Revolving Lights: Pilgrimage, Volume 7

by Dorothy M. Richardson

The waiter pushed on, righting his noisy trayful. Michael subsided with elbows on the smeary marble table-top, his face propped on his hands, about to speak. The Lintoffs also; their gleaming pale faces set towards the common centre, while their eyes brooded outwards on the crowded little scene. Miriam surveyed them, glad of their engrossment, dizzy with the sense of having left herself outside in the Park.

“Shall I tell the Lintoffs that you have dimples?” Michael asked serenely, shifting his bunched face round to smile at her.

She checked him as he leaned across to call their attention.... It was in this very room that she had first told him he must choose between her company and violent scenes with waiters. He was utterly unconscious; aware only of his compatriots sitting opposite, himself before them in the pride of an international friendship. Yesterday’s compact set aside, quite likely, later on, to be questioned.

The Lintoffs’ voices broke out together, chalkily smooth and toneless against the cockney sounds vibrating in the crowded space, all harsh and strident, all either facetious or wrangling. Their eyes had come back. But they themselves were absent, set far away, amongst their generalisations. Of the actual life of the passing moment they felt no more than Michael. Itself, its uniqueness, the deep loop it made, did not exist for them. They looked only towards the future. He only at a uniform pattern of humanity.

Yet within the air itself was all the time the something that belonged to everybody; that could be universally recognised; disappearing at once with every outbreak of speech that sought only for distraction, from embarrassment or from tedium.... She sat lifeless, holding for comfort as she gathered once more, even with these free Russians, the proof of her perfect social incompatibility, to the thought that this endurance was the last. These were the last hours of wandering out of the course of her being.... She felt herself grow pale and paler, sink each moment more utterly out of life. The pain in her brow pressed upon her eyelids like a kind of sleep. She must be looking quite horrible. Was there anyone, anywhere, who suffered quite in this way, felt always and everywhere so utterly different?

Tea came bringing the end of the trio of Russian phrases. Michael began to dispense it, telling the Lintoffs that they had discovered that the English did not know how to drink tea. Ardent replies surged at the back of her mind; but speech was a faraway mystery. She clung to Michael’s presence, the sight of his friendly arm handing the cup she could not drink; to the remembered perfection of his acceptance of failures and exhaustions ... mechanically she was speaking French ... appearing interested and sincere; caring only for the way the foreign words gave a quality to the barest statement by placing it in far-off surroundings, giving it a life apart from its meaning, bearing her into a tide of worldly indifference....

But real impressions living within her own voice came crowding upon her, overwhelming the forced words, opening abysses, threatening complete flouting of her surroundings. She snatched at them as they passed before her, smiled her vanishing thread of speech into inanity, and sat silent, half turned towards the leaping reproachful shapes of thought, inexpressible to these people waiting with faces set only towards swift replies. Madame Lintoff made a fresh departure in her moaning sweetly querulous voice ... a host of replies belonged to it, all contradicting each other. But there was a smooth neat way of replying to a thing like that, leading quickly on to something that would presently cancel it ... quite simple people.... Mrs. Bailey, saying wonderful things without knowing it.

Answers given knowingly, admitted what they professed to demolish.... She had forfeited her right to speak; disappeared before their eyes, and must yet stay, vulnerable, held by the sounds she had woven, false threads between herself and them. Her head throbbed with pain, a molten globe that seemed to be expanding to the confines of the room. Michael was inaccessible, carefully explaining to Madame Lintoff, in his way, why she had said what she had said; set with boyish intentness towards the business of opening his dreadful green bottle.

Lintoff sat upright with a listening face; the lit brooding face of one listening to distant music. He was all lit, all the time, curiously giving out light that his thinly coloured eyes and flaming beard helped to flow forth. She could imagine him speaking to crowds; but he had not the unmistakable speaker’s look, that lifted look and the sense of the audience; always there, even in converse with intimate friends.... But of course in Russia there were no crowds, none of that machinery of speaker and audience, except for things that were not going to end in action.... When Michael lifted his glass with a German toast, Lintoff’s smile came without contracting his face, the light that was in him becoming a person. He was so far away from the thoughts provoked by speech that he could be met afresh in each thing that was said; coming down into it whole and serious from his impersonal distances; but only to go back. There was no permanent marvel for him in the present.... The room was growing dim. Only Michael’s profile was clear, tilted as he tossed off his dreadful drink at one draught. His face came round at last, fresh and glowing with the effervescence. He exclaimed, in gulps, at her pallor and ordered hot milk for her, quietly and courteously from the hovering waiter. The Lintoffs uttered little condolences most tenderly, with direct homely simplicity.

Sitting exempted, sipping her milk while the others talked, lounging, in smooth gentle tones, three forces ... curbed to gentleness ... she felt the room about her change from gloom to a strange blurred brightness, as if she were seeing it through frosted glass.... A party of young men were getting up to go, stamping their feet and jostling each other as they shook themselves to rights, letting their jeering, jesting voices reach street level before they got to the door. They filed past. Their faces, browless under evilly flattened cloth caps, or too large under horrible shallow bowlers set too far back, were all the same, set towards the street with the look, even while they jested, of empty finality; choiceless dead faces. They were not really gay. They had not been gay as they sat. Only defiantly noisy, collected together to banish, with their awful ritual of jeers and jests, the closed-in view that was always before their eyes; giving them, even when they were at their rowdiest, that look of lonely awareness of something that would never change. That was why they jeered? Why their voices were always defensive and defiant? What else could they do when they could alter nothing and never get away? The last of the file was different; a dark young man with a club-footed gait. His face was pursed a little with the habit of facetiousness, but not aggressively; the forehead that had just disappeared under his dreadful cap was touched with a radiance, a reflection of some individual state of being, permanently independent of his circumstances; very familiar, reminding her of something glad ... she found it as she brought her eyes back to the table; the figure of a boy, swinging in clumsy boots along the ill-lit tunnel of that new tube at Finsbury Park on a Saturday night, playing a concertina; a frightful wheezing and jangling of blurred tones, filling the passage, bearing down upon her, increasing in volume, detestable. But she had taken in the leaping unconscious rhythmic swinging of his body and the joy it was to him to march down the long clear passage, and forgiven him before he passed; and then his eyes as he came, rapt and blissfully grave above the hideous clamour.