She had expected so little that she was grateful even for this. She had prepared herself to receive merciless rebuffs. What she had not prepared herself to do was to express gratitude. Consequently she found a difficulty in doing so. But no annoyance was discernible in him. He did not appear to want her thanks or even to notice the absence of them. And this in some inexplicable sense piqued her. She would have liked him to say: “Aren’t you grateful?” (Though, of course, it was just the last thing he would ever say.) But at least he might have waited enquiringly for her to voice her gratitude. And if he had, she would probably not have done so. But because he ran on talking of all kinds of irrelevant things she was both quaintly annoyed and intensely desirous of thanking him.
Suddenly she realized he was paying her the stupendous compliment of talking to her about himself.
“Of course I love music,” he was saying, “but I do not let it occupy my whole life. There are bigger things. Infinitely bigger things....”
She was pleased he had used the word “love” so straightforwardly, so naturally, so unhysterically. She was glad he had not said “am fond of,” or “am awfully keen on,” or “like very much.” Most men were afraid of the word; she was glad he was not. And immediately she thought: “If I had said it, it would have sounded schoolgirlish. What is it that gives dignity to what he says?”
“What are they?” she asked.
“The biggest and most important thing in the world,” he replied, “is life. Life is worth living, there’s not a doubt about that. But it’s more worth living for some people than for others. And the things that make or tend to make those differences are among those infinitely bigger things of which I spoke.”
She did not properly understand what he meant, but she was striving magnificently to seem as if she did. And the more she strove the more she felt: There are parts of this man that I shall never understand. And I am defenceless, I am at a terrible disadvantage, because there are no parts of me that he could not understand if he would.... And all the time during the conversation she had been noticing little insignificant things which gave her a peculiar, almost a poignant pleasure. His appearance was anything but effeminate, yet the whole pose of him as he poured out tea was instinct with an almost womanly grace. All his movements (excepting those that involved the rising out of his deck-chair) were so free, so unfettered, so effortless, even when they were uncouth. This does not mean that his table manners were perfect. They were not. Some of them were extremely original. He ate small triangular ham sandwiches at two mouthfuls. He dropped cigarette ash into his saucer. His cake dissection was ungeometrical. And yet he was all the while doing two things at once with such a superb and easy-going facility—talking and having tea. She admired him. She passionately admired him. She passionately admired him because everything she admired him for was done so unconsciously, so effortlessly, so unthinkingly. She watched the movements of his face as he spoke, and admired the splendid lack of symmetry that was there. She was fascinated by the appalling ugliness of some of his facial expressions. And she was fascinated by his supreme neglect of whether they were ugly or not. She shrank back at some of his facial eccentricities; she wanted to cry out: “Don’t do that again—ever! It looks terrible! It spoils you. You don’t show yourself to advantage a bit!” And the next minute she was admiring the nonchalance that made him so splendidly indifferent to the impressions he gave. The very hideousness of him at times was the measure of his individuality and of her admiration.
§ 8
It was eight o’clock when she left “Claremont.” In the Ridgeway the long green avenue seemed scarcely darker than before, though twilight was falling and the rising moon flooded the roadway in pale radiance. Everything reminded her of those old evening walks from the Bockley High School back home to No. 24, Kitchener Road. Groups of girls swept past her like fleecy clouds, with here and there the swift sparkle of an eye or the sudden flash of an ornament caught in the jets of moonlight that fell through the lacery of leaves. She was very happy. All the poetry in the world was greeting her. And the Ridgeway, so sleek, so dapper, so overwhelmingly suburbanized, seemed to her full of wonderful romance. Nothing was there in that soft light that did not seem passionately beautiful. Someone was clipping a hedge close by, and the gentle flip-flip of the shears was golden music to her. The rich scent of the cut evergreen was like nectar. From an open window came the chatter of children’s voices and the muffled hum of a gramophone, and she suddenly awoke to the realization of how wonderful a thing a gramophone can be. The long vistas of concrete pavement with their alternating cracks making two lines of tapering perspective were to her among the most beautiful visions she had ever seen. And out in the High Road—the common, condemned, despised High Road—all was poetry and romance. Trams passed like golden meteors flying through space; the last rays of the evening sun had picked out a certain upstairs window in the King’s Head and turned it into a crimson star. The King’s Head was no longer a public-house; it was a lighthouse, a beacon flashing hope and welcome on the long pale road whither the blue tram-lines sped to infinity. And over the roofs the moon was splashing in streams of silver foam. Bockley, that great, straggling, drab, modern metropolitan suburb was no longer itself, but a city gleaming with strange magic.
She did not go straight home, but wandered amongst the stream of strollers along the High Road towards the Forest. She was amazed at the astonishing loveliness of this place, where she had been born and had lived and worked and dreamed. She was thrilled at the passionate beauty that was exuding from every house and building like some rare essence. She had always taken it for granted: Bockley is an ugly place. And now it seemed that Bockley was transfigured into a thing of wild, tumultuous beauty, as if the flesh had fallen away and revealed a soul of serene wonderment. Bockley! The very word became subtle and mysterious, like a password or the sacred formula that frees the powers of magic!