At the beginning of the journey to the east-end the Lintoffs were as far away as people in another town. When the east-end was reached they were too near. Their brilliance lit up the dingy neighbourhood and sent out a pathway of light across London. Their eyes were set on the far distance. It seemed an impertinence to rise suddenly in their path and claim attention.

But Michael lost his way and the Lintoffs were hidden, erupting just out of sight. The excitement of going to meet them filtered away in the din and swelter of the east-end streets.

They came upon the hotel at last, suddenly. A stately building with a wide pillared porch. As they went up its steps and into the carpeted hall, cool and clean and pillared, giving on to arched doorways and the distances of large rooms, she wished the Russians could be spirited away, that there were nothing but the strange escape from the midst of squalor into this cool hushed interior.

But they appeared at once, dim figures blocking the path, closing up all the distances but the one towards which they were immediately obliged to move and that quickly ended in a bleak harshly lit room. And now here they were, set down, meekly herded at the table with other hotel people.

No strange new force radiated from them across the chilly expanse of coarse white tablecloth. They were able to be obliterated by their surroundings; lost in the onward-driving tide of hotel-life; responding murmuringly to Michael’s Russian phrases, like people trying to throw off sleep.

Her private converse with them the day before, made it impossible even to observe them now that they were exposed before her. And a faint hope, refusing to be quenched, prevented her casting even one glance across at them. If the hope remained unwitnessed there might yet be, before they separated, something that would satisfy her anticipations. If she could just see what he was like. There was, even now, an unfamiliar force keeping her eyes averted from all but the vague sense of the two figures. Perhaps it came from him. Or it was the harvest growing from the moment in the hotel entrance.

A dispiriting conviction was gathering behind her blind attention. If she looked across, she would see a man self-conscious, drearily living out the occasion, with an assumed manner. After all, he was now just a married man, sitting there with his wife, a man tamed and small and the prey of known circumstances, meeting an old college friend. This drop on to London was the end of their wonderful adventure. A few weeks ago she had still been his fellow student, his remembered companion, in a Russian prison for her daring work, ill with the beginnings of her pregnancy. Now, he was with her for good, inseparably married, no longer able to be himself in relation to anyone else.... She felt herself lapsing further and further into isolation. Something outside herself was drowning her in isolation.

Something in Michael.... That, at least, she could escape now that she was aware of it. She leaned upon his voice. At present there was no sign of his swift weariness. He was radiant, sitting host-like at the head of the table between her and his friends, untroubled by his surroundings, his glowing Hebrew beauty, his kind, reverberating voice expressing him, untrammelled, in the poetry of his native speech. But he was aware of her through his eager talk. All the time he was tacitly referring to her as a proud English possession.... It was something more than his way of forgetting, in the presence of fresh people, and falling again into his determined hope. Her heart ached for him as she saw that away in himself, behind the brave play he made, in his glance of the deliberately naughty child relying on its charm to obtain forgiveness, he held the hope of her changing under the influence of seeing him thus, at his fullest expansion amongst his friends. He was purposely excluding her, so that she might watch undisturbed; so that he might use the spaces of her silence to persuade her that she shared his belief. She was helplessly supporting his illusion. It would be too cruel to freeze him in mid-career, with a definite message. She sat conforming; expanding, in spite of herself, in the rÔle he had planned. He must make his way back through his pain, later on, as best he could. No one was to blame; neither he for being Jew, nor she for her inexorable Englishness....

Across the table, supporting him, were living examples of his belief in the possibility of marriage between Christians and Jews. Lintoff was probably as much and as little Greek Orthodox as she was Anglican, and as pure Russian as she was English, and he had married his little Jewess.

Michael would eagerly have brought any of his friends to see her. But she understood now why he had been so cautiously, carelessly determined to bring about this meeting.... They would accept his reading, and had noted her, superficially, in the intervals of their talk, in the light of her relationship to him. She was wasting her evening in a hopeless masquerade. She felt her face setting in lines of weariness as she retreated to the blank truth at the centre of her being. Narrowly there confined, cold and separate, she could glance easily across at their irrelevant forms. They could be made to understand her remote singleness; in one glance. Whatever they thought. They were nothing to her, with their alien lives and memories. She was English; an English spectacle for them, quite willing, an interested far-off spectator of foreign ways and antics. No, she would not look, until she was forced; and then some play of truth, springing in unexpectedly, would come to her aid. Reduced by him to a mere symbol she would not even risk encountering their unfounded conclusions.

She heard their voices, animated now in an eager to and fro, hers contralto, softly modulated, level and indifferent in an easy swiftness of speech; his higher, dry and chippy and staccato; the two together a broken tide of musical Russian words, rich under the cheerless hotel gas-light. It would flow on for a while and presently break and die down. Michael’s social concentration would not be equal to a public drawing-room, a prolonged sitting on sofas. Coffee would come. They would linger a little over it, eagerness would drop from their voices, the business of reflecting over their first headlong communications would be setting in for each one of them, separating them into individualities, and suddenly Michael would make a break. For she could hear they were not talking of abstract things. Revolutionary ideas would be, between him and Lintoff, an old battlefield they had learned to ignore. They were just listening, in excited entrancement, to the sounds of each other’s voices, their eyes on old scenes, explaining, repeating themselves, in the turmoil of their attentiveness ... each ready to stop halfway through a sentence to catch at an outbreaking voice. Michael’s voice was still rich and eager. His years had fallen away from him; only now and again the memory of his settled surrounding and relentless daily work caught at his tone, levelling it out.

Coffee had come. Someone asked an abrupt question and waited in a silence. She glanced across. A tall narrow man, narrow slender height, in black, bearded, a narrow straw-gold beard below bright red lips. Unsympathetic; vaguely familiar. Him she must have observed in the dim group in the hall during Michael’s phrases of introduction.

“Nu; da;” Michael was saying cordially, “Lintoff suggests we go upstairs,” he continued, to her, politely. He looked pleased and easy; unfatigued.

She rose murmuring her agreement, and they were all on their feet, gathering up their coffee-cups. Michael made some further remark in English. She responded in the vague way he knew and he watched her eyes, standing near, taking her coffee-cup with a sturdy quiet pretence of answering speech, leaving her free to absorb the vision of Madame Lintoff, a small dark form risen sturdily against the cheap dingy background, all black and pure dense whiteness; a curve of gleaming black hair shaped against her meal-white cheek; a small pure profile, firmly beautiful, emerging from the high close-fitting neck-shaped collar of her black dress; the sweep of a falling fringed black shawl across the short closely sleeved arm, the fingers of the hand stretched out to carry off her coffee, half covered by the cap-like extension of the long black sleeve. She might be a revolutionary, but her sense of effect was perfect. Every line flowed, from the curve of her skull, left free by the beautiful shaping of her thick close hair, to the tips of her fingers. There was no division into parts, no English destruction of lines at the neck and shoulders, no ugly break where the dull stuff sleeve joined the wrist. In the grace of her small sturdy beauty there seemed only scornful womanish triumph, weary; a suggestion of unspeakable ennui. She was utterly different from English Jewesses....

Without breaking the rhythm of her smooth graceful movement, she turned her head and glanced across at Miriam; a faint slight radiance, answering Miriam’s too-ready irrecoverable beaming smile, and fading again at once as she moved towards the door. Too late—already they were moving, separated, in single file up the long staircase, Madame Lintoff now a little squarish dumpy Jewish body, stumping up the stairs ahead of her—Miriam responded to the gleam she had caught in the deep wehmÜtig Hebrew eyes, of something in her that had escaped from the confines of her tribe and sex. She was not one of those Jewesses, delighting in instant smiling familiarity with women, immediate understanding, banding them together. She had not a trace of the half affectionate, half obsequious envy, that survived the discovery of their being more intelligent or better-informed than Englishwomen. She had looked impersonally, and finding a blankness would not again enquire. She had gone back into the European world of ideas into which somehow since her childhood she had emerged. But she was weary of it; of her idea-haunted life; of everything that had so far come into her mind and her experience. Did the man leading the way upstairs know this? Perhaps Russian men could read these signs? In any case a Russian would not have Michael’s physiological explanations of everything; even if they proved to be true....

“I forgot to tell you, Miriam, that of course Lintoffs both speak French. Lintoff has also a little English.”

It was his bright beginning voice. They were to spend the evening ... shut in a small cold bedroom ... resourceless, shut in with this slain romance ... and the way already closed for communication between herself and the Russians before she had known that they could exchange words that would at least cast their own brief spell. Between herself and Madame Lintoff nothing could pass that would throw even the thinnest veil over their first revealing encounter. To the unknown man anything she might say would be an announcement of her knowledge of his reduced state....

