Revolving Lights: Pilgrimage, Volume 7

by Dorothy M. Richardson

It was Michael Shatov’s amused delight in her stories of their method that had made her begin to cherish them as a possession. Gradually she had learned that irritation with their apparent insolence was jealousy. Within her early interested unenvious sallies of investigation amongst the social élite of the Wimpole Street patients, or as a fellow guest amongst the Orlys’ society friends, there had been moments of longing to sweep away the defences and discountenance the individual. But gradually the conviction had dawned that with the genuine members of the clan this could not be done. Their quality went right through, shedding its central light, a brightness that could not be encircled, over the whole of humanity. They disarmed attack, because in their singleness of nature they were not aware of anything to defend. They had no contempts; not being specially intellectual; and, crediting everyone with their own condition, they reached to the sources of nobility in all with whom they came in contact. It was refreshment and joy merely to be in the room with them. But also it was an arduous exercise. They brought such a wide picture and so long a history. They were England. The world-wide spread of Christian England was in their minds; and to this they kindled, more than to any personal thing.

The existence of these scattered few, explained those who were only conventional approximations....

To-night, immersed in the vision of a future that threatened their world, she found them one and all bright figures of romance. She sped as her footsteps measured off the length of the little street, into the recesses, the fair and the evil, of aristocratic English life, and affectionately followed the small bright freely moving troupe as it spread in the past and was at this moment spreading, abroad over the world, the unchangeable English quality and its attendant conventions.

The books about these people are not satisfactory.... Those that show them as a moral force, suggest that they are the fair flower of a Christian civilisation. But a Christian civilisation would be abolishing factories.... Lord Shaftesbury ... Arnold’s barbarian idea made a convincing picture, but it suggested in the end, behind his back, that there was something lacking in the Greeks. Most of the modern books seemed to ridicule the English conventions, and choose the worst types of people for their characters.

But in all the books about these people, even in novelettes, the chief thing they all left out, was there. They even described it, sometimes so gloriously that it became more than the people; making humanity look like ants, crowding and perishing as a vast scene. Generally the surroundings were described separately, the background on which presently the characters began to fuss. But they were never sufficiently shown as they were to the people when there was no fussing; what the floods of sunshine and beauty indoors and out meant to these people as single individuals, whether they were aware of it or not. The ‘fine’ characters in the books, acting on principle, having thoughts, and sometimes, the less likeable of them, even ideas, were not shown as being made strong partly by endless floods of sunshine and beauty. The feeble characters were too much condemned for clutching, to keep, at any price within the charmed circle....

The antics of imitators, all down the social scale, were wrongly condemned.

But here, in this separate existence, was a shape that could draw her, whole, along with it ... and here suddenly, warmly about her in its evening quiet, was the narrow winding lane of Bond Street.... Was this bright shape, that drew her, the secret of her nature ... the clue she had carried in her hand through the maze?

It would explain my love for kingly old Hanover, the stately ancient house in Waldstrasse; the way the charm of the old-fashioned well-born Pernes held me so long in the misery of North London; the relief of getting away to Newlands, my determination to remain from that time forth, at any cost, amidst beautiful surroundings...? Though life has drawn me away these things have stayed with me. They were with me through the awful months.... If she had been able to escape into the beauty of outside things, it would not have happened.

It was not the fear of being alone with the echoes of the tragedy that made me ill in suburban lodgings, but the small ugliness and the empty crude suburban air; the knowledge that if I stayed and forgot its ugliness in happiness it would mould me unawares. My drifting to the large old house in grey wide Bloomsbury was a movement of return.

Then I am attached forever to the spacious gentle surroundings in which I was born? Always watching and listening and feeling for them to emerge? My social happiness dependent upon the presence of some suggestion of its remembered features, my secret social ambition its perfected form in circumstances beyond my reach?...