Then all these years they might have been going sometimes to those lectures. Pater talking about them—telling about old Rayleigh and old Kelvin as if they were his intimates—flinging out remarks as if he wanted to talk and his audience were incapable of appreciation ... light, heat, electricity, sound-waves; and never saying that members could take friends or that there were special lectures for children ... Sir Robert Ball ... “a fascinating Irish fellow with the gift of the gab who made a volcano an amusing reality” Krakatoa ... that year of wonderful sunsets and afterglows ... the air half round the world, full of fine dust ... it seemed cruel ... deprivation ... all those years; all that wonderful knowledge just at hand. And now it was coming, the Royal Institution ... this evening. She must find out whether one had to dress and exactly how one got in. Albemarle Street.... It all went on in Albemarle Street.
2
“We might meet” said Mr. Hancock, busily washing his hands and lifting them in the air to shake back his coat sleeves. Miriam listened from her corner behind the instrument cabinet, stupid with incredulity; he could not be speaking of the lecture ... he must be ... he had meant all the time that he was going to be with her at the lecture.
“... in the library at half past eight.”
“Oh yes” she replied casually.
3
To sit hearing the very best in the intellectual life of London, the very best science there was; the inner circle suddenly open ... the curious quiet happy laughter that went through the world with the idea of the breaking up of air and water and rays of light; the strange love that came suddenly to them all in the object lesson classes at Banbury Park. That was to begin again ... but now not only books, not the strange heavenly difficult success of showing the children the things that had been found out; but the latest newest things from the men themselves—there would be an audience and a happy man with a lit face talking about things he had just found out. Even if one did not understand there would be that. Fancy Mr. Hancock being a member and always going and not talking about it ... at lunch. He must know an enormous number of things besides the wonders of dentistry and pottery and Japanese art.
It was education ... a liberal education. It made up for only being able to say one was secretary to a dentist at a pound a week ... it sounded strange at the end of twelve years of education and five months in Germany and two teaching posts—to people who could not see how wonderful it was from the inside; and the strange meaning and rightness there was; there had been a meaning in Mr. Hancock from the beginning, a sort of meaning in her privilege of associating with fine rare people, so different to herself and yet coming one after another, like questions into her life, and staying until she understood ... somebody struggled all night with the angel ... I will not let thee go until thou bless me ... and there was some meaning—of course, meanings everywhere ... perhaps a person inside a life could always feel meanings ... or perhaps only those who had moved from one experience to another could get that curious feeling of a real self that stayed the same through thing after thing.
4
“This is the library” said Mr. Hancock leading Miriam along from the landing at the top of the wide red-carpeted staircase. It seemed a vast room—rooms leading one out of the other, lit with soft red lights and giving a general effect of redness, dull crimson velvet in a dull red glow and people, standing in groups and walking about—a quite new kind of people. Miriam glanced at her companion. He looked in place; he was in his right place; these were his people; people with gentle enlightened faces and keen enlightened faces. They were all alike in some way. If the room caught fire there would be no panic. They were gentle, shyly gentle or pompously gentle, but all the same and in agreement because they all knew everything, the real important difficult things. Some of them were discussing and disagreeing; many of the women’s faces had questions and disagreements on them and they were nearly all worn with thought; but they would disagree in a way that was not quarrelsome, because everyone in the room was sure of the importance of the things they were discussing ... they were all a part of science.... “Science is always right and the same, religion cannot touch it or be reconciled with it, theories may modify or cancel each other but the methods of science are one and unvarying. To question that fundamental truth is irreligious” ... these people were that in the type of their minds—one and unvarying; always looking out at something with gentle intelligence or keen intelligence ... this was Alma’s world ... it would be something to talk to Alma about. There was something they were not. They were not ... jolly. They could not be. They would never stop “looking.” Culture and refinement; with something about it that made them quite different to the worldly people, a touch of rawness, raw school harshness about them that was unconscious of itself and could not come to life. Their shoulders and the backs of their heads could never come to life. It gave them a kind of deadness that was quite unlike the deadness of the worldly people, not nearly so dreadful—rather funny and likable. One could imagine them all washing, very carefully, in an abstracted way still looking and thinking and always with the advancement of science on their minds; never really aware of anything behind or around them because of the wonders of science. Seeing these people changed science a little. They were almost something tremendous; but not quite.
5
“That’s old Huggins” murmured Mr. Hancock, giving Miriam’s arm a gentle nudge as a white-haired old man passed close by them with an old woman at his side, with short white hair exactly like him. “The man who invented spectrum analysis—and that’s his wife; they’re both great fishermen.” Miriam gazed. There, was the splendid thing.... In her mind blazed the coloured bars of the spectrum. In the room was the light of the beauty, the startling life these two old people shed from every part of their persons. The room blazed in the light they shed. She stood staring, moving to watch their gentle living movements. They moved as though the air through which they moved was a living medium,—as though everything were alive all round them—in a sort of hushed vitality. They were young. She felt she had never seen anyone so young. She longed to confront them just once, to stand for a moment the tide in which they lived.