The coming upstairs had stayed the tide of reminiscences. There was nothing ahead but obstructive conversation, perhaps in French; but steered all the time by Michael’s immovable European generalisations; his clear, swiftly manoeuvring, encyclopÆdic Jewish mind....

With her eyes on the fatiguing vista she agreed that of course Monsieur and Madame Lintoff would know French; letting her English voice sound at last. The instant before she spoke she heard her words sound in the dim street-lit room, an open acknowledgment of the death of her anticipations. And when the lame words came forth, with the tone of the helplessly insulting, polite, superfluous English smile, she knew that it was patent to everyone that the evening was dimmed, now, for them all. It was not her fault that she had been brought in amongst these clever foreigners. Let them think what they liked, and go. If even anarchists had their world linked to them by strands of clever easy speech, had she not also her world, away from speech and behaviour?

Lintoff was lighting a candle on the chest of drawers. The soft reflected glare coming in at the small square windows, was quenched by its gleam. He was standing quite near, in profile, his white face and bright beard lit red from below. The bent head full of expression, yet innocent, was curious, neither English nor foreign. He was a Doctor of Philosophy. But not in the way any other European man would have been. His figure had no bearing of any kind. Yet he did not look foolish. A secret. There was some secret power in him ... Russia. She was seeing Russia; far-away Michael blessedly there in the room; keeping her there. He had sat down in his way, in a small bedroom chair, his head thrust forward on his chest, his hands in his pockets, his legs stretched out across the thread-bare carpet, his coffee on the floor at his side. He was at home in Russia after his English years. Madame Lintoff in the small corner beside the bed was ferreting leisurely in a cupboard with her back to the room. Lintoff was holding a match to the waxy wick of the second candle. No one was speaking. But the cold dingy room, with its mean black draperies and bare furniture, was glowing with life.

There was no pressure in the room; no need to buy peace by excluding all but certain points of view. She felt a joyful expansion. But there was a void all about her. She was expanded in an unknown element; a void, filled by these people in some way peculiar to themselves. It was not filled by themselves or their opinions or ideas. All these things they seemed to have possessed and moved away from. For they were certainly animals; perhaps intensely animal, and cultured. But principally they seemed to be movement, free movement. The animalism and culture, so repellent in most people, showed, in them, rich jewels of which they were not aware. They were moving all the time in an intense joyous dreamy repose. It centred in him and was reflected, for all her weariness, upon Madame Lintoff. It was into this moving state, that she had escaped from a Jewish family life. If the right question could be found and addressed to him, the secret might be plumbed. It might rest on some single unacceptable thing that would drop her back again into singleness; just the old familiar inexorable sceptical opposition....

His second candle was alight. Michael spoke, in Russian, and arrested him standing in the middle of the floor with his back to her. She heard his voice, no longer chippy and staccato as it had been in the midst of their intimate talk downstairs, but again dim, expressionless, the voice of a man in a dream. Madame Lintoff had hoisted herself on to the bed. She had put on a little black ulster and a black close-fitting astrakhan cap. Between them her face shone out suddenly rounded, very pretty and babyish. From the deep Hebrew eyes gleamed a brilliant vital serenity. An emancipated Jewish girl, solid, compact, a rounded gleaming beauty that made one long to place one’s hands upon it; but completely herself, beyond the power of admiration or solicitude; a torch gleaming in the strange void.... But so solidly small and pretty. It was absurd how pretty she was, how startling the rounded smooth firm blossom of her face between the close dead black of her ulster and little cap. Miriam smiled at her behind the to and fro of dreamy Russian sentences. But she was not looking.

It was glorious that there had been no fussing. No one had even asked her to sit down. She could have sung for relief. She wanted to sing the quivering alien song that was singing itself in the spaces of the room. There was a chair just at hand against the wall, beside a dilapidated wicker laundry basket. But her coffee was where Michael had deposited it, on the chest of drawers at his side. She must recover it, go round in front of Lintoff to get it before she sat down. She did not want the coffee, but she would go round for the joy of moving in the room. She passed him and stood arrested by the talk flowing to and fro between her and her goal. Michael rose and stood with her, still talking. She waited a moment, weaving into his deep emphatic tones the dreamy absent voice of Lintoff.

Michael moved away with a question to Madame Lintoff sitting alone behind them on her bed. She was left standing, turned towards Lintoff, suddenly aware of the tide that flowed from him as he stood, still motionless, in the middle of the room. He stood poised, without stiffness, his narrow height neither drooping nor upright; as if held in place by the surrounding atmosphere. Nothing came to trouble the space between them as she moved towards him, drawn by the powerful tide. She felt she could have walked through him. She was quite near him now, her face lifted towards the strange radiance of the thin white face, the glow of the flaming beard; a man’s face, yielded up to her, and free from the least flicker of reminder.

“What do you think? What do you see?” she heard herself ask. Words made no break in the tide holding her there at rest.

His words followed hers like a continuation of her phrase:

“Mademoiselle, I see the People.” His eyes were on hers, an intense blue light; not concentrated on her; going through her and beyond in a widening radiance. She was caught up through the unresisting eyes; the dreamy voice away behind her. She saw the wide white spaces of Russia; motionless dark forms in troops, waiting....

She was back again, looking into the eyes that were now upon her personally; but not in the Englishman’s way. It was a look of remote intense companionship. She sustained it, helpless to protest her unworthiness. He did not know that she had just flown forward from herself out and away; that her faint vision of what he saw as he spoke was the outpost of all her experience. He was waiting to speak with an equal, to share.... He had no social behaviour. No screen of adopted voice or manner. There was evil in him; all the evils that were in herself, but unscreened. He was careless of them. She smiled and met his swift answering smile; it was as if he said, “I know; isn’t everything wonderful.” ... They moved with one accord and stood side by side before the gleaming candles. Across the room the two Russian voices were sounding one against the other; Michael’s grudging sceptical bass and the soft weary moaning contralto. “Do you like Maeterlinck?” she asked, staring anxiously into the flame of the nearest candle. He turned towards her with eager words of assent. She felt his delighted smile shining through the sudden enthusiastic disarray of his features and gazed into the candle summoning up the vision of the old man sitting alone by his lamp. The glow uniting them came from the old man’s lamp ... this young man was a revolutionary and a doctor of philosophy; yet the truth of the inside life was in him, nearer to him than all his strong activities. They could have nothing more to say to each other. It would be destruction to say anything more. She dropped her eyes and he was at once at an immense distance. Behind her closed door she stood alone grappling her certainties, trying to answer the voice that cried out within her against the barriers between them of language and relationships. Lintoff began to walk about the room. Every time his movements brought him near he stood before her in eager discourse. She caught the drift of the statements he flung out in a more solid, more flexible French, mixed with struggling, stiff, face-stiffening scraps of English. The people, alive and one and the same all over the world, crushed by the half-people, the educated specialists, and by the upper classes dead and dying of their luxury. She agreed and agreed, delighting in the gentleness of his unhampered movements, in his unself-conscious, uncompeting speech. If what he said were true, the people to pity were the specialists and the upper classes; clean sepulchres.... How would he take opposition?

“Isn’t it weird, Étrange,” she cried suddenly into a pause in his struggling discourse, “that Christians are just the very people who make the most fuss about death?”

He had not understood the idiom. Sunned in his waiting smile she glanced aside to frame a translation.

“N’y a rien de plus drÔle,” she began. How cynical it sounded; a cynical French voice striking jests out of the surface of things; neighing them against closed nostrils, with muzzles tight-crinkled in Mephistophelian mirth. She glanced back at him, distracted by the reflection that the contraction of the nostrils for French made everything taut....

“Isn’t it funny that speaking French banishes the inside of everything; makes you see only things?” she said hurriedly, not meaning him to understand; hoping he would not come down to grasp and struggle with the small thought; yet longing to ask him suddenly whether he found it difficult to trim the nails of his right hand with his left.

He was still waiting unchanged. Yet not waiting. There was no waiting in him. There would be, for him, no more dropping down out of life into the humble besogne de la pensÉe. That was why she felt so near to him, yet alive, keeping the whole of herself, able to say anything, or nothing. She smiled her delight. There was no sheepishness in his answering radiance, no grimace of the lips, not the least trace of any of the ways men had of smiling at women. Yet he was conscious, and enlivened in the consciousness of their being man and woman together. His eyes, without narrowing from that distant vision of his, yet looked at her with the whole range of his being. He had known obliterating partialities, had gone further than she along the pathway they forge away from life, and returned with nothing more than the revelation they grant at the outset; his further travelling had brought him nothing more. They were equals. But the new thing he brought so unobstructively, so humbly identifying and cancelling himself that it might be seen, was his, or was Russian....

