with great gusto, in well-chosen forcible terms, while the men were no doubt also enjoying the same blessed relief, she had felt that the Canadian girl was more right than she knew. Between men and girls, throughout English life there was no exchange, save in the ways of love. Except for those moments when they stood, to each other, for all the world, they never met. And the sense of these sacred moments embarrassed, even while it shaped and beautified, every occasion. Women were its guardians and hostesses. Their guardianship made them hostesses for life. Upon the faces of these girls as they sat about unmasked and pathetically individual, it shed its radiance and, already, its heavy shadows.

Yet American girls with their easy regardlessness seemed lacking in depth of feminine consciousness, too much turned towards the surfaces of life, and the men with their awakened understanding and quick serviceableness, by so much the less men. In any case there was not the recognisable difference in personality that was so striking in England, and that seemed in some way, even at one’s moments of greatest irritation with the women, to bring all the men under a reproach. Many young American men had faces moulded on the lines of responsible middle-aged German housewives; while some of the quite young girls looked out at life with the sharp shrewd repudiation of cynical elderly bachelors. If it were the building up of a civilisation that had brought the sexes together, for generations, in relations that came in English society only momentarily, at a house-warming or a picnic, would the results remain? Or would there be, in America, later on, a beginning of the English differences, the women moving, more and more heavily veiled and burdened, towards the heart of life and the men getting further and further away from the living centre. Ought men and women to modify each other, each standing as it were, halfway between the centre and the surface, each with a view across the other’s territory? Or should they accentuate their natural differences? Were the differences natural?

As they rode home through the twilit lanes, the insoluble problem, sounding for her in every shouted remark, had been continually soothed away by the dewy, sweet-scented, softly streaming air. The slurring of their tyres in unison along the smooth roadway, the little chorus of bells as they approached a turning, made them all one entered for good into the heritage of the accomplished day. Nothing could touch the vision that rose and the confessions that were made within its silence. Within each one of the indistinguishable forms the sense of the day was clearing with each moment; its incidents blending and shaping, an irrevocable piece of decisive life; but behind and around and through it all was summer, smiling. Before each pair of eyes, cleared of heat and dust by the balm of the evening air, the picture of the English summer, in blue and gold and green, stood clear within the outspread invisible distances. That was the harvest, the thing that drew people to the labour of organising picnics, that remained afterwards forever; that would remain for the lovers after their love was forgotten; that linked all the members of the party in a fellowship stronger than their differences.

But when they reached the suburbs, the problem was there again in might, incessant as the houses looming by on either side, driven tyrannously home by the easy flight ahead, as Highgate sloped to London, of the two whose machines were fitted with “free” wheels.... Only a mind turned altogether towards outside things could invent....

And then London came, opening suddenly before me as I rode out alone from under a dark archway into the noise and glare of a gaslit Saturday night.

Trouble fell away like a cast garment as I swung forward, steering with thoughtless ease, into the southernmost of the four converging streets.