“Ah Meesturra Hancock—you are a faceful votary.”
That’s a German, thought Miriam, as the flattering deep caressing gutturals rebounded dreadfully from her startled consciousness. What a determined intrusion. How did he come to know such a person? Glancing she met a pair of swiftly calculating eyes fixed full on her face. There was fuzzy black hair lifted back from an anxious, yellowish, preoccupied little face. Under the face came the high collar-band of a tightly-fitting dark claret-coloured ribbed silk bodice, fastened from the neck to the end of the pointed peak by a row of small round German buttons, closely decorated with a gilded pattern. Mr. Hancock was smiling an indulgent, deprecating smile. He made an introduction and Miriam felt her hand tightly clasped and held by a small compelling hand, while she sought for an answer to a challenge as to her interest in science. “I don’t really know anything about it” she said vaguely, strongly urged to display her knowledge of German. The eyes were removed from her face and the little lady boldly planted and gazing about her made announcements to Mr. Hancock—about the fascinating subject of the lecture and her hopes of a large and appreciative audience.
What did she want? She could not possibly fail to see that Mr. Hancock was telling her that he could see through her social insincerities. It was dreadful to find that even here there were social insincerities. She was like a busy ambassador for things that belonged somewhere else and that he was laughing at in an indulgent, deprecating way that must make her blaze with an anger that she did not show. Looking at her as her eyes and mouth made and fired their busy sentences, Miriam suddenly felt that it would be easy to deal with her, take her into a corner and talk about German things, food and love affairs and poetry and music. But she would always be breaking away to make a determined intrusion on somebody she knew. She could not really know any English person. What was she doing, bearing herself so easily in the inner circle of English science? Treating people as if she knew all about them and they were all alike. How surprised she must often be, and puzzled.
6
“That was Miss Teresa Szigmondy” said Mr. Hancock, reproducing his amused smile as they took their seats in the dark theatre.
“Is she German?” “Well ... I think, as a matter of fact, she’s part Austro-Hungarian and part—well, Hebrew.” A Jewess ... Miriam left her surroundings, pondering over a sudden little thread of memory. An eager, very bright-eyed, curiously dimpling school-girl face peering into hers, and a whispering voice—“D’you know why we don’t go down to prayers? ’Cos we’re Jews”—they had always been late; fresh faced and shiny haired and untidy and late and clever in a strange brisk way and talkative and easy and popular with the teachers.... Their guttural voices ringing out about the stairs and passages, deep and loud and stronger than any of the voices of the other girls. The Hyamson girls—they had been foreigners, like the Siggs and the de Bevers, but different ... what was the difference in a Jew? Mr. Hancock seemed to think it was a sort of disgraceful joke ... what was it? Max Sonnenheim had been a Jew, of course, the same voice. Banbury Park “full of Jews” ... the Brooms said that in patient contemptuous voices. But what was it? What did everybody mean about them?
“Is she scientific?”
“She seems to be interested in science” smiled Mr. Hancock.
“How funny of her to ask me to go to tea with her just because you told her I knew German.”
“Well, you go; if you’re interested in seeing notabilities you’ll meet all kinds of wonderful people at her house. She knows everybody. She’s the niece of a great Hungarian poet. I believe he’s to be seen there sometimes. They’re all coming in now.” Mr. Hancock named the great names of science one by one as the shyly gentle and the pompously gentle little old men ambled and marched into the well of the theatre and took their seats in a circle round the central green table.
