For many days they spent their leisure wandering in the green spaces of London, restored to Miriam with the frail dream-like wonder they had held in her years of solitude, deepened to a perpetual morning brightness. She recalled, in the hushed reconciliation of the present, while they saw and thought in unison, breaking their long silences with anecdotes, re-living together all they could remember of childhood, their long exhausting, thought-transforming controversies. And as her thoughts had been, so now, in these same green places were her memories transformed.
She watched, wondering, while elderly relatives, hated and banished, standing, forgotten like past nightmares, far away from her independent London life, but still powerful in memory to strike horror into her world, came forth anew, food as she breathlessly spoke their names and described them, for endless speculation. With her efforts to make him see and know them, they grew alive in her hands, significant and attractive as the present, irrecoverable, gone, lonely and pitiful, conquered by her own triumphant existence in a different world, free from obstructions, accompanied, understood. Between the movements of conversation from figure to figure, a thread of reflection wove itself in continuous
repetition. Perhaps to all these people, life had once looked free and developing. Perhaps, if she went their way, she might yet share their fate. Never. She was mistress of her fate; there was endless time. The world was changed. They had never known freedom or the endlessness of the passing moment. Time for them had been nothing but the continuous pressure of fixed circumstances.
Distant parts of London, whither they wandered far through unseen streets, became richly familiar, opening, when suddenly they would realise that they were lost, on some scene, stamped as unforgettably as the magic scenes of holiday excursions. They fingered in long contemplation of all kinds of shop windows, his patient unmoved good-humour while she realised his comparative lack of tastes and preferences, and held forth at length on the difference between style and quality, and the products of the markets, his serene effrontery in taking refuge at last behind the quaintest little tales, satirical, but dreadfully true and illuminating, disarmed her impatience and sent her forward in laughter. He seemed to have an endless supply of these little tales, and told them well, without emphasis, but each one a little drama, perfectly shaped and staged. She collected and remembered and pondered them, the light they shed on unfamiliar aspects of life, playing comfortingly over the future. If Judges and Generals and Emperors and all sorts of people fixed and labelled in social life were really absurd, then social life, with him, might be not merely unaffrighting, but also amusing. At the same time she was affronted by his inclusion of
English society in his satirical references. There were, she was sure, hidden and active, in all ranks in England, a greater proportion of people than in any country of his acquaintance, who stood outside his criticism.
She avoided the house, returning only when the hour justified a swift retreat from the hall to her room; escape from the dimly-lit privacy of the deserted drawing-room. Not again could she suffer his nearness, until the foreigner in him, dipped every day more deeply into the well of English feeling, should be changed. When she was alone, she moved, thoughtless, along a pathway that led backwards towards a single memory. Far away in the distance, coming always nearer, was the summer morning of her infancy, a permanent standing arrested, level with the brilliance of flower-heads motionless in the sunlit air; no movement but the hovering of bees. Beyond this memory towards which she passed every day more surely, a marvellous scene unfolded. And always with the unfolding of its wide prospects, there came a beautifying breath. The surprise of her growing comeliness was tempered by a sudden curious indifference. These new looks of hers were not her own. They brought a strange publicity. She felt, turned upon her, the welcoming, approving eyes of women she had contemptuously neglected, and upon her own face the dawning reflection of their wise, so irritating smile. She recognised them, half fearfully, for they alone were the company gathered about her as she watched the opening marvel. She recognised them for lonely wanderers upon the
earth. They, these women, then were the only people who knew. Their smile was the smile of these wide vistas, wrought and shaped, held back by the pity they turned towards the blind life of men; but it was alone in its vision of the spaces opening beyond the world of daily life.
The open scene, that seemed at once without her and within, beckoned and claimed her, extending for ever, without horizons, bringing to her contemplating eye a moving expansion of sight ahead and ahead, earth and sky left behind, across flower-spread plains whose light was purer and brighter than the light of day. Here was the path of advance. But pursuing it she must be always alone; supported in the turmoil of life that drove the haunting scene away, hidden beyond the hard visible horizon, by the remembered signs and smiles of these far-off lonely women.
