Revolving Lights: Pilgrimage, Volume 7

by Dorothy M. Richardson

This was the true harvest of the summer’s day; the transfiguration of these northern streets. They were not London proper; but tonight the spirit of London came to meet her on the verge. Nothing in life could be sweeter than this welcoming—a cup held brimming to her lips, and inexhaustible. What lover did she want? No one in the world could oust this mighty lover, always receiving her back without words, engulfing and leaving her untouched, liberated and expanding to the whole range of her being. In the mile or so ahead, there was endless time. She would travel further than the longest journey, swifter than the most rapid flight, down and down into an oblivion deeper than sleep; and drop off at the centre, on to the deserted grey pavements, with the high quiet houses standing all about her in air sweetened by the evening breath of the trees, stealing down the street from either end; the sound of her footsteps awakening her again to the single fact of her incredible presence within the vast surrounding presence. Then, for another unforgettable night of return, she would break into the shuttered house and gain her room and lie, till she suddenly slept, tingling to the spread of London all about her, herself one with it, feeling her life flow outwards, north, south, east and west, to all its margins.

And it had been so. Nothing had intervened, but, for a moment, the question, coming as the wild flowers fell from her unclasped belt, bringing back the long-forgotten day—what of those others, lost, for life, in perpetual association?

The long lane of Bond Street had come to an end, bringing her out into the grey-brown spaciousness of Piccadilly, lit sparsely by infrequent globes of gold. The darkness cast by the massive brown buildings thrilled heavily about the shrouded oblivion of west-end life. She passed elderly men, black coated and mufflered over their evening dress, wrapped in their world, stamped with its stamp, still circulating, like the well preserved coins of a past reign—thinking their sets of thoughts, going home to the small encirclement of clubs and chambers, a little aware of the wide night and the time of year told on the air as they had passed along where the Green Park slept on the far side of the road. This was their moment, between today and tomorrow, of freedom to move amongst the crowding presences gathered through so many years within themselves; slowly, mannishly; old-mannishly, perpetually pulled up, daunted, taking refuge in their sets of thoughts; not going far, never returning to renew a sally, for the way home was short, and their gait showed them going, almost marching, to the summons of their various destinations. Some of their faces betrayed as they went by, unconscious of observation, the preoccupation that closed in on all their solitude; a look of counting, but with liberal evening hand, the days that remained for them to go their rounds. One came prowling with slow, gentlemanly stroll, half-halting to stare at her, dim-eyed, from his mufflings. Here and there a woman, strayed away from the searching light and the rivalry of the Circus, hovered in the shadows. Presently, across the way, the Park moved by, brimming through its railings a midnight freshness into the dry sophisticated air. Through this strange mingling, hansoms from the theatres beyond the Circus, swinging, gold-lamped, one by one, along the centre of the deserted roadway, drew bright threads of younger west-end life, meshed and tangled, men and women from social throngs, for whom no solitude waited.

Piccadilly Circus was almost upon her, the need for thoughtless hurrying across its open spaces; the awakening on the far side with the west-end dropping away behind; and the tide of her own neighbourhood setting towards her down Shaftesbury Avenue; bringing with it the present movement of her London life.... Why hadn’t she a club down here; a neutral territory where she could finish her thoughts undisturbed?

Defying the surrounding influences, she glanced back at the months following the picnic ... the shifting of the love-story into the midst of the Wimpole Street household, making her room like a little theatre where at any moment the curtain might go up on a fresh scene ... knowing them all so well, being behind the scenes as well as before them, she had watched with a really cruel indifference, and let the light of the new theories play on all she saw. For unconscious unquestioning people were certainly ruled by something. The acting of the play had been all carefully according to the love-stories of the sentimental books, would always be, for good kind people brought up on the old traditions. And a predictable future was there, another home life carrying the traditions forward. All the old family sayings applied. Many of them were quoted with a rueful recognition. But they were all proud of playing these recognisable parts. All of their faces had confessed, as they had come, one by one, betweenwhiles, to talk freely to her alone, their belief in the story that had lain, hidden and forgotten, in the depths of her heart; making her affection for them blaze up afresh from the roots of her being. She had seen the new theories disproved. Not that there was not some faint large outline of truth in them, but that it was so large and loose that it did not fit individuals. It did not correspond to any individual experience because it was obliged to ignore the underlying things of individuality.... Blair Leighton ... Marcus Stone ... Watts; Mendelssohn, corresponded to an actual individual truth.... The new people did not know it because they were odd, isolated people without up-bringing and circumstances? They did not know because they were without backgrounds? Quick and clever, like Jews without a country? They would fasten in this story on the critical dismay of the parents, make comedy or tragedy out of the lack of sympathy between the two families, the persistence of unchanged character in each one, that would tell later on. But comedy and tragedy equally left everything unstated. No blind victimising force could account for the part of the story they left untold, something that justified the sentimental books they all jeered at; a light, that had come suddenly holding them all gentle and hushed behind even their busiest talk; bringing wide thoughts and sympathies; centring in the girl; breaking down barriers so completely that for a while they all seemed to exchange personalities. Blind force could not soften and illuminate.... There was something more than an allurement of “nature,” a veil of beauty disguising the “brutal physical facts.” Why brutal? Brutal is deliberate, a thing of the will. They meant brutish. But what was wrong with the brutes, except an absence of freewill? Their famous “brutal frankness” was brutish frankness, showing them pitifully proud of their knowledge of facts that looked so large, and ignorant of the tiny enormous undying fact of freewill. Perhaps women have more freewill than men?