Looking at him she was again carried forth, out into the world. Again about the whole of humanity was flung some comprehensive feeling she could not define.... It filled her with longing to have begun life in Russia. To have been made and moulded there. Russians seemed to begin, by nature, where the other Europeans left off....

“The educated specialists,” she quoted to throw off the spell and assert English justice, “are the ones who have found out about the people; not the people themselves.” His face dimmed to a mask ... dead white Russian face, crisp, savage red beard, opaque china blue eyes, behind which his remembered troops of thoughts were hurrying to range themselves before her. Michael broke in on them, standing near, glowing with satisfaction, making a melancholy outcry about the last ’bus. She moved away leaving him with Lintoff and turned to the bedside unprepared with anything to say.

Where could she get a little close-fitting black cap, and an enveloping coat of that deep velvety black, soft, not heavy and tailor—made like an English coat, yet so good in outline, expressive; a dark moulding for face and form that could be worn for years and would retain, no matter what the fashions were, its untroublesome individuality? Not in London. They were Russian things. The Russian woman’s way of abolishing the mess and bother of clothes; keeping them close and flat and untrimmed. Shining out from them full of dark energy and indifference. More oppressively than before, was the barrier between them of Madame Lintoff’s indifference. It was not hostility. Not personal at all; nor founded on any test, or any opinion.

In the colourless moaning voice with which she agreed that there was much for her to see in London and that she had many things she wished particularly not to miss, in the way she put her foreigner’s questions, there was an over-whelming indifference. It went right through. She sat there, behind her softly moulded beauty, dreadfully full of clear hard energy; yet immobile in perfect indifference. Not expecting speech; yet filching away the power to be silent. No breath from Lintoff’s wide vistas had ever reached her. She had driven along, talking, teaching, agitating; had gone through her romance without once moving away from the dark centre of indifference where she lay coiled and beautiful.... Her sympathy with the proletarians was a fastidious horror of all they suffered. Her cold clear mind summoned it easily, her logical brain could find sharp terse phrases to describe it. She cared no more for them than for the bourgeois people from whom she had fled with equal horror, and terse phrases, into more desperate activities than he. He loved and wanted the people. He felt separation from them more as his loss than as theirs. He wanted the whole vast multitude of humanity. The men came strolling. Lintoff asked a question. They all flung sentences in turn, abruptly, in Russian, from unmoved faces. They were making arrangements for tomorrow.

Lintoff stood flaring in the lamplit porch, speeding them on their way with abrupt caressing words.

“Well?” said Michael before they were out of hearing—“Did you like them?”

“Yes or no as the case may be.” Michael’s recovered London manner was a support against the prospect of sustaining a second meeting tomorrow, with everything already passed that could ever pass between herself and them.

“You have made an immense impression on Bruno Feodorovitch.”

“How do you know?” “He finds you the type of the Englishwoman. Harmonious. He said that with such a woman a man could all his life be perfectly happy. Ah, Miriam, let us at once be married.” His voice creaked pathetically; waiting for the lash. The urgent certainty behind it was not his own certainty. Nothing but a too dim, too intermittent sense of something he gathered in England. She stood still to laugh aloud. His persistent childish naughtiness assured her of the future and left her free to speak.

“You know we can’t; you know how separate we are. You have seen it again and again and agreed. You see it now; only you are carried away by this man’s first impression. Quite a wrong one. I know the sort of woman he means. Who accepts a man’s idea and leaves him to go about his work undisturbed; sure that her attention is distracted from his full life by practical preoccupations. It’s perfectly easy to create that impression, on any man. Of bright complacency. All the busy married women are creating it all the time, helplessly. Men see them looking out into the world, practical, responsible, quite certain about everything, going from thing to thing, too active amongst things to notice men’s wavering self-indulgence, their slips and shams. Men lean and feed and are kept going, and in their moments of gratitude they laud women to the skies. At other moments, amongst themselves, they call them materialists, animals, half-human, imperfectly civilised creatures of instinct, sacrificed to sex. And all the time they have no suspicion of the individual life going on behind the surface.” ... To marry would be actually to become, as far as the outside world could see, exactly the creature men described. To go into complete solitude, marked for life as a segregated female whose whole range of activities was known; in the only way men have of knowing things.

“Lintoff of course is not quite like that. But then in these revolutionary circles men and women live the same lives.... It’s like America in the beginning, where women were as valuable as men in the outside life. If the revolution were accomplished they would separate again.” ...

She backed to the railings behind her, and leant, with a heel on the low moulding, to steady herself against the tide of thought, leaving Michael planted in the middle of the pavement. A policeman strolled up, narrowly observing them, and passed on.

“No one on earth knows whether these Russian revolutionaries are right or wrong. But they have a thing that none of their sort of people over here have—an effortless sense of humanity as one group. The men have it and are careless about everything else. I believe they think it worth realising if everybody in the world died at the moment of realisation. The women know that humanity is two groups. And they go into revolutions for the freedom from the pressure of this knowledge.” “Revolution is by no means the sole way of having a complete sense of humanity. But what has all this to do with us?”

“It is not that the women are heartless; that is an appearance. It is that they know that there are no tragedies....”

“Listen, Mira. You have taught me much. I am also perhaps not so indiscriminating as are some men.”

“In family life, all your Jewish feelings would overtake you. You would slip into dressing-gown and slippers. You have said so yourself. But I am now quite convinced that I shall never marry.” She walked on.

He ran round in front of her, bringing her to a standstill.

“You think you will never marry ... with this”—his ungloved hands moved gently over the outlines of her shoulders. “Ah—it is most—musical; you do not know.” She thrilled to the impersonal acclamation; yet another of his many defiant tributes to her forgotten material self; always lapsing from her mind, never coming to her aid when she was lost in envious admiration of women she could not like. Yet they contained an impossible idea; the idea of a man being consciously attracted and won by universal physiological facts, rather than by individuals themselves....

If Michael only knew, it was this perpetual continental science of his that had helped to kill their relationship. With him there could never be any shared discovery.... She grudged the formal enlightenment he had brought her; filching it from the future. There could never now be a single harmonious development in relation to one person. Unless in relation to him.... For an instant marriage, with him, suggested itself as an accomplished fact. She saw herself married and free of him; set definitely in the bright resounding daylight of marriage ... free of desires ... free to rest and give away to the tides of cheerfulness ringing in confinement within her. She saw the world transformed to its old likeness; and walked alone with it, in her old London, as if awakened from a dream. But her vision was disturbed by the sense and sound of his presence and she knew that her response was not to him....

The necessity of breaking with him invaded her from without, a conviction, coming from the radiance on which her eyes were set, and expanding painlessly within her mind. She recognised with a flush of shame at the continued association of these two separated people, that there was less reality between them now than there had been when they first met. There was none.... She was no longer passionately attached to him, but treacherously since she was hiding it, to someone hidden in the past, or waiting in the future ... or anyone; any chance man might be made to apprehend ... so that when his man’s limitations appeared, that past would be there to retreat to....

He had never for a moment shared her sense of endlessness.... More sociably minded than she ... but not more sociable ... more quickly impatient of the cessations made by social occasions, he had no visions of waiting people.... His personal life was centred on her completely. But the things she threw out to screen her incommunicable blissfulnesses, or to shelter her vacuous intervals from the unendurable sound of his perpetual circling round his set of ideas, no longer reached him. She could silence and awaken him only in those rare moments when she was lifted out of her growing fatigues to where she could grasp and state in all its parts any view of life that was different from his own. Since she could not hold him to these shifting visions, nor drop them and accept his world, they had no longer anything to exchange....

At the best they were like long-married people, living, alone, side by side; meeting only in relation to outside things. Any breaking of the silence into which she retreated while keeping him talking, every pause in her outbursts of irrepressible cheerfulness, immediately brought her beating up against the bars of his vision of life as uniform experience, and gave her a fresh access of longing to cut out of her consciousness the years she had spent in conflict with it.

Always until tonight her longing to escape the unmanageable burden of his Jewishness had been quenched by the pain of the thought of his going off alone into banishment. But tonight the long street they were in shone brightly towards the movement of her thought. Some hidden barrier to their separation had been removed. She waited curbed, incredulous of her freedom to breathe the wide air; unable to close her ears to the morning sounds of the world opening before her as the burden slipped away. Drawing back, she paused to try upon herself the effect of his keenly imagined absence. She was dismantled, chill and empty handed, returning unchanged to loneliness. But no thrill of pain followed this final test; the unbelievable severance was already made. Even whilst looking for words that would break the shock, she felt she had spoken.

