“the hushed happiness that had begun in the dining-room half an hour ago seized her again suddenly, sending her forward almost on tiptoe. It was securely there; the vista it opened growing in beauty as she walked; bearing within her in secret unfathomable abundance the gift of ideal old-English rose and white gracious adorable womanhood given her by Dr. Heber.”
When he goes to church she interprets it as a symptom of falling in love, but if it is, the further progress of the disease is along lines which would baffle even those who have specialised in the study of the malady in fiction and poetry through ages. He goes back to Canada, along with his companion students, without saying a word to his fellow-boarder and leaves to the landlady the difficult task of warning Miriam that her association with the Spanish Jew has furnished a subject of gossip in the house, and that another boarder has confided to her that Dr. Heber had “made up his mind to speak,” but that he had been scared by Miriam's flirtation with the little Jew.
Miriam never questions the correctness of the landlady's diagnosis, nor the authenticity of her information. Still less does she doubt her own interpretation of the wholesome direct-minded Canadian's silent looks in her direction.
Finally a man comes into her life who literally proposes marriage. He is a young Russian Jew student, small of stature and suggestive of an uncanny oldness. Under his influence she begins translating stories from the German and seems to find some of the beneficial possibilities of “sublimation” in the task. The test is not a true one, however, because this little stream into which the current of her libido is temporarily turned is too closely associated with the main channel—Shatov—and when she becomes engaged to him the translation seems to be forgotten.
“Deadlock” is the conflict between instinct and taste, involved in marrying a man with whom she is in love but who arouses a revolt of her inherited traditions and intellectual and æsthetic biases; or between her ego instinct and her herd instinct. There the reader takes leave of her at the end of the sixth volume.
A far more serious deadlock than that presented by her engagement is the deadlock imposed upon Miriam by nature in creating her a woman and endowing her with qualities which keep her in a state of revolt against her Creator and against what to her is the indignity of being a woman. This is epitomised splendidly in “The Tunnel,” when she is fretting her mind through the wearying summer days to keep pace with the illness that is creeping upon her. Entries in the dentists' index under the word “Woman” start the train of thought:
“inferior; mentally, morally, intellectually and physically ... her development arrested in the interest of her special functions ... reverting later towards the male type ... old women with deep voices and hair on their faces ... leaving off where boys of eighteen began.... Woman is undeveloped man ... if one could die of the loathsome visions.... Sacred functions ... highest possibilities ... sacred for what? The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world? The future of the race? What world? What race? Men.... Nothing but men; forever.... It will go on as long as women are stupid enough to go on bringing men into the world ... even if civilised women stop the colonials and primitive races would go on. It was a nightmare. They despise women and they want to go on living—to reproduce—themselves. None of their achievements, no 'civilisation,' no art, no science can redeem that. There is no possible pardon for men. The only answer to them is suicide; all women ought to agree to commit suicide.... All the achievements of men were poisoned at the root. The beauty of nature was tricky femininity. The animal world was cruelty. Jests and amusements were tragic distractions from tragedy.... The woman in black works. It's only in the evenings she can roam about seeing nothing. But the people she works for know nothing about her. She knows. She is sweeter than he. She is sweet. I like her. But he is more me.”
Earlier, but less consciously, she expresses it when, watching the men guests at the Corrie's,
“Miriam's stricken eyes sought their foreheads for relief. Smooth brows and neatly brushed hair above; but the smooth motionless brows were ramparts of hate; pure murderous hate. That's men, she said, with a sudden flash of certainty, that's men as they are, when they are opposed, when they are real. All the rest is pretence. Her thoughts flashed forward to a final clear issue of opposition, with a husband. Just a cold blank hating forehead and neatly brushed hair above it. If a man doesn't understand or doesn't agree he's just a blank bony conceited thinking, absolutely condemning forehead, a face below, going on eating—and going off somewhere. Men are all hard angry bones; always thinking something, only one thing at a time and unless that is agreed to, they murder. My husband shan't kill me.... I'll shatter his conceited brow—make him see ... two sides to every question ... a million sides ... no questions, only sides ... always changing. Men argue, think they prove things; their foreheads recover—cool and calm. Damn them all—all men.”
Few writers could have sketched Miriam Henderson without condemning her and without inviting the condemnation of the reader. Miss Richardson has done it. She has given us Miriam as she knows herself, without explanation, plea, or sentence, and left us to judge for ourselves. She does not label her. And this is probably the reason Miss Richardson's work has found so small an audience. People demand labels. They want to be “told.” And she does not “tell” them. She invites them to think, and original thinking is an unpopular process.