It is because these men write so well that it is a relief, from looking and enduring the clamour of the way things state themselves from several points of view simultaneously, to read their large superficial statements. Light seems to come, a large comfortable stretching of the mind, things falling into an orderly scheme, the flattering fascination of grasping and elaborating the scheme. But the after reflection is gloom ... a poisoning gloom over everything.... “Good writing” leaves gloom. Dickens doesn’t.... But people say he’s not a good writer.... Youth ... and Typhoon.... Oh “Stalked about gigantically in the darkness.” ... Fancy forgetting that. And he is modern and a good writer. New. They all raved quietly about him. But it was not like reading a book at all.... Expecting good difficult “writing” some mannish way of looking at things, and then ... complete forgetfulness of the worst time of the day on the most grilling day of the year in a crowded Lyons’ at lunch-time and afterwards joyful strength to face the disgrace of being an hour or more late for afternoon work.... They leave life so small that it seems worthless. He leaves everything big; and all he tells added to experience forever. It’s dreadful to think of people missing him; the forgetfulness and the new birth into life. Even God would enjoy reading Typhoon.... Then that is “great fiction?” “Creation?” Why these falsifying words, making writers look cut-off and mysterious? Imagination. What is imagination? It always seems insulting, belittling, both to the writer and to life.... He looked and listened with his whole self—perhaps he is a small pale invalid—and then came ‘stalked about gigantically’ ... not made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding ... and working his salvation. That is what matters to him.... In the day of Judgment, though he is a writer, he will be absolved. Those he has redeemed will be there to shout for him. But he will still have to go to Purgatory; or be born again as a woman. Why come forward suddenly, in the midst of a story to say they live far from reality? A sudden smooth complacent male voice, making your attention rock between the live text and the picture of a supercilious lounging form, slippers, a pipe, other men sitting round, and then the phrase so smooth and good that it almost compels belief. Why cannot men exist without thinking themselves all there is?

She was in the open roadway, passing into the deeps of the central freedom of Piccadilly Circus, the crowded corner unknowingly left behind. Just ahead was the island, the dark outline of the fountain, the small surmounting figure almost invisible against the shadowy upper mass of a bright-porched building over the way. The grey trottoir, empty of the shawled flowerwomen and their great baskets, was a quiet haven. The surrounding high brilliancies beneath which people moved along the pavements from space to space of alternating harsh gold and shadowy grey, met softly upon its emptiness, drawing a circle of light round the shadow cast by the wide basin of the fountain. There was a solitary man’s figure standing near the curb, midway on her route across the island to take to the roadway opposite Shaftesbury Avenue; standing arrested; there was no traffic to prevent his crossing; a watchful habitué; she would pass him in a moment, the last fragment of the west-end ... good-bye, and her thoughts towards gaining the wide homeward-going lane. A little stoutish dapper grey-suited ... Tommy Babington! Standing at ease, turned quite away from the direction that would take him home; still and expressionless, unrecognisable save for the tilt of his profile and the set of his pince-nez. She had never before seen him in unconscious repose, never with this look of a motionless unvoyaged soul encased in flesh; yet had always known even when she had been most attracted, that thus he was. He had glanced. Had he recognised her? It was too late to wheel round and save his solitude. Going on, she must sweep right across his path. Fellow-feeling was struggling against her longing to touch, through the medium of his voice, the old home-life so suddenly embodied. He had seen her, and his unawakened face told her that she would neither pause nor speak. Years ago they would have greeted each other vociferously.... She was now so shrouded that he was not sure she had recognised him. Through his stupefaction smouldered a suspicion that she wished to avoid recognition. He was obviously encumbered with the sense of having placed her amidst the images of his preoccupation. She rushed on, passing him with a swift salute, saw him raise his hat with mechanical promptitude as she stepped from the curb and forward, pausing an instant for a passing hansom, in the direction of home. It was done. It had always been done from the very beginning. They had met equally at last. This was the reality of their early association. Her spirits rose, clamorous. It was epical she felt. One of those things arranged above one’s head and perfectly staged. Tommy of all people wakened thus out of his absorption in the separated man’s life that so decorated him with mystery in the feminine suburbs; shocked into helpless inactivity; glum with an irrevocable recognising hostility. It had been arranged. Silent acceptance had been forced upon him, by a woman of his own class. She almost danced to the opposite pavement in this keenest, witnessed moment of her yearslong revel of escape. He would presently be returning to that other enclosed life to which, being a man, and dependent on comforts, he was fettered. Already in his mind was one of those formulas that echoed about in the enclosed life ... “Oui, ma chère, little Mirry Henderson, strolling, at midnight, across Piccadilly Circus.”

Suddenly it struck her that the life of men was pitiful. They hovered about the doors of freedom, returning sooner or later to the hearth, where even if they were autocrats they were not free; but passing guests, never fully initiated into the house-life, where the real active freedom of the women resided behind the noise and tumult of meetings. Man’s life was bandied to and fro ... from word to word. Hemmed in by women, fearing their silence, unable to enter its freedom—being himself made of words—cursing the torrents of careless speech with which its portals were defended.

And all the time unselfconscious thoughtless little men, with neat or shabby sets of unconsidered words for everything, busily bleating through cornets, blaring through trombones and euphoniums, thrumming undertones on double-basses. She summoned Harriett and shrieked with laughter at the cheerful din. It was cheerful, even in a funeral march. There would certainly be music in heaven; but not books.

The shock of meeting Tommy had brought the grey of tomorrow morning into the gold-lit streets. There was a fresh breeze setting down Shaftesbury Avenue. Here, still on the Circus, was that little coffee-place. Tommy was going home. She was rescuing the last scrap of a London evening here at the very centre and then going home, on foot, still well within the charmed circle.