The Tunnel: Pilgrimage, Volume 4

by Dorothy M. Richardson

6

Miriam sat so enclosed in her unarmed struggle with the new definition of a book that the entry of the newcomers left her unembarrassed. Two rotund ruddy men in mud-spotted tweeds, both fair, one with a tuft like a cockatoo standing straight up from his forehead above a smooth pink face, the other older than anybody in the room, with a shaggy head and a small pointed beard. They came in talking aloud and stumped about the room, making their greetings. Miriam bowed twice and twice received a sturdy handclasp and the kindly gleam of blue eyes, one pair large, mild and owl-like behind glasses; the other fierce and glinting, a shaft of whimsical blue light. The second pair of eyes surely would not agree with what Mr. Wilson had been saying. But their coming in had broken a charm; the overwhelming charm of the way he put things; so that even while you hated what he was saying and his way of stating things as if they were the final gospel and no one else in the world knew anything at all, you wanted him to go on; only to go on and to keep on going on. It was wrong somehow; he was all wrong; “though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels”; it was wrong and somehow wicked; but it caught you, it had caught Alma and all these people; and in a sense he despised them all, and was talking to something else; the thing he knew; the secret that made him so strong, even with his weak voice and weak mouth; strong and fascinating. It was wrong to be here; it would be wrong to come again; but there was nothing like it anywhere else; no other such group of things; and thought and knowledge of things. More must be heard. It would be impossible not to risk everything to hear more.

Alma ordered fresh tea; Mr. Wilson and the husband and the two new men were standing about. The elder man was describing in a large shouting voice a new mantelpiece—a Tudor mantelpiece. What was a Tudor mantelpiece? ... to buy a house to put round it. What a clever idea.... Little Mr. Wilson seemed to be listening; he squealed amendments of the jests between the big man’s boomings ... buy a town to put round it.... What a lovely idea ... buy a nation to put round it ... there was a burst of guffaws. Mr. Wilson’s face was crimson; his eyes appeared to be full of tears. The big man went on. Mrs. Binkley kept uttering deep reedy caressing laughs. Two of the young men were leaning forward talking eagerly with bent heads. Miriam’s neighbour sat upright with his hands on his knees, his eyes glaring as if ... as if he were just going to jump out of his skin. Hidden by the increased stir made by the re-entry of the maid, and encouraged by the extraordinary clamour of hilarious voices Miriam ventured to ask him if he would perform an act of charity by allowing her to rob him of one of his cigarettes. She liked her unrecognisable voice. It was pitched deep, but strong; a little like Mrs. Binkley’s. The young man started and turned eagerly towards her, stammering and muttering and fumbling about his person. “I swear” he brought out, “I could cut my throat ... my God ... oh here we are.” Seizing the open box from the tea-table he swung round with his crossed legs extended across her corner so that she was cut off from the rest of the room, and held the box eagerly towards her. They both took cigarettes and he lit them with matches obtained from his neighbour. “Thank you” said Miriam blissfully drawing “that has saved my life.” Precipitately restoring the matches he swung round again leaning forward with his elbow on his knee, blocking out Miriam’s view. Before it was blocked out she had caught the eye of Mr. Wilson who was standing facing her in the little group of men about the tea-table and still interpolating their hubbub with husky squeals of jocularity, quietly observing the drama in her corner. For the moment she did not wish to listen; Alma’s appreciative squeals were getting strained and the big man was a bore. Seen sitting in profile taking his tea he reminded her of Mr. Staple-Craven; her eye caught and recoiled from weak patches, touches of frowsy softness here and there about the shaggy head. Cut off from the room safe in the extraordinary preoccupation of the young man whose eager brooding was moving now towards some imminent communication—she had undisturbed knowledge of what she had done. Speech and action had launched her, for good or ill, into the strange tide running in this house. Its cold waters beat against her breast. She was no longer quite herself. There was something in it that quickened all her faculties, challenged all the strength she possessed. By speech and action she had accepted something she neither liked, nor approved nor understood; refusal would have left its secret unplumbed, standing aside in her life, tormenting it. The sense of the secret intoxicated her ... perhaps I am selling my soul to the devil. But she was glad that Mr. Wilson had witnessed her launching.