“There’s a pretty lady” said Mr. Hancock, conversationally, just as the light was lowered. Miriam glanced across the half circle of faintly shining faces and saw an effect, a smoothly coiffured head and smooth neck and shoulders draped by a low deep circular flounce of lace rising from the gloom of a dark dress, sweep in through a side door bending and swaying—“or a pretty dress at any rate”—and sat through the first minutes of the lecture, recalling the bearing and manner of the figure, with sad fierce bitterness. Mr. Hancock admired “feminine” women ... or at any rate he was bored by her own heavy silence and driven into random speech by the sudden dip and sweep of the lace appearing in the light of the doorway. He was surprised himself by his sudden speech and half corrected it ... “or a pretty dress.” ... But anyhow he, even he, was one of those men who do not know that an effect like that was just an effect, a deliberate “charming” feminine effect. But if he did not know that, did not know that it was a trick and the whole advertising manner, the delicate, plunging fall of the feet down the steps—“I am late; look how nicely and quietly I am doing it; look at me being late and apologetic and interested”—out of place in the circumstances; then what was he doing here at all? Did he want science or would he really rather be in a drawing room with “pretty ladies” advertising effects and being “arch” in a polite, dignified, lady-like manner? How dingy and dull and unromantic and unfeminine he must find her. She sat in a lively misery, following the whirling circle of thoughts round and round, stabbed by their dull thorns, and trying to drag her pain-darkened mind to meet the claim of the platform, where, in a square of clear light, a little figure stood talking eagerly and quietly in careful slow English. Presently the voice on the platform won her—clear and with its curious, even, unaccented rat-tat-tat flowing and modulated with pure passion, the thrill of truth and revelation running alive and life-giving through every word. That, at least, she was sharing with her companion ... “development-in-thee-method-of-intaircepting-thee-light.” “Daguerre” ... a little Frenchman stopping the sunlight, breaking it up, making it paint faces in filmy black and white on a glass.... There would only be a few women like the one with the frill in an audience like this ... “women will talk shamelessly at a concert or an opera, and chatter on a mountain top in the presence of a magnificent panorama; their paganism is incurable.” Then men mustn’t stare at them and treat them as works of art. It was entirely the fault of men ... perfectly reasonable that the women who got that sort of admiration from men should assert themselves in the presence of other works of art. The thing men called the noblest work of God must be bigger than the work by a man. Men plumed themselves and talked in a clever expert way about women and never thought of their own share in the way those women went on ... unfair, unfair; men were stupid complacent idiots. But they were wonderful with their brains. The life and air and fresh breath coming up from the platform amongst the miseries and uncertainties lurking in the audience was a man ... waves of light which would rush through the film at an enormous speed and get away into space without leaving any impression were stopped by some special kind of film and went surging up and down in confinement—making strata ... supairposeetion of strata ... no Englishman could move his hands with that smoothness, making you see. “Violet subchloride of silver.” That would interest Mr. Hancock’s chemistry. She glanced at the figure sitting very still, with bent head, at her side. He was asleep. Her thoughts recoiled from the platform and bent inwards, circling on their miseries. That was the end, for him, of coming to a lecture, with her. If she had been the frilled lady, sitting forward with her forward-falling frill, patronising the lecture and “exhibiting” her interest he would not have gone to sleep.
8
When the colour photographs came, Miriam was too happy for thought. Pictures of stained glass, hard crude clear brilliant opaque flat colour, stood in miraculous squares on the screen and pieces of gardens, grass and flowers and trees shining with a shadeless blinding brilliance.
She made vague sounds. “It’s a wonderful achievement” said Mr. Hancock, smiling with grave delighted approval towards the screen. Miriam felt that he understood, as her ignorance could not do, exactly what it all meant scientifically; but there was something else in the things as they stood, blinding, there that he did not see. It was something that she had seen somewhere, often.
“They’ll never touch pictures.”
“Oh no—there’s no atmosphere; but there’s something else; they’re exactly like something else....”
Mr. Hancock laughed, a little final crushing laugh that turned away sceptical of further enlightenment.
Miriam sat silent, busily searching for something to express the effect she felt. But she could not tell him what she felt. There was something in this intense hard rich colour like something one sometimes saw when it wasn’t there, a sudden brightening and brightening of all colours till you felt something must break if they grew any brighter—or in the dark, or in one’s mind, suddenly, at any time, unearthly brilliance. He would laugh and think one a little insane; but it was the real certain thing; the one real certain happy thing. And he would not have patience to hear her try to explain; and by that he robbed her of the power of trying to explain. He was not interested in what she thought. Not interested. His own thoughts were statements, things that had been agreed upon and disputed and that people bandied about, competing with each other to put them cleverly. They were not things. It was only by pretending to be interested in these statements and taking sides about them that she could have conversation with him. He liked women who thought in these statements. They always succeeded with men. They had a reputation for wit. Did they really think and take an interest in the things they said, or was it a trick, like “clothes” and “manners”—or was it that women brought up with brothers or living with husbands got into that way of thinking and speaking. Perhaps there was something in it. Something worth cultivating; a fine talent. But it would mean hiding so much, letting so much go; all the real things. The things men never seemed to know about at all. Yet he loved beautiful things; and worried about religion and had found comfort in “Literature and Dogma” and wanted her to find comfort in it, assuming her difficulties were the same as his own; and knowing the dreadfulness of them. The brilliant unearthly pictures remained in her mind, supporting her through the trial of her consciousness of the stuffiness of her one long-worn dress. Dresses should be fragrant in the evening. The Newlands evening dress was too old fashioned. Things had changed so utterly since last year. There was no money to have it altered. But this was awful. Never again could she go out in the evening, unless alone or with the girls. That would be best, and happiest, really.