His voice breaking his silence, came like an echo. She went like a ghost along the anticipated phrases, keenly aware only of those early moments when she had first gathered the shapes and rhythms of his talk.

Freedom; and with it that terrible darkness in his voice. Words must be said; but it was cruel to speak from far away; from the midst of joy. The unburdened years were speeding towards her; she felt their breath; the lifting of the light with the presence, just beyond the passing moments, of the old companionship that for so long had been hers only when she could forget her surrounded state.... His resonant cough brought her again the sound of his voice ... how could the warm kind voice disappear from her days ... she felt herself quailing in loneliness before the sharp edges of her daily life.

Glancing at him as they passed under a lamp she saw a pale, set face. His will was at work; he was facing his future and making terms with it. He would have a phrase for his loss, as a refuge from pain. That was comforting; but it was a base, social comfort; far away from the truth that was loading her with responsibility. He did not know what he was leaving.... There was no conscious thought in him that could grasp and state the reality of his loss; nor what it was in him that even now she could not sever from herself. If he knew, there would be no separation. He had actually moved into his future; taken of his own freewill the first step away from the shelter she gave. Perhaps a better, kinder shelter awaited him. Perhaps he was glad in his freedom and his manner was made from his foreigner’s sense of what was due to the occasion. He did not know that there would be no more stillness for him.

Yet he did dimly know that part of his certainty about her was this mysterious youth; the strange everlasting sense of being, even with servants and young children, with any child, in the presence of adult cynical social ability, comfortably at home in the world.... Perhaps he would be better off without such an isolated, helpless personality in the life he must lead. But letting him go was giving him up to cynicism, or to the fixed blind sentiments of all who were not cynics. No one would live with him in his early childhood, and keep it alive in him. He would leave it with her, without knowing that he left it.

All the things she had made him contemplate would be forgotten.... He would plunge into the life he used to call normal.... That was jealousy; flaming through her being; pressing on her mind. For a moment she faced the certainty that she would rather annihilate his mind than give up overlooking and modifying his thoughts. Here alone was the root of her long delay ... it held no selfless desire for his welfare ... then he would be better off with anyone. He and the cynics and the sentimentalists were human and kindly, however blind.... They were not cruel; ready to wreck and destroy in order to impose their own certainties.... Even as she gazed into it, she felt herself drawn powerfully away from the abyss of her nature by the pain of anticipating his separated future; the experiences that would obliterate and vanquish her; justifying as far as he would ever again see, his original outlook.... She battled desperately, imploring the power of detachment, and immediately found words for them both.

“It is weak to go on; it will only become more difficult.”

“You are right, it is a weakness;” his voice broke on a gusty breath; “tomorrow we will spend as we have promised, the afternoon with Lintoffs. On Monday I will go.”

The street swayed about her. She held on, forcing her limbs; passing into emptiness. The sounds of the world were very far away; but within their muffled faintness she heard her own free voice, and his, cheerful and impersonal, sounding on through life. With the breath of this release she touched the realization that some day, he would meet, along a pathway unknown to her and in a vision different from her own, the same truth.... What truth? God? The old male prison, whether men were atheists or believers?... The whole of the truth of which her joy and her few certainties were a part, innocently conveyed to him by someone with a character that would win him to attend. Then he would remember the things they had lost in speech. The enlightener would not argue. Conviction would come to him by things taken for granted.

Clear demonstration is at once fooled.... All men in explanatory speech about life, have at once either in the face, or in the unconscious rest of them, a look of shame. Because they are not living, but calculating.... Women who are not living ought to spend all their time cracking jokes. In a rotten society women grow witty; making a heaven while they wait....

But if from this far cool place where she now was, she breathed deep and let mirth flow out, he would never go.

At the very beginning of the afternoon Miriam was isolated with Madame Lintoff. Forced to walk ahead with her, as if companionably, between the closed shop-fronts and the dismal gutter of Oxford Street, while her real place, at Michael’s side, with Lintoff beyond, or side by side with Lintoff, and Michael beyond, was empty, and the two men walked alone, exchanging, without interference, one-sided, masculine views.

She listened to Madame’s silence. For all her indifference, she must have had some sort of bright anticipation of her first outing in London. And this was the outing. A walk, along a grey pavement, in raw grey air, under a heavy sky, with an Englishwoman who had no conversation.

Most people began with questions. But there was no question she wanted to ask Madame Lintoff.... She knew her too well. During the short night she had become a familiar part of the picture of life; one of the explanations of the way things went.... Yet it was inhospitable to leave her with no companion but the damp motionless air. Relaxing her attention, to make an attempt at bold friendliness, she swung gaily along, looking independently ahead into the soft grey murk. But hopelessness seized her as a useless topic sprang eagerly into her mind and she felt herself submerged, unable to withstand its private charm. Helplessly she explained, in her mind, to the far-off woman at her side that this bleak day coming suddenly in the midst of July was one of the glorious things in the English weather.... Only a few people find English weather glorious.... Clever people think it contemptible to mention weather except in jest or with a passing curse. Madame Lintoff would have just that same expression of veiled scorn that means people are being kept from their topics.... For a few seconds, as she skirted a passing group, she looked back to an unforgettable thing, that would press for expression, now that she had thought of it, through anything she might try to say ... a wandering in twilight along a wide empty pavement at the corner of a square of high buildings, shutting out all but the space of sky above the trees.... That lovely line about Beatrice, bringing bright, draped, deep-toned figures, with the grave eyes of intensest eternal happiness, and heads bent in an attitude of song, about her in the upper air; the way they had come down, as she had lowered her eyes to the gleaming, wet pavement to listen again and again into the words of the wonderful line; how they had closed about her; a tapestry of intensifying colour, making a little chamber filled with deep light, gathering her into such a forgetfulness that she had found herself going along at a run, and when she had wakened to recall the sense of the day and the season, had looked up and seen November in the thick Bloomsbury mist, the beloved London lamplight glistening on the puddles of the empty street, and spreading a sheen of gold over the wet pavements; the jewelled darkness of the London winter coming about her once more; and then the glorious shock of remembering that August and September were still in hand, waiting hidden beyond the dark weather....

She came back renewed and felt for a moment the strange familiar uneasy sense of being outside and indifferent to the occasion, the feeling that brought again and again, in spite of experience, the illusion that everyone was merely playing a part, distracting attention from the realities that persisted within. That all the distortions of speech and action were the whisperings and postures of beings immured in a bright reality they would not or could not reveal. But acting upon this belief always brought the same result. Astonishment, contempt, even affronted dignity were the results of these sudden outbreaks....

But a Russian idealist ... would not be shocked, but would be appallingly clever and difficult. All the topics which now came tumbling into her mind shrank back in silence before Madame Lintoff’s intellectual oblivion. It was more oppressive than the oblivion of the intellectual English. Theirs was a small, hard, bright circle. Within it they were self-conscious. Hers was an impersonal spreading darkness....

They were nearing Oxford Circus. There were more people strolling along the pavement. For quite a little time they were separated by the passing of two scattered groups, straggling along, with hoarse cockney shouting, the women yodelling and yelling at everything they saw. The reprieve brought them together again, Miriam felt, with something rescued; a feeling of accomplishment. Madame Lintoff’s voice came hurriedly—Was she noticing the Salvation Army Band, thumping across the Circus; or this young man getting into a hansom as if the whole world were watching him being importantly headlong?—mournfully came a rounded little sentence deploring the Sunday closing of the theatres.... She would have neatly deplored September.... Je trouve cela triste, l’automne.

But thrilled by the sudden sounding of the little voice, Miriam tried eagerly to see London through her eyes; to find it a pity that the theatres were not open. She agreed, and turned her mind to the plays that were on at the moment. She could not imagine Madame Lintoff at any one of them. But their bright week-day names lost meaning in the Sunday atmosphere; drew back to their own place, and insisted that she should find a defence for its quiet emptiness. They themselves defended it, these English theatre names, gathering much of their colour and brightness from the weekly lull. But the meaning of the lull lay much deeper than the need for contrast; deeper than the reasons given by sabbatarians, whom it was a joy to defy, though they were right. It was something that was as difficult to defend as the qualities of the English weather.