Between them and their second week stood a promised visit to the Brooms; offering itself each time she surveyed it, under a different guise. But when, for their last evening together, he surprised her, so little did he ever seem to plan or reflect, with stall tickets for the opera she was overwhelmed by the swift regardless pressure of events. Opera, for ever outside her means and forgotten, descending thus suddenly upon her without space for preparation of mind, would seem to be wasted. Not in such unseemly haste could she approach this crowning ornament of social life. She was speechless, too, before the revelation of his
private ponderings. She knew he was indifferent, even to the theatre, and that he could not afford this tremendous outlay. His recklessness was selfless; a great planning for her utmost recreation. In her satisfaction he was to be content. Touched to the heart she tried to express her sense of all these things, much hampered by the dismayed anticipation of failure, on the great evening, to produce any satisfying response. She knew she would dislike opera; fat people, with huge voices, screaming against an orchestra, in the pretence of expressing emotions they had never felt. But he assured her that opera was very beautiful, Faust perhaps the most beautiful and charming of all, and drew her attention to the massed voices. To this idea she clung, in the interval, for enlightenment.
But after spending all her available funds on an evening blouse and borrowing a cloak from Jan she found herself at the large theatre impressed only by the collected mass of the audience. The sense of being small and alone, accentuated by the presence of little Mr. Shatov, neatly in evening dress at her side, persisted, growing, until the curtain rose. So long as they had wandered about London and sat together in small restaurants, the world had seemed grouped about them, the vast ignored spectator of a strange romance. But in this huge enclosure, their small, unnoticed, unquestioned presences seemed challenged to account for themselves. All these unmoved people, making the shut-in air cold with their unconcern, even when they were hushed with the strange appealing music
of the overture, were moving with purpose and direction because of their immense unconsciousness. Where were they going? What was it all about? What, she asked herself, with a crowning pang of desolation, as the curtain went relentlessly up, were he and she to be or do in this world? What would they become, committed, identified, two small desolate, helpless figures, with the crowding mass of unconscious life?
“I find something of grandeur in the sober dignity of this apartment. It is medi?val Germany at its best.”
“It is very dark.”
“Wait, wait. You shall see life and sunshine, all in the most beautiful music.”
The sombre scene offered the consolation, suddenly insufficient, that she had found in the past in sliding idly into novels, the restful sense of vicarious life. She had heard of a wonderful philosophy in Faust, and wondered at Mr. Shatov’s claim for its charm. But there was, she felt, no space, on the stage, for philosophy. The scene would change, there was “charm” and sunshine and music ahead. This scene itself was changing as she watched. The old man talking to himself was less full of meaning than the wonderful German interior, the pointed stonework and high, stained windows, the carved chairs and rich old manuscripts. Even as he talked, the light from the night-sky, pouring down outside on a beautiful old German town, was coming in. And presently there would be daylight scenes. The real meaning of it all was scenes, each with their separate, rich, silent significance. The
scenes were the story, the translation of the people the actual picture of them as they were by themselves behind all the pother...... She set herself, drifting in solitude away from the complications of the present, to watch Germany. The arrival of Mephistopheles was an annoying distraction suggesting pantomine. His part in the drama was obscured by Mr. Shatov’s whispered eulogies of Chaliapin, “the only true Mephistopheles in Europe.” It certainly seemed right that the devil should have “a most profound bass voice.” The chanting of angels in Paradise, she suggested, could only be imagined in high clear soprano, whereat he maintained that women’s voices unsupported by the voices of men were not worth imagining at all.
“Pippa passes. It is a matter of opinion.”
“It is a matter of fact. These voices are without depth of foundation. What is this Pippa?”
“And yet you think that women can rise higher, and fall lower, than men.”
She walked home amidst the procession of scenes, grouped and blending all about her, free of their bondage to any thread of story, bathed in music, beginning their life in her as memory, set up for ever amongst her store of realities. It had been a wonderful evening, opera was wonderful. But the whole effect was threatened, as it stood so lovely all about her in the night air, by his insistence upon a personal interpretation, surprising her in the midst of the garden scene and renewed now as they walked, by little attempts to accentuate the
relationship of their linked arms. Once more she held off the threatened obliteration. But the scenes had retreated, far away beyond the darkness and light of the visible street. With sudden compunction she felt that it was she who had driven them away, driven away the wonders that were after all his gift. If she had softened towards him, they would have gone, just the same.... It was too soon to let them work as an influence.
