“I’m not. Even the charlatans make me feel ashamed of my sham advantage. No; the thing that is most wonderful about those Tuesdays is waking up utterly worn out, having a breakfast of cold fruit in the cold grey morning, a rush for the train, a last sight of the Taylors as they go off into the London Bridge crowd and then suddenly feeling utterly refreshed. They do too. It’s an effect we have on each other.”
“How did you come across them?”
“Michael. Reads Reynolds’s. A notice of a meeting of London Tolstoyans. We rushed out in the pouring rain to the Edgware Road and found nothing at the address but a barred up corner shop-front. Michael wanted to go home. I told him to go and stood staring at the shop waiting for it to turn into the Tolstoyans. I knew it would. It did. Just as Michael was almost screaming in the middle of the road, I turned down a side street and found a doorway, a bead of gas shining inside just showing a stone staircase. We crept up and found a bare room, almost in darkness, a small gas jet, and a few rows of kitchen chairs and a few people sitting scattered about. A young man at a piano picked out a few bars of Grieg and played them over and over again. Then the meeting began. Dora, reading a paper on Tolstoy’s ideas. Well, I felt I was hearing the whole truth spoken aloud for the first time.... But oh the discussion.... A gaunt man got up and began to rail at everything, going on till George gently asked him to keep to the subject. He raved then about some self-help book he had read. Quite incoherent; and convincing. Then the young man at the piano made a long speech about hitching your waggon to a star and at the end of it a tall woman, so old that she could hardly stand, stood up and chanted, in a deep laughing voice, Waggons and Stars. Waggons and stars. Today I am a waggon. Tomorrow a star. I’m reminded of the societies who look after young women. Meet them with a cup of tea, call a cab, put the young woman and the cup of tea into the cab. Am I to watch my brother’s blunderings? No. I am his lover. Then he becomes a star. And I am a star. Then an awful man, very broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, with a low forehead and a sweeping moustache bounded up and shouted; I am a God! You, madam, are a goddess! Tolstoy is over-civilised! That’s why he loves the godlike peasant. All metaphysicians, artists and pious people are sensualists. All living in unnatural excesses. The Zulu is a god. How many women in filthy London can nurse their children? What is a woman? Children. What is the glory of man? Unimaginable to town slaves. They go through life ignorant of manhood, and the metaphysicians wallow in pleasures. Men and women are divine. There is no other divinity. Let them not sell their godhead for filthy food and rotting houses and moloch factories. What stands in the way? The pious people, the artists and the metaphysicians.... Then a gentleman, in spectacles at the back, quietly said that Tolstoy’s ideas were eclectic and could never apply generally.... Of course he was right, but it doesn’t make Tolstoy any the less true. And you know when I hear all these convincing socialists planning things that really would make the world more comfortable, they always in the end seem ignorant of humanity; always behind them I see little Taylor, unanswerable, standing for more difficult deep-rooted individual things. It’s individuals who must change, one by one.”
“Socialism will give the individual his chance.”
“Yes, I know. I agree in a way. You’ve shown me all that. I know environment and ways of thinking do partly make people. But Taylor makes socialism, even when its arguments floor him, look such a feathery, passing thing.”
“You stand firm, Miriam. Socialism isn’t feathery. You’re feathery. One thinks you’re there and suddenly finds you playing on the other side of the field.”
“It’s the fact that socialism is a side that makes it look so shaky. And then there’s Reich; an absolute blaze of light ... on the outside side of things.”
“Not a blaze of anything, my dear Miriam ... a poor, hard-working, popular lecturer.”
“Everybody in London is listening. Hearing the most illuminating things.”
“What do they illuminate?”