This Russian woman was also a continental, sharing the awful continental demand that the week-day things should never cease; dependent all the time on revolving sets of outside things ... and the modern English were getting more and more into the same state. In a few years Sunday would be “bright”; full of everyday noise. Unless someone could find words to explain the thing all these people called dullness; what it was they were so briskly smothering. Without the undiscoverable words, it could not be spoken of. An imagined attempt brought mocking laughter and the sound of a Bloomsbury voice: “Vous n’savez pas quand vous vous rasez, hein?” Madame Lintoff would not be vulgar; but she would share the sentiment....

Miriam turned to her in wrath, feeling an opportunity. Here, for all her revolutionary opinions, was a representative of the talkative oblivious world. She would confess to her that she dared not associate closely with people because of the universal capacity for being bored, and the hurry everyone was in. Her anger began to change into interest as words framed themselves in her mind.... But as she turned to speak she was shocked by the pathos of the little cloaked figure; the beautifully moulded, lovely disc of face, shining out clasped by the cap, above the close black draperies, and withdrew her eyes to contemplate in silence the individual life of this being; her moments of solitary dealing with the detail of the day when she would be forced to think things; not thoughts; and did not know how marvellous things were. That lonely one was the person to approach, ignoring everything else. She would protest, make some kind of defence; but if the ground could be held, they would presently be together in a bright world. But there was not enough time, between here and Hyde Park. Then later.

Behind, near or far, the two dry men were keeping their heads, exchanging men’s ready-made remarks....

“Est-ce qu’il y a en Angleterre le grand drame psychologique?”

What on earth did she mean?

“Oh yes; here and there,” said Miriam firmly.

She sang over in her mind the duet of the contrasting voices as she turned in panic to the region within her, that was entrenched against England. Some light on the phrase would be there, if anywhere.... Shaw? Were his things great psychological dramas?

“Galumphing about like an elephant.” ... The sudden bright English voice reverberated through her search.... Sudermann? She saw eager, unconscious faces, well-off English people, seeing only their English world, translating everything they saw into its language; strayed into Oxford Street to remind her. She wanted to follow them, and go on hearing, within the restricted jargon of their English voices, the answer to questions they never dreamed of putting. The continentals put questions and answered them by theories. These people answered everything in person; and did not know it.

The open spaces of the Park allowed them to line up in a row, and for some time they hovered on the outskirts of the crowd gathered nearest to the gates. Michael, in Russian, was delightedly showing off his Hyde Park crowds, obviously renewing his own first impression of these numbers of people casually gathered together—looking for his friends to show that they were impressed in the same way. They were impressed. They stood side by side, looking small and wan; making little sounds of appreciation, their two pairs of so different eyes wide upon the massed people. He could not wait; interrupted their contemplation in his ironic challenging way.

Lintoff answered with an affectionate sideways movement of the head; two short Russian words pouching his red lips in a gesture of denial. But he did not move, as an Englishman would have done after he thought he had settled a debateable point; remaining there gently, accessible and exposed to a further onslaught. He held his truths carelessly, not as a personal possession, to be fought over with every other male.

It was Michael who made the first movement away from his summed-up crowd.... They drifted in a row towards the broad pathway lined with seated forms looking small and misty under the high trees, but presently to show clearly, scrappy and inharmonious, shreds of millinery and tailoring, no matter how perfect, reduced to confusion, spoiling the effect of the flower beds brightly flaring under the grey sky and the wide stretch of grass, brilliant emerald until it stopped without horizon where the saffron distances of the mist shut thickly down. She asked Michael what Lintoff had said.

“He says quite simply that these people are not free.”

“Nor are they,” she said, suddenly reminded of a line of thought. “They are,” she recited, clipping her sentences in advance as they formed, to fit the Russian intonation, with carelessly turned head and Lintoff’s pout of denial on her lips, “docile material; an inexhaustible supply. An employer must husband; his horses and machinery; his people he uses up; as-cheaply-as-possible-always-quite-sure-of-more.”

“That has been so. But employers begin to understand that it is a sound economic to care for their workers.” “A few. And that leads only to blue canvas.”

“What is this?”

“Wells’s hordes of uniformed slaves, living in security, with all sorts of material enjoyments.”

“It surprises me that still you quote this man.”

“He makes phrases and pictures.”

“Of what service are such things from one who is incapable of unprejudiced thought?”

“Everybody is.”

“Pardon me; you are wrong.”

“Thought is prejudice.”

“That is most-monstrous.”

“Thought is a secondary human faculty, and can’t lead, anyone, anywhere.”

He turned away to the Lintoffs with a question. His voice was like a cracked bell. Lintoff’s gentle, indifferent tones made a docile response.

“I suggest we have tea,” bellowed Michael softly, facing her with a cheerful countenance. “They agree. Is it not a good idea?”

“Perfectly splendid,” she murmured, smiling her relief. He could be trusted not to endure ... to be tired of an adventure before it had begun....

“Certainly it is splendid if it bring dimples. Where shall we go?” He turned eagerly, to draw them back at once to the park gates, shouting gaily as he broke the group, “Na, na; where. What do you think, Miriam?”

“There isn’t anything near here,” she objected. She pressed forward with difficulty, her strength ebbing away behind her. His impatience was drawing them away from something towards which they had all been moving. It was as if her real being were still facing the other way.

“No—where really can we go?” In an instant he would remember the dark little Italian-Swiss cafÉ near the Marble Arch, and its seal would be set on the whole of the afternoon. The Lintoffs would not be aware of this. They were indifferent to surroundings in a world that had only one meaning for them. But the sense of them and their world, already, in the boundless immensity of Sunday, scattered into the past, would be an added misery amongst the clerks and shop-girls crowded in that stuffy little interior where so many of her Sunday afternoons had died. The place cancelled all her worlds, put an end to her efforts to fit Michael into them, led her always impatiently into the next week for forgetfulness of their recurring, strife-tormented leisure....

Verandahs and sunlit sea; small drawing-rooms, made large by their wandering shapes; spaces of shadow and sunlight beautifying all their English Sunday contents; windowed alcoves reflecting the sky; spacious, silken, upstairs tea-rooms in Bond Street.... But these things were hers now, only through friends. Here, by herself, as the Lintoffs knew her, she belonged to the resourceless crowd of London workers....

Michael ordered much tea and a lemonade, in a reproachful aside to the pallid grubby little waiter squeezing his way between the close-set tables with a crowded tray held high.

“’Ow many?” he murmured over his shoulder, turning a low-browed anxious face. His tray tilted dangerously, sliding its contents.

“You can count?” said Michael without looking at him.

“Four tea, four limonade,” murmured the poor little man huskily.

“I have ordered tea,” thundered Michael. “You can bring also one bottle limonade.”

The waiter pushed on, righting his noisy trayful. Michael subsided with elbows on the smeary marble table-top, his face propped on his hands, about to speak. The Lintoffs also; their gleaming pale faces set towards the common centre, while their eyes brooded outwards on the crowded little scene. Miriam surveyed them, glad of their engrossment, dizzy with the sense of having left herself outside in the Park.

“Shall I tell the Lintoffs that you have dimples?” Michael asked serenely, shifting his bunched face round to smile at her.

She checked him as he leaned across to call their attention.... It was in this very room that she had first told him he must choose between her company and violent scenes with waiters. He was utterly unconscious; aware only of his compatriots sitting opposite, himself before them in the pride of an international friendship. Yesterday’s compact set aside, quite likely, later on, to be questioned.

The Lintoffs’ voices broke out together, chalkily smooth and toneless against the cockney sounds vibrating in the crowded space, all harsh and strident, all either facetious or wrangling. Their eyes had come back. But they themselves were absent, set far away, amongst their generalisations. Of the actual life of the passing moment they felt no more than Michael. Itself, its uniqueness, the deep loop it made, did not exist for them. They looked only towards the future. He only at a uniform pattern of humanity.

Yet within the air itself was all the time the something that belonged to everybody; that could be universally recognised; disappearing at once with every outbreak of speech that sought only for distraction, from embarrassment or from tedium.... She sat lifeless, holding for comfort as she gathered once more, even with these free Russians, the proof of her perfect social incompatibility, to the thought that this endurance was the last. These were the last hours of wandering out of the course of her being.... She felt herself grow pale and paler, sink each moment more utterly out of life. The pain in her brow pressed upon her eyelids like a kind of sleep. She must be looking quite horrible. Was there anyone, anywhere, who suffered quite in this way, felt always and everywhere so utterly different?