Absurd, too, to try to invent life which did not come of itself. He had desisted and was away, fallen into his thoughtful forgetful singing, brumming out shreds of melody that brought single scenes vividly penetrating the darkness. She called him back with a busy repentance, carelessly selecting from her thronging impressions a remark that instantly seemed meaningless.
“Yes” he said heartily, “there is, absolutely, something echt, kern-gesund about these old-German things.”
That was it. It had all meant, really, the same for him; and he knew what it was that made the charm; admitting it, in spite of his strange deep dislike of the Germans. Kern-Gesundheit was not a sufficient explanation. But the certainty of his having been within the charm made him real, a related part of the pageant of life, his personal engaging small attribute her own undivided share. On the doorstep, side by side with his renewed silent appeal, she turned and met, standing free, his gentle tremulous salutation.
For a moment the dark silent house blazed into light before her. She moved forward, as he opened
the door, as into a brightness of light where she should stand visible to them both, in a simplicity of golden womanhood, no longer herself, but his Marguerite, yet so differently fated, so differently identified with him in his new simplicity, going forward together, his thoughts and visions as simple as her own in the life now just begun, from which their past dropped away grey and cold, the irrelevant experience of strangers.
But the hall was dark and the open dining-room door showed blank darkness. She led the way in; she could not yet part from him and lose the strange radiance surrounding herself. They ought to go forward now, together, from this moment, shedding a radiance. To part was to break and mar, forever, some essential irrecoverable glory. They sat side by side on the sofa by the window. The radiance in which she sat crowned, a figure visible to herself, recognisable, humble and proud and simple, back in its Christian origin, a single weak small figure, transfixed with light, dreadfully trusted with the searing, brightly gleaming dower of Christian womanhood, was surrounded by a darkness unpenetrated by the faint radiance the high street lamps must be sending through the thick lace curtains. This she thought is what people mean by the golden dream; but it is not a dream. No one who has been inside it can ever be the same again or quite get out. The world it shows is the biggest world there is. It is outer space where God is and Christ waits. “I am very happy, do you feel happy?” The small far-off man’s voice sounded out, lost in the impenetrable darkness. Yet it was through him,
through some essential quality in him that she had reached this haven and starting place, he who had brought this smiting descent of certainties which were to carry her on her voyage into the unknown darkness, and since he could not see her smile, she must speak.
“I think so,” she said gently. She must, she suddenly realised, never tell him more than that. His happiness was, she now recognised, hearing his voice, different to hers. To admit and acclaim her own would be the betrayal of a secret trust. If she could dare to lay her hand upon him, he might know. But they were too separate. And if he were to touch her now, they would again be separated for longer than before, for always. “Good-night,” she said, brushing his sleeve with the tips of her fingers, “dear, funny little man.”
He followed her closely but she was soon away up the familiar stairs in the darkness, in her small close room, and trying to chide herself for her inadequate response, while within the stifling air the breath of sunlit open spaces moved about her.
But in the morning when the way to King’s Cross Station was an avenue of sunlight, under a blue sky triumphant with the pealing of church bells, his sole conversation was an attempt to induce her to reproduce the epithet. The small scrap of friendliness had made him happy! No one, it seemed, had ever so addressed him. His delight was all her own. She was overcome by the revelation of her power to bless without effort. The afternoon’s visit now seemed a welcome interval in the too swift succession
of discoveries. In the cool noisy shelter of the station, Sunday holiday-makers were all about them. He was still charmingly preening himself, set off by the small busy crowd, his eye wandering with its familiar look, a childlike contemplation of the English spectacle. To Miriam’s unwilling glance it seemed for observation a fruitless field; nothing exhibited there could challenge speculation.
On each face, so na?vely engrossed with immediate arranged circumstance, character, opinion, social conditions, all that might be expected under the small tests of small circumstances, was plainly written in monotonous reiteration. Moving and going, they could go, with all their busy eagerness, no further than themselves. At their destinations other similar selves awaited them, to meet and send them back, unchanged; an endless circling. Over their unchanging, unquestioned world, no mystery brooded with black or golden wings. They would circle unsurprised until for each one came the surprise of death. It was all they had. They were dreadful to contemplate because they suggested only death, unpondered death. Her eye rested for relief upon a barefooted newspaