Dorothy M. Richardson

“ Bailey, and before there was time for them to close round her once more, the figure of Michael Shatov, with Europe stretching wide behind him, had forced them into companionship with all the walls in the world. She had been conscious that they waited for his departure; but it was far away out of sight, and when she should be once more alone with them, their attack would find her surrounded; lives lived alone within the vanquished walls of single poor bare rooms in every town in Europe would come visibly to her aid, driving her own walls back into dependence. ”

“ Young men died in advance; it was visible in their faces, when they took degrees and sat down to tasks that made time begin to move; never again free from its movement, always listening and looking for the stillness they had lost... But why is the world which produces them so fresh and real and free, and then seizes and makes them dead old leaves whirled along by time, so different to people alone in themselves when time is not moving? People in themselves want nothing but reality. Why can’t reality exist in the world? ”

“ With the first sound of his voice, Miriam surrendered herself to breathless listening. It sounded out, at conversational pitch, with a colourless serenity that instantly explained his bearing, revealing him beyond the region either of diffidence or temerity. It was a voice speaking to no one, in a world emptied of everything that had gone before.
“The progress of philosophy” went the words, in letters of gold across the dark void “is by a series of systems; that of science by the constant addition of small facts to accumulated knowledge.” ”

“ Life would become like the individual; alive .... it would show, inside and out, and people would leave off talking so much. Life does show, seen from far off, pouring down into stillness. But the contemplation of it, not caring for pain or suffering except as part of a picture, which no one who is in the picture can see, seems mean. Old women sitting in corners, suddenly making irrelevant remarks and chuckling, see; they make a stillness of reality, a mind picture that does not care, out of the rush of life. Perhaps they do not fear death. ”

“ The crushing of full realisation, piling up behind her numbness, must pass over her. There was not much time. The train was carrying her steadily onward, and towards conversation with the unconscious Brooms. She tried to relax to its movement, to hold back from the entanglements of thought and regard the day as an interval outside the hurrying procession of her life. A way opened narrowly ahead, attainable by one rending effort, into a silence, within which the grey light filtering through the dingy windows on to the grime-greyed floor offered itself with a promise of reassurance. ”

“ It was not enough to see and force the admittance of the holes in a theory privately, and leave the form of words going on and on in the world perpetually parroted, infecting the sky. “Wise women know better and go their way without listening,” is not enough. It is not only the insult to women; a contempt for men is a bulwark against that, but introduces sourness into one’s own life....... It is the impossibility of witnessing the pouring on of a vast, repeating public life that is missing the significance of everything. ”

“ A single word sounded the secret of the universe ...... there is a dead level of intelligence throughout humanity. She listened in wonder whilst she explained aloud that she had learned most of her French by reading again and again for the sake of the long even rhythm of its sentences, one book; that this was the only honest way to acquire a language. It was like a sea, each sentence a wave rolling in, rising till the light shone through its glistening crest, dropping, to give way to the next on-coming wave, the meaning gathering, accumulating, coming nearer with each rising falling rhythm ”

“ While she cried you’ve got a house, she wondered, scanning Eve’s radiant slender form, whence she drew with all her apparent helplessness, the strength to face such formidable things.
“I’ve let the two rooms over the shop. I live at the top.” As she exclaimed on the implied wealth, Miriam found her envy wandering back in the thought of the two rooms under the sky, well away from the shop in another world, the rest of the house securely cared for by other people. ”

“ No one seemed at all disturbed; the lecturer least of all. Perhaps he felt that the effects of real realisation would be so tremendous that he could not face them. The thought of no God made life simply silly. The thought of God made it embarrassing. If a hand suddenly appeared writing on the wall, what would he do? He would blush; standing there as a competitor, fighting for his theories, amongst the theories of other men. Yet if there were no philosophers, if the world were imagined without philosophy, there would be nothing but theology, getting more and more superstitious. ”

“ Mr. Gunner came quietly in with Sissie and the tea, making a large party distributed almost invisibly in the gloom beyond the circle of dim lamplight. There was a joyful urgency of communication in the room. But the teacups were filled and passed round before the accumulated intercourse broke through the silence in a low-toned remark. It seemed to come from everyone and to bear within it all the gentle speech that had sounded since the world began; light spread outward and onward from the darkened room.
Taking her share in the remarks that followed, Miriam marvelled. ”

“ The blue light of the omnibus lamp lit up faces entangled in visible thoughts, unwillingly suffering the temporary suspension of activity, but in the far corner there was one, alive and aware, gazing untrammelled at visions like her own, making them true, the common possession of all who would be still. Why were these people only to be met in omnibuses and now and again walking sightless along crowded streets? Perhaps in life they were always surrounded with people with whom they did not dare to be still. In speech that man would be a little defensive and cynical. ”

“ Aren’t you glad you’ve enlarged your horizons? Don’t you know what people are ... what you, a person, are to people? Are you a person? In a blankness, life streamed up in spirals, vanishing, leaving nothing ....
“That is not bad. Ah I should not have paid this visit. It was also in some respects most painful to me.” Poor little man, poor little lonely man white-faced and sensitive, in a world without individuals; grown and formed and wise without realising an individual; never to realise. Audible within the darkness was a singing, hovering on spaces of warm rosy light. ”

“ She gazed down the vista to discover the nature of the spell they cast. “You can see them in clear light in the desert” she exclaimed in a moment. The charm grew as she spoke. She looked forward to being alone with them again in the light of this discovery. The chill of Mr. Shatov’s indifferent response to her explanation was buried in her private acknowledgment that it was he who had forced her to discover something of the reason of her enchantment. He forced her to think. She reflected that solitude was too easy. It was necessary for certainties. Nothing could be known except in solitude. ”

“ She contemplated the sharply ravaged little head, reared and smiling above the billows of what people called ‘misfortunes’ by her conscious and self-confessed strength of will; yes, and unconscious fairness and generosity, reflected Miriam and an immovable sense of justice. All these years of scraping and contrivance had not corrupted Mrs. Bailey; she ought to be a judge, and not Mr. Gunner’s general servant.... Justice is a woman; blindfolded; seeing from the inside and not led away by appearances; men invent systems of ethics, but they cannot weigh personality ”

“ The morning was raw with dense fog; at her Wimpole Street ledgers she would by this time have been cramped with cold; but she felt warm and tingling with life as if she had been dancing, or for a long while in happy social contact; yet so differently; deeply and serenely alive and without the blank anxious looking for the continuance of social excitement. This something would continue, it was in herself, independently. It was as if there were someone with her in the room, peopling her solitude and bringing close around her all her past solitudes, as if it were their secret. ”

“ Miriam rose to go; Mrs. Bailey’s hand restrained her. “I think you know” whispered Mr. Gunner, “what we are to each other.” Miriam made no reply; there was a golden suffusion before her eyes, about the grey pillow. Mrs. Bailey was clutching her hand. She bent and kissed the hollow cheek, receiving on her own a quick eager mother’s kiss, and turned to offer her free hand to Mr. Gunner who painfully wrung it in both his own. Outside in the darkness St. Pancras clock was striking. She felt a sudden sadness. What could they know of each other? What could any man and woman know of each other? ”

“ Miriam hurried forward to meet the open scene for one moment alone and found herself on a little quay surrounding a square basin of motionless grey water shut in by wooden galleries, stacked with mouldering casks. But the air was the air that moves softly on still days over wide waters and in the shadowed light of the enclosure, the fringe of green where the water touched the grey stone of the quay gleamed brilliantly in the stillness. She breathed in, in spite of herself, the charm of the scene; an ordered completeness, left to itself in beauty ”