Tea came bringing the end of the trio of Russian phrases. Michael began to dispense it, telling the Lintoffs that they had discovered that the English did not know how to drink tea. Ardent replies surged at the back of her mind; but speech was a faraway mystery. She clung to Michael’s presence, the sight of his friendly arm handing the cup she could not drink; to the remembered perfection of his acceptance of failures and exhaustions ... mechanically she was speaking French ... appearing interested and sincere; caring only for the way the foreign words gave a quality to the barest statement by placing it in far-off surroundings, giving it a life apart from its meaning, bearing her into a tide of worldly indifference....

But real impressions living within her own voice came crowding upon her, overwhelming the forced words, opening abysses, threatening complete flouting of her surroundings. She snatched at them as they passed before her, smiled her vanishing thread of speech into inanity, and sat silent, half turned towards the leaping reproachful shapes of thought, inexpressible to these people waiting with faces set only towards swift replies. Madame Lintoff made a fresh departure in her moaning sweetly querulous voice ... a host of replies belonged to it, all contradicting each other. But there was a smooth neat way of replying to a thing like that, leading quickly on to something that would presently cancel it ... quite simple people.... Mrs. Bailey, saying wonderful things without knowing it.

Answers given knowingly, admitted what they professed to demolish.... She had forfeited her right to speak; disappeared before their eyes, and must yet stay, vulnerable, held by the sounds she had woven, false threads between herself and them. Her head throbbed with pain, a molten globe that seemed to be expanding to the confines of the room. Michael was inaccessible, carefully explaining to Madame Lintoff, in his way, why she had said what she had said; set with boyish intentness towards the business of opening his dreadful green bottle.

Lintoff sat upright with a listening face; the lit brooding face of one listening to distant music. He was all lit, all the time, curiously giving out light that his thinly coloured eyes and flaming beard helped to flow forth. She could imagine him speaking to crowds; but he had not the unmistakable speaker’s look, that lifted look and the sense of the audience; always there, even in converse with intimate friends.... But of course in Russia there were no crowds, none of that machinery of speaker and audience, except for things that were not going to end in action.... When Michael lifted his glass with a German toast, Lintoff’s smile came without contracting his face, the light that was in him becoming a person. He was so far away from the thoughts provoked by speech that he could be met afresh in each thing that was said; coming down into it whole and serious from his impersonal distances; but only to go back. There was no permanent marvel for him in the present.... The room was growing dim. Only Michael’s profile was clear, tilted as he tossed off his dreadful drink at one draught. His face came round at last, fresh and glowing with the effervescence. He exclaimed, in gulps, at her pallor and ordered hot milk for her, quietly and courteously from the hovering waiter. The Lintoffs uttered little condolences most tenderly, with direct homely simplicity.

Sitting exempted, sipping her milk while the others talked, lounging, in smooth gentle tones, three forces ... curbed to gentleness ... she felt the room about her change from gloom to a strange blurred brightness, as if she were seeing it through frosted glass.... A party of young men were getting up to go, stamping their feet and jostling each other as they shook themselves to rights, letting their jeering, jesting voices reach street level before they got to the door. They filed past. Their faces, browless under evilly flattened cloth caps, or too large under horrible shallow bowlers set too far back, were all the same, set towards the street with the look, even while they jested, of empty finality; choiceless dead faces. They were not really gay. They had not been gay as they sat. Only defiantly noisy, collected together to banish, with their awful ritual of jeers and jests, the closed-in view that was always before their eyes; giving them, even when they were at their rowdiest, that look of lonely awareness of something that would never change. That was why they jeered? Why their voices were always defensive and defiant? What else could they do when they could alter nothing and never get away? The last of the file was different; a dark young man with a club-footed gait. His face was pursed a little with the habit of facetiousness, but not aggressively; the forehead that had just disappeared under his dreadful cap was touched with a radiance, a reflection of some individual state of being, permanently independent of his circumstances; very familiar, reminding her of something glad ... she found it as she brought her eyes back to the table; the figure of a boy, swinging in clumsy boots along the ill-lit tunnel of that new tube at Finsbury Park on a Saturday night, playing a concertina; a frightful wheezing and jangling of blurred tones, filling the passage, bearing down upon her, increasing in volume, detestable. But she had taken in the leaping unconscious rhythmic swinging of his body and the joy it was to him to march down the long clear passage, and forgiven him before he passed; and then his eyes as he came, rapt and blissfully grave above the hideous clamour.

“Listen, Miriam. Here is something for you.” She awoke to scan the three busy faces. It had not been her fault that she had failed and dropped away from them. Had it been her fault? The time was drawing to an end. Presently they would separate for good. The occasion would have slipped away. With this overwhelming sense of the uniqueness of occasions, she yet forgot every time, that every occasion was unique, and limited in time, and would not recur.... She sat up briskly to listen. There was still time in hand. They had been ages together. She was at home. She yawned and caught Lintoff’s smiling eye. There was a brightness in this little place; all sorts of things that reflected the light ... metal and varnished wood, upright; flat surfaces; the face of the place; its features certainly sometimes cleansed, perhaps by whistling waiters in the jocund morning, for her. She did not dust ... she could talk and listen, in prepared places, knowing nothing of their preparations.... She belonged to the leisure she had been born in, to the beauty of things. The margins of her time would always be glorious.

“Lintoff says that he understands not at all the speech of these young men who were only now here. I have not listened; but it was of course simply cockney. He declares that one man used repeatedly to the waiter making the bill, one expression, sounding to him like a mixture of Latin and Chinese—Ava-tse. I confess that after all these years it means to me absolutely nothing. Can you recognise it?”

She turned the words over in her mind, but could not translate them until she recalled the group of men and the probable voice. Then she recoiled. Lintoff and Michael did not know the horror they were handling with such light amusement.

“I know,” she said, “it’s appalling; fearful”—even to think the words degraded the whole spectacle of life, set all its objects within reach of the transforming power of unconscious distortion....

“Why fearful? It is just the speech of London. Certainly this tame boor was not swearing?” railed Michael. Lintoff’s smile was now all personal curiosity.

“It’s not Cockney. It’s the worst there is. London Essex. He meant I’ve; had; two; buns or something. Isn’t it perfectly awful?” Again the man appeared horribly before her, his world summarised in speech that must, did bring everything within it to the level of its baseness.

“Is it possible?” said Michael with an amused chuckle. Lintoff was murmuring the phrase that meant for him an excursion into the language of the people. He could not see its terrible menace. The uselessness of opposing it.... Revolutionaries would let all these people out to spread over everything.... But the people themselves would change? But it would be too late to save the language....

“English is being destroyed,” she proclaimed. “There is a relationship between sound and things.... If you heard a Canadian reading Tennyson.... ‘Come into the goiden, Mahd.’ But that’s different. And in parts of America a very beautiful rich free English is going on; more vivid than ours, and taking things in all the time. It is only in England that deformed speech is increasing—is being taught in schools. It shapes these people’s mouths and contracts their throats and makes them hard-eyed.”

“You have no ground whatever for these wild statements.”

“They are not wild; they are tame, when you really think of it.” Lintoff was watching tensely; deploring wasted emotion ... probably.

“Do you think Lintoff....” They moved on in their talk, unapprehensive foreigners, leaving the heart of the problem untouched. It was difficult to keep attached to a conversation that was half Michael’s, with the Lintoffs holding back, acquiescing indulgently in his topics. An encyclopÆdia making statements to people who were moving in a dream; halting and smiling and producing gestures and kindly echoes.... Michael like a rock for most things as they were and had been in the past, yet knowing them only in one way; clear as crystal about ordered knowledge, but never questioning its value.

She wanted, now, to talk again alone with Lintoff ... anything would do. The opposition that was working within her, not to his vision, but to his theory of it, and of the way it should be realised, would express itself to him through any sort of interchange. Something he brought with him would be challenged by the very sound on the air of the things that would be given her to say, if she could be with him before the mood of forgetful interest should be worn away. She sat waiting for the homeward walk, surrounded by images of the things that had made her; not hers, England’s, but which she represented and lived in, through something that had been born with her. If there was anyone she had ever met to whom these things could be conveyed without clear speech or definite ideas, it was he. But when they left the restaurant they walked out into heavy rain and went to the place of parting, separated and silent in a crowded ’bus.

Michael was going to keep his word.

Michael alone. With more than the usual man’s helplessness.... Getting involved. At the mercy of his inability to read people.

The torment of missing his near warm presence would grow less, but the torment of not knowing what was happening to him would increase.

This stillness creeping out from the corners of the room was the opening of a lifetime of loneliness. It would grow to be far more dreadful than it was tonight. Tonight it was alive, between the jolly afternoon with the Lintoffs—jolly; the last bit of shared life—and the agony of tomorrow’s break with Michael. But a day would come when the silence would be untormented, absolute, for life; echoing to all her movements in the room; waiting to settle as soon as she was still.

