Revolving Lights: Pilgrimage, Volume 7

by Dorothy M. Richardson

Their scornful revolutionary eyes watched her glance about amongst her hoard of contradictory ideas. Statements about different ways of looking at things were irrelevancies that perhaps with Russians might be abandoned altogether. Yet to appear before them empty-handed, hidden in her earlier uninfluenced personality, would be not to meet them at all. Personal life to them was nothing, could be summed up in a few words, the same for everybody. They lived for an idea.

She offered them a comprehensive glimpse of the many pools of thought in which she had plunged, rising from each in turn, to recover the bank and repudiate; unless a channel could be driven, that would make all their waters meet. They laughed when she cried out at the hopelessness of uniting them. “All these things are nothing.”

But a revolutionary is a man who throws himself into space. In Russia there is nowhere else to throw himself? That would do as an answer to their criticisms of English socialism. She could say also that conservatives are the best socialists; being liberal-minded. Most socialists were narrow and illiberal, holding on to liberal ideas. The aim of the Lycurgans, alone amongst the world’s socialists, was to show the English aristocracy and middle classes that they were, still, socialists.

There were things in England. But they struggled at cross purposes, refusing to get into a shape that would draw one, whole, along with it. But there were things in England with truth shining behind them. English people did not shine. But something shone behind them. Russians shone. But there was nothing behind them. There were things in England. She offered them the contents of books. They were as real as the pools of experience. Yet they, too, were irreconcilable.

A little blue-lit street; lamps with large round globes, shedding moonlight; shadows, grey and black. She had somehow got into the west-end—a little west-end street, giving out its character. She went softly along the middle of the blue-lit glimmering roadway, narrow between the narrow pavements skirting the high façades, flat and grey, broken by shadowy pillared porticoes; permanent exits and entrances on the stage of the London scene; solid lines and arches of pure grey shaping the flow of the pageant, and emerging, when it ebbed away, to stand in their own beauty, conjuring back the vivid tumult to flow in silence, a continuous ghostly garland of moving shapes and colours, haunting their self-sufficient calm.

Within the stillness she heard the jingling of hansoms, swinging in morning sunlight along the wide thoroughfares of the west-end; saw the wide leisurely shop-fronts displaying in a restrained profusion, comfortably within the experienced eye half turned to glance from a passing vehicle, all the belongings of west-end life; on the pavements, the trooping succession of masked life-moulded forms, their unobservant eyes, aware of the resources all about them, at gaze upon their continuous adventure, yesterday still with them as they came out, in high morning light, into the adventure of to-day. Campaigners, sure of their weapons in the gaily decked mêlée, and sure every day of the blissful solitude of the interim times.

For as long as she could remember she had known something of their secret. During the years of her London life she had savoured between whiles the quality of their world, divined its tests and passwords, known what kept their eyes unseeing and their speech clipped to a jargon.

Best of all was the illumination that had come with her penetration of the mystery of their attitude towards direct questions. There was something here that had offered her again and again a solution of the problem of social life, a safeguard of individuality. Here it was once more, a still small voice urging that every moment of association would be transformed if she would only remember the practice the technique revealed by her contemplation of this one quality. Always to be solid and resistent; unmoved. Having no opinions and only one enthusiasm—to be unmoved. Momentary experiments had proved that the things that were about her in solitude could be there all the time. But forgetfulness always came. Because most people brought their worlds with them, their opinions, and the set of things they believed in; forcing in the end direct questions and disagreements. And most people were ready to answer questions, showing by their angry defence of their opinions that they were aware, and afraid, of other ways of looking at things. But these society people did not seem to be aware of anything but their one world. Perhaps that was why their social method was not able to hold her for long together.

“Is this the way to Chippenham?” But everyone delights in telling the way. It brings the teller out into adventure; with his best self and his best moments all about him. The surroundings are suddenly new with life, and beautiful like things seen in passing, on a journey. English people delight because they are adventurous. They prolong the moment, beaming and expanding, and go on their way refreshed. Foreigners, except perhaps Germans, answer differently. Obsequiously; or with a studied politeness that turns the occasion into an opportunity for the display of manners; or indifferently, with a cynical suggestion that they know what you are like, and that you will be the same when you reach your destination. They are themselves, without any fulness or wonder. English people are always waiting to be different, to be fully themselves. Strangers, to them, are gods and angels.

But it is another kind of question that is meant, the question that is a direct attack on the unseeing gaze; a speech to the man at the wheel. That is where, without knowing it, these people are philosophers. What Socrates saw, answered all his questions; and his counterings of the young men’s questions were invitations to them to look for themselves. The single world these people see is, to them, so unquestionable that there is no room for question. Nothing can be communicated except the latest news; and scandal; information about people who have gone outside the shape. But, to each other, even their statements are put in the form of questions. “Fine day, what?” So that everyone may be not questioned, but questioner. It is also a sort of apology for falling into speech at all.