“ No matter what failure lay ahead, it might be possible, even if the lessons lasted only a little while, to find out all he knew about philosophy. It was a privilege, another of those extraordinary privileges coming suddenly and unexpectedly in strange places, books or people knowing all about things one had already become involved in without knowing when or why, people interested and attracted by a response that at first revealed no differences, so that they all in turn took one to be like themselves, and looking at life in their way. ”

“ The mere reproduction of the magic phrases, even when after solitary peaceful contemplation she should have reassembled them in their right relations and their marvellously advancing sequence, would not carry her hearers along the road she had travelled. The something that held them together, lively and enlivening, was incommunicable.
“Don’t huggy away. The audience will take a considerable time to disperse.”
Miriam desired only to escape into the night. Just outside, in the darkness, was the balm that would disperse her disquietude. ”

“ So long as they had wandered about London and sat together in small restaurants, the world had seemed grouped about them, the vast ignored spectator of a strange romance. But in this huge enclosure, their small, unnoticed, unquestioned presences seemed challenged to account for themselves. All these unmoved people, making the shut-in air cold with their unconcern, even when they were hushed with the strange appealing music of the overture, were moving with purpose and direction because of their immense unconsciousness. ”

“ Had she thought what it must be to have always at her side a Jewish consciousness, unconscious of her actuality, believing in its own positive existence, seeing her as human only in her consecration to relationships?
The returning butler ushered her unannounced through a doorway near at hand into a room that spread dimly about her in a twilight deepened by a single core of rosy light at the centre of the expanse. ”

“ She watched the family centres unmoved, her mind hovering over their imagined houses, looking regretfully at the shattered whole, the views from their windows that belonged to the past and were suddenly strange as when they had first seen them; passing on to their servants and friends and outwards into their social life, following results as far as she could, the principal sufferers impressing her all the time in the likeness of people who suddenly make avoidable disturbances in the midst of a conversation. ”

“ It was no longer to be feared that an unscrupulous, successful, brightly cajoling woman would persuade her that her problem did not exist; but neither from this woman to whom the fact of life as a thing in itself never had time to appear, could she hope for support in her own belief in the unsoundness of compromise.
Mrs. Bergstein bowed, murmured a greeting and indicated a little settee near the low chair into which she immediately subsided, her face still in shadow, the shape of her coiffure so much in keeping with the dress that Miriam could hardly refrain from departing then and there. ”

“ Even Jewish houses were porous to the life of the world, and to have a house, however strangely shaped one’s life, would be to have a vantage point for breathing in the life of the world...... She stood in a lull, reprieved, her endlessly revolving problem left behind, the future in abeyance, perhaps to be shown her by the woman waiting within, set in surroundings that now called to her jubilantly, proclaiming themselves to be the only object of her visit. ”

“ This Miriam felt, was terribly unanswerable. But the hushed platform was alive with the standing figure almost before the muffling of the last emphatic word told that the assailant had re-assumed his seat.
“I think I have said” his face beaming with the repressed radiance of an invading smile, was lifted towards the audience, but the blue eyes modestly addressed the frill of green along the platform edge, “that metaphysic, with respect to some of the conceptions of science, while admitting that they have their uses for practical purposes, denies that they are exactly true. ”

“ In the end, back again in England, sitting in the cold dilapidated room before the table of little books, weary, opposite Mr. Shatov comfortably groaning and stretching, his eyes already brooding in pursuit of something that would presently turn into speech, she struggled feebly with a mournful uneasiness that had haunted the whole of the irrevocable expansion of her consciousness. A German, not a Russian ethnologist, and therefore without prejudice, had declared that the Russians were the strongest kinetic force in Europe. ”

“ Because you know when you are quite young how desperately you love a place. The day we left our first home I remember putting marbles in my pocket in the nursery, not minding, only thinking I should take them out again by the sea, and downstairs in the garden I suddenly realised, the sun was shining on to the porch and bees swinging about amongst the roses, and I ran back and kissed the warm yellow stone of the house, sobbing most bitterly and knowing my life was at an end. ”