“You are magnificent” gasped the young man glaring at the wall. “I mean you are simply magnificent.” He flashed unconscious eyes at her—he had no consciousness of the cold tide with its curious touch of evil; it was hand in hand with him and his simplicity that she had stepped down into the water—and hurried on. “An angel of dreams. Dreams ... you know—I say,” he spluttered incoherently, “I must tell you.” His working preoccupied face turned to face hers with a jerk that brought part of the heavy sheaf of hair across one of his eyes. “I’ve been doing the best work this week I ever did in my life!” Red flooded the whole of his face and the far-away glare of his one visible eye became a blaze of light, near, and smiling a guilty delighted smile. He was demanding her approval, her sympathy, just on the strength of her being there. It was the moment of consenting to Alma that had brought this. However it had come she would have been unable to withstand it. He wanted approval and sympathy; someone here had some time or other shut him up; perhaps he was considered second-rate, perhaps he was second-rate; but he was innocent as no one else in the room was innocent. “Oh, I am glad” she replied swiftly. Putting his cigarette on the edge of the piano he seized one of her hands and crushed it between his own. His face perspired and there were tears in his eye. “Do tell me about it” she said with bold uneasy eagerness hoping he would drop her hand when he spoke. “It’s a play” he shouted in a low whisper, a spray of saliva springing through his lips “a play—it’s the finest stuff I ever rout.” Were all these people either cockney or with that very bland anglican cultured way of speaking—like the husband and the man with the Tudor mantelpiece?

7

“I can of course admit that the growth of corn was, at first, accidental and unconscious, and that even after the succession of processes began to be grasped and the soil methodically cultivated the success of the crop was supposed to depend upon the propitiation of a god. I can see that the discovery of the possibility of growing food would enormously alter the savage’s conception of God, by introducing a new set of attributes into his consciousness of him; but in defining the God of the Christians as a corn deity you and Allen are putting the cart before the horse.”

That was it, that was it—that was right somehow; there was something in this big red-faced man that was not in Mr. Wilson; but why did his talk sound so lame and dull, even while he was saving God—and Mr. Wilson’s, while he made God from the beginning a nothing created by the fears and needs of man, so thrilling and convincing, so painting the world anew? He was wrong about everything and yet while he talked everything changed in spite of yourself.

The earlier part of the afternoon looked a bright happy world behind the desolation of this conflict; the husband and wife and the young men and Mrs. Binkley and the bright afternoon light, dear far-off friends ... withstanding in their absence the chilly light of Mr. Wilson’s talk. Who was Mr. Wilson? But he was so certain that men had created God ... life in that thought was a nightmare. Nothing that could happen could make it anything but a nightmare henceforth ... it did not matter what happened, and yet he seemed pleased, amused about everything and eager to go on and “do” things and get things done.... His belief about life was worse than agnosticism. There was no doubt in it. “Mr. G” was an invention of man. There was nothing but man; man, coming from the ape, some men a little cleverer than others, men had discovered science, science was the only enlightenment, science would put everything right; scientific imagination, scientific invention. Man. Women were there, cleverly devised by nature to ensnare man for a moment and produce more men; to bring scientific order out of primeval chaos; chaos was decreasing order increasing; there was nothing worth considering before the coming of science; the business of the writer was imagination, not romantic imagination, but realism, fine realism, the truth about “the savage” about all the past and present, the avoidance of cliché ... what was cliché?...

“Well my dear man you’ve got the Duke of Argyll to keep you company” sighed Mr. Wilson with a smothered giggle, getting to his feet.

Miriam went from the sitting room she had entered in another age with the bedroom violets pinned against her collarette, stripped and cold and hungry into the cold of the brightly-lit little dining room. The gay cold dishes, the bright jellies and fruits, the brown nuts, the pretty Italian wine in thin white long-necked decanters ... Chianti ... Chianti ... they all seemed familiar with the wine and the word; perhaps it was a familiar wine at the Wilson supper-parties; they spoke of it sitting at the little feast amongst the sternness of nothing but small drawings and engravings on walls that shone some clear light tone against the few pieces of unfamiliar grey-brown furniture like people clustering round a fire. But it was a feast of death; terrible because of their not knowing that it was a feast of death. The wife of the cockatoo had come in early enough to hear nearly the whole of the conversation and had sat listening to it with a quiet fresh talkative face under her fresh dark hair; the large deep furrow between her eyebrows was nothing to do with anything here, it was permanent, belonging to her life. She had brought her life in with her and kept it there, the freshness and the furrow; she seemed now, at supper to be out for the evening, to enjoy herself—at the Wilsons’ ... coming to the Wilsons’ ... for a jolly evening, just as anybody would go anywhere for a jolly evening. She did not know what was there, what it all meant. Perhaps because of the two little boys. She, with two little unseen boys and the big house so near, big and full of her and noise and things, and her freshness and the furrow of her thought about it prevented anything from going on; the dreadful thing had to be dropped where it was, leaving the big man who had fought to pretend to be interested and amused, leaving Mr. Wilson with the last word and his quiet smothered giggle.