She resisted, pitting against it the sound of London. But in the distant voice there was a new note; careless dismissal. The busy sound seemed very far away; like an echo of itself.

She moved quickly at the first sinking of her heart, and drew in her eyes from watching her room, the way its features stood aloof, separate and individual; independent of her presence. In a moment panic would have seized her, leaving no refuge. She asserted herself, involuntarily whistling under her breath, a cheerful sound that called across the night to the mistaken voice of London and blended at once with its song.... She would tell Michael he must communicate with her in any dire necessity.... Moving about unseeing she broke up the shape of her room and blurred its features and waited, holding on. Attention to these wise outside threats would drive away something coming confidently towards her, just round the corner of this vast, breathless moment.... She paused to wait for it as for a person about to speak aloud in the room, and drew a deep breath sending through her a glow from head to foot ... it was there; independent, laughing, bubbling up incorrigibly, golden and bright with a radiance that spread all round her; her profanity ... but if incurable profanity was incurable happiness, how could she help believing and trusting it against all other voices ... if the last deepest level of her being was joy ... a hilarity against which nothing seemed to be able to prevail ... able, in spite of herself, in spite of her many solemn eager expeditions in opposition to it, to be always there, not gone; always waiting behind the last door. It was simply rum. Her limbs stirred to a dance ... how slowly he had played that wild Norwegian tune; making it like an old woman singing to a fretful child to cheat it into comfort; a gay quavering.

Its expanded gestures carried her slowly and gently up and down the room, dipping, swaying, with wooden clogs on her feet, her arms swinging to balance the slow movements of her body, the surrounding mountain landscape gleaming in the joy of the festival, defying the passing of the years. She could not keep within the slow rhythm. Her feet flung off the clogs and flew about the room until she was arrested by the flying dust and escaped to the window while it settled behind her on the subdued furniture. A cab whistle was sounding in the street and the voices, coming up through the rain-moist air, of people grouped waiting on a doorstep ... come out into the deep night, out again into endless space, from a room, and still keeping up the sound of carefully modulated speech and laughter. The jingling of a hansom sounded far away in the square. It would be years before it would get to them. They would have to go on fitting things into the shape of their carefully made tones. She was tempted to call down to them to stop; tell them they were not taking anyone in....

A puff of wind brought the rain against her face, inviting her to stay with the night and find again, as she had done in the old days of solitude, the strange wide spaces within the darkness. But she was drawn back by a colloquy set in, behind her, in the room. Warmly the little shabby enclosure welcomed her, given back, eager for her to go on keeping her life in it; showing her the time ahead, the circling scenes; all the undeserved, unsought, extraordinary wealth of going on being alive. She stood with the rain-drops on her face, tingling from head to foot to know why; why; why life should exist....

Going back into the room she found that her movement about it had all its old quality; she was once more in that zone of her being where all the past was with her unobstructed; not recalled, but present, so that she could move into any part and be there as before. She felt her way to sit on the edge of her bed, but gently as she let herself down, the bedstead creaked and gave beneath her, jolting her back into today, spreading before her the nothingness of the days she must now pass through, bringing back into her mind the threats and wise sayings. She faced them with arguments, flinching as she recognised this acknowledgment of their power.

Lifelong loneliness is a phrase. With no evidence for its meaning, but the things set down in books.... People who record loneliness, bare their wounds, and ask for pity, are not wholly wounded. For others, no one has any right to speak.... What is “a lonely figure”? If it knows it is lonely it is not altogether lonely. If it does not know, it is not lonely. Books about people are lies from beginning to end. However sincere, they cannot offer any evidence about life. Even lifelong loneliness is life; too marvellous to express. Absolutely, of course. But relatively? Relative things are forgotten when you are alone....

The thought, at this moment, of the alternative of any sort of social life with its trampling hurry, made her turn to the simple single sense of her solitude with thankfulness that it was preserved. Social incompatibility thought of alone, brought a curious boundless promise, a sense of something ahead that she must be alone to meet, or would miss. The condemnation of social incompatibility coming from the voices of the world roused an impatience which could not feel ashamed; an angry demand for time, and behind it a sense of companionship for which there was no name....

Single, detached figures came vividly before her, all women. Each of them had spoken to her with sudden intimacy, on the outskirts of groups from which she had moved away to breathe and rest. They had all confessed their incompatibility; a chosen or accepted loneliness. But it was certain they never felt that human forms about them crushed, with the sets of unconsidered assumptions behind their talk, the very sense of existence. They were either cynical, not only seeing through people, but not caring at all to be alive, never assuming characters in order to share the fun ... or they were “misjudged” or “resigned.” The cynical ones were really alone. They never had any sense of being accompanied by themselves. They had a strange hard strength; unexpected hobbies and interests. Those who were resigned were usually religious.... They lived in the company of their idea of Christ ... but regretfully ... as if it were a second best.... “And I who hoped for only God, found thee.” ... Mrs. Browning could never have realised how fearfully funny that was ... from a churchwoman.... And Protestant churchwomen believe that only men are eligible to associate with God. Thinking of Protestant husbands the idea was suffocating. It made God intolerable; and even Heaven simply abscheulich.... Buddhism.... “Buddhism is the only faith that offers itself to men and women alike on equal terms ...” and then, “women are not encouraged to become priests” ... Thibet.... The whole world would be Thibet if the people were evenly distributed. Only the historic centuries had given men their monstrous illusions; only the crowding of the women in towns. But the Church will go on being a Royal Academy of Males....

She called back her thoughts from a contemplation that would lead only to anger, and was again aware of herself waiting, on the edge of her bed, just in time. In spite of her truancy the gay tumult was still seething in her mind; the whole of her past happinesses close about her, drawing her in and out of the years. Fragments of forgotten experience detached themselves, making a bright moving patchwork as she watched, waiting, while she passed from one to another and fresh patches were added drawing her on. Joy piled up within her; but while she savoured again the quality all these past things had held as she lived them through, she suddenly knew that they were there only because she was on her way to a goal. Somewhere at the end of this ramble into the past, was a release from wrath. She rallied to the coolness far away within her tingling blood. How astoundingly good life was; generous to the smallest effort.... The scenes gathered about her, called her back, acquired backgrounds that spread and spread. She watched single figures going on into lives in which she had no part; into increasing incidents, leaving them, as they had found them, unaware. They never stopped, never dropped their preoccupation with people and the things that happened, to notice the extraordinariness of the world being there and they on it ... and so it was, everywhere....

She seemed to be looking with a hundred eyes, multitudinously, seeing each thing from several points at once, while through her mind flitted one after another all the descriptions of humanity she had ever culled. There was no goal here. Only the old familiar business of suspended opinions, the endless battling of thoughts. She turned away. She had gone too far. Now there would be lassitude and the precipice that waited.... Her room was clear and hard about her as she moved to take refuge near the friendly gas, the sheeny patch of wall underneath it.

As she stood within the radiance, conscious only of the consoling light, the little strip of mantelshelf and the small cavernous presence of the empty grate, a single scene opened for a moment in the far distance, closing in the empty vista, standing alone, indistinct, at the bottom of her ransacked mind. It was gone. But its disappearance was a gentle touch that lingered, holding her at peace and utterly surprised.

This forgotten thing was the most deeply engraved of all her memories? The most powerful? More than any of the bright remembered things that had seemed so good as they came, suddenly, catching her up and away, each one seeming to be the last her lot would afford?

It was. The strange faint radiance in which it had shone cast a soft grey light within the darkness concealing the future....

Oldfield. It had come about through Dr. Salem Oldfield. She could not remember his arrival. Only suddenly realising him, one evening at dinner when he had been long enough in the house to chaff Mrs. Bailey about some imaginary man. Sex-chaff; that was his form of humour; giving him away as a nonconformist. But so handsome, sitting large and square, a fine massive head, well shaped hair, thick, and dinted with close cropped waves; talking about himself in the eloquent American way. It was that night he had told the table how he met his fiancÉe. He was a charlatan, stagey; but there must have been something behind his clever anecdotal American piety. Something remained even after the other doctors’ stories about his sharing their sitting-room and books, without sharing expenses; about his laziness and self-indulgence.

Mr. Chadband. But why shouldn’t people on the way to Heaven enjoy buttered toast? A hypocrite is all the time trying to be something, or he wouldn’t be a hypocrite.... And the story he told was true.... Dr. Winchester knew. It was with his friends at Balham that the girl had been staying. Wonderful. His lonely despair in Uganda; the way he had forced himself in the midst of his darkness to visit the sick convert ... and found the answer to his trouble in a leaflet hymn at the bedside; and come to London for his furlough and met the authoress in the very first house he visited. Things like that don’t happen unless people are real in some way. And the way he had admired Michael; and liked him.

It had been Michael he had taken to the Quaker meeting. But there must have been some talk with him about religion, to lead up to that sudden little interview on the stairs, he holding a book in one large hand and thumping it with the other.... “You’ll find the basic realities of religious belief set forth here; in this small volume. Your George Fox was a marvellous man.” There was an appealing truth in him at that moment, and humility.... But before his footsteps had died away she knew she could not read the book. Even the sight of it suggested his sledge-hammer sentimental piety. Also she had felt that the religious opinions of a politician could not clear up the problems that had baffled Emerson. It was only after she had given back the book that she remembered the other George Fox and the Quaker in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But she had said she had read it and that it was wonderful, to silence his evangelistic attacks, and also for the comfort of sharing, with anybody, the admission that there was absolute wonderfulness.

After that there was no memory of him until the Sunday morning when Michael had come panting upstairs to ask her to go to this meeting. He was incoherent, and she had dressed and gone out with them, into the high bright Sunday morning stillness; without knowing whither. Finding out, somewhere on the way, that they were going to see Quakers waiting to be moved by the spirit.... A whitewashed room, with people in Quaker dress sitting in a circle? Shocking to break in on them.... Startling not to have remembered them in all these years of hoping to meet someone who understood silence; and now to be going to them as a show; because Dr. Oldfield admired Michael, and being American, found out the unique things in London....

In amongst the small old shops in St. Martin’s Lane, gloomy, iron-barred gates, a long bleak corridor, folding doors; and suddenly inside a large room with sloping galleries and a platform, like a concert room, a row of dingy modern people sitting on the platform facing a scattered “chapel” congregation; men and women sitting on different sides of the room ... being left standing under the dark gallery, while Dr. Oldfield and Michael were escorted to seats amongst the men; slipping into a chair at the back of the women’s side; stranded in an atrocious emphasis of sex. But the men were on the left ... and numbers of them; not the few of a church congregation; and young; modern young men in overcoats; really religious, and not thinking the women secondary.... But there were men also on the women’s side; here and there. Married men? Then those across the way were bachelors.... That young man’s profile; very ordinary and with a walrus moustache; but stilled from its maleness, deliberately divested and submitted to silence, redeeming him from his type....

To have been born amongst these people; to know at home and in the church a shared religious life.... They were in Heaven already. Through acting on their belief. Where two or three are gathered together. Nearer than thoughts; nearer than breathing; nearer than hands and feet. The church knew it; but put the cart before the horse; the surface before the reality. The beautiful surroundings, the bridge of music and then, the moment the organ stopped a booming or nasal voice at top speed, “T’ th’ Lordour God b’long mahcies ’n f’giveness.” ... Anger and excited discovery and still more time wasted, in glancing across to find Michael, small and exposed at the gangway end, his head decorously bent, the Jew in him paying respect, but looking up and keenly about him from under his bent brows, observing on the only terms he knew, through eye and brain....

Michael was a determinist.... But to assume the presence of the holy spirit was also determinism?... Beyond him Dr. Oldfield, huge and eagerly bowed, conforming to Quaker usages, describing the occasion in his mind as he went. It was just then, turning to get away from his version, that the quality of the silence had made the impression that had come back to her now.

Dr. McHibbert said pure being was nothing. But there is no such thing as nothing ... being in the silence was being in something alive and positive; at the centre of existence; being there with others made the sense of it stronger than when it was experienced alone. Like lonely silence it drove away the sense of enclosure. There had been no stuffiness of congregated humanity; the air, breathed in, had held within it a freshness, spreading coolness and strength through the secret passages of the nerves.

It had felt like the beginning of a life that was checked and postponed into the future by the desire to formulate it; and by the nudging of a homesickness for daily life with these people who lived from the centre, admitted, in public, that life brims full all the time, away below thoughts and the loud shapes of things that happen.... And just as she had longed for the continuance of the admission, the spell had been broken. Suddenly, not in continuance, not coming out of the stillness, but interrupting it, an urbane, ingratiating voice. Standing up in the corner of the platform, turned towards the congregation, as if he were a lecturer facing an audience, a dapper little man in a new spring suit, with pink cheeks and a pink rose in his buttonhole.... Afterwards it had seemed certain that he had broken the silence because the time was running out. Strangers were present and the spirit must move....

It had been a little address, a thought-out lecture on natural history, addressed by a specialist to people less well informed. He had talked his subject not with, but at them.... While his voice went on, the gathering seemed to lose all its religious significance. His informing air; his encouraging demonstrator’s smiles; his obvious relish of the array of facts. They fell on the air like lies, losing even their own proper value, astray and intruding in the wrong context. When he sat down the silence was there again, but within it were the echoes of the urbane, expounding, professorial voice. Then, just afterwards, the breaking forth of that old man’s muffled tones; praying; quietly, as if he were alone. No one to be seen; a humbled life-worn old voice, coming out of the heart of the gathering, carrying with it, gently, all the soreness and groaning that might be there. No whining or obsequiousness; no putting on of a special voice; patient endurance and longing; affection and confidence. And far away within the indistinct aged tones, a clarion note; the warm glow of sunlight; his own strong certainty beating up unchanged beneath the heavy weight of his years. A gentle, clean, clear-eyed old man, with certainly a Whitman beard. Beautiful. For a moment it had been perfectly beautiful.

If he had stopped abruptly.... But the voice cleared and swelled. Life dropped away from it; leaving a tiresome old gentleman in full blast; thoughts coming in to shape carefully the biblical phrases describing God; to God. In the end he too was lecturing the congregation, praying at them, expressing his judgment.... Bleakness spread through the air. It was worse than the little pink man, who partly knew what he was doing and was ashamed. But this old chap was describing, at awful length, without knowing it, the secret of his own surface misery, the fact that he had never got beyond the angry, jealous, selfish, male God of the patriarchate.

Almost at once after that, the stirring and breaking up; and those glimpses, as people moved and turned towards each other, shaking hands, of the faces of some of the women, bringing back the lost impression. The inner life of the meeting was more fully with the women? It was they who spread the pure, live atmosphere? But they were obviously related. They had a household look, but not narrowly; none of the air of isolation that spread from churchwomen; the look of being used up by men and propping up a man’s world with unacknowledged, or simply unpondered, private reservations. Nor any of the jesting air of those women who ‘make the best of things.’ They looked enviably, deeply, richly alive, on the very edge of the present, representing their faith in their own persons, entirely self-centred and self-controlled; poised and serene and withdrawn, yet not withholding. They had no protesting competing eagerness, and none of the secret arrogance of churchwomen. Their dignity was not dignified. Seen from behind they had none of the absurdity of churchwomen, devoutly uppish about the status of an institution which was a standing insult to their very existence.... It was they, the shock of the relief, after the revealed weakness of the men, of their perfect poise, their personality, so strong and intense that it seemed to hold the power of reaching forth, impersonally, in any thinkable direction, that had finally confirmed the impression that had been so deep and that yet had not once come up into her thoughts since the day it was made.... The poorest, least sincere type of Anglican priest had a something that was lacking in Dr. Oldfield and the pink man. The absence of it had been the most impressive part of seeing them talking together. He had introduced Michael first. And the feeling of being affronted had quickly changed to thankfulness at representing nothing in the eyes of the suave little man. He had given only half his attention, not taking up the fact that Michael was a Zionist; his eyes wandering about; the proprietary eyes of a churchwarden....

St. Pancras clock struck two. But there was no sense of night in the soft wide air; pouring in now more strongly at the open casement, rattling its fastening gently, rhythmically, to and fro, sounding its two little notes. It was the west wind. Of course she was not tired and there was no sense of night. She hurried to be in bed in the darkness, breathing it in, listening to the little voice at the window. Here was part of the explanation of her evening. Again and again it had happened; the escape into the tireless unchanging centre; when the wind was in the west. Michael had been hurt when she had told him that the west wind brought her perfect happiness and always, like a sort of message, the certainty that she must remain alone. But it was through him that she had discovered that it transformed her. It was an augury for tomorrow. For the way of the wind tonight, its breath passing through her, recalled, seeming exactly to repeat, that wonderful night of restoration when, for the only time, he had been away from London. It was useless to deplore the seeming cruelty. The truth was forced upon her, wafted through her by this air that washed away all the circumstances of her life.