Revolving Lights: Pilgrimage, Volume 7

by Dorothy M. Richardson

They were Puritans.... More wonderful than she had known in thinking of them as nonconformists, a disgrace her father had escaped together with the trade he had abandoned in youth. They were the Puritans she had read of; but not Cromwellian, certainly not Roundheads. Though they were tall and gaunt with strongly moulded features, their thoughtless, generous English ancestry showed in them, moulded by their sternness to a startling ... beauty. They had well-shaped hands, alive and speaking amongst their rich silks and fine old laces. They wore with a dignified austerity, but still they wore, and must therefore have thought about, silk and lace and broadcloth and fine frilled linen, as well as the sin in themselves and in the world. But principally they were aware of sin, gazing with stern meditative eyes, through the pages of their gloomily bound books, into the abyss yawning at their feet. She held herself in her place, growing bolder, longing now for parley with their silent resistance, disguising nothing, offering them pell-mell, the least suitable of her thoughts. But the eyes they turned on her, still dreadfully begging her to remember now, in the days of her youth, were kind, lit by a special smiling indulgence.... Their strong stern lives, full of the knowledge of experience, that had led down to her, had made them kind. However far she might stray, she was still their favourite, their different stubby round-faced darling, never to be condemned to the abyss. Listening as they called to their part in her, she shared the salvation they had wrought ... salvage ... of hard fine lives, reared narrowly, in beauty, above the gulf.

Yet it was also from their incompleteness that they called to her; the darkness in them, visible in the air about them as they moved, that she had always feared and run away from. The thought of the stern gaunt chairs in which they sat and died of old age was horrible even at this moment, and now that she no longer feared them, she knew, though she felt a homesick longing for their stern righteousness, that it was incomplete. The pressing darkness kept them firm, fighting the devil every inch of the way....

But the devil was not dark, he was bright. Brightest and best of the sons of the morning. What shocking profanity. Something has made me drunk. I am always drunk in the west-end. Satan was proud. God revenged himself. Revengeful, omnipotent, jealous, “the first of the autocrats.” ...

There was a glory hidden in that old darkness, but they did not know it; though they followed it. Accepting them, plunging into their darkness she would never be able to keep from finding the bright devil and wandering wrapt in gloom, but forgetful, perpetually in the bright spaces within the darkness. And perhaps it was God. Impossible to say. Religious people shunned the bright places believing them haunted by the devil. Other religious people believed they were the gift of God and would presently be everywhere, for everybody, the kingdom of God upon Earth. But even if factories were abolished and the unpleasant kinds of work shared out so that they pressed upon nobody, how could the Kingdom of Heaven come upon earth as long as there were childbirth and cancer?

Light makes shadows. The devil is God’s shadow? The Persians believed that in the end the light would absorb the darkness. That was credible. But it could never happen on earth. That was where the Puritans were right with their vale of tears, and why they were more deeply attractive than the other side of the family. Their roots in life were deeper and harder and the light from the Heavenly City fell upon their foreheads because they struggled in the gloom. If only they knew what the gloom was, the marvel of its being there. They were solemn and reproachful because they could not get at their own gaiety....

The others were too jolly, too much turned out towards life, deliberately cheerful and roystering, not aware of the wonder and beauty of gloom, yet more dreadfully haunted and afraid of it, showing its uncomprehended presence by always deliberately driving it away. They spread gloom about them, by their perpetual impatient cheerfulness, afraid to listen and look. Their wild spirits were tragic, bright tragedy, making their country life sound in the distance like one long maddening unbroken noise, afraid to stop, rushing on, taking everything for granted, and troubling about nothing. People who lived in the country were different. Fresh. All converted by their surroundings into perpetual noise? The large spaces gave them large rich voices ... rounded sturdy west country yeomen, blunt featured and jolly, with big voices. Jesting with women. The women all dark and animated ... arch ... minxes. Any amount of flirting. All the scandals of the family were on that side. Girls, careering, with flying hair, round paddocks, on unbroken bare-backed ponies. Huge families. Hunting. Great Christmas and Harvest parties. Maypoles in the spring. They always saw the spring, every year without fail. Perhaps that was their secret? Wherever they were they saw nothing but dawn and spring, the light coming from the darkness. They shouted against the darkness because they knew the light was hidden in it. If you’re waking, call me early, call me early ...

So ear-ly in, the mor-ning,

My Belo-ved

My Beloved.

Those women’s voices pealed out into the wakening air of pure silver dawns. The chill pure dawn and dark over the fields where L’Allegro walked in her picture, the dewy dawn-lit grass under her white feet, her hair blown softly back by the morning breeze flowing over her dawn-lit face, shaping her garments to her happy limbs as she walked dancing, towards the increasing light. Little pools and clumps of wet primroses over the surface of the grey-green grass, flushed with rose, like her glowing dancing face as she skimmed, her whole bright form pealing with song towards the increasing light. Was that sort of life still going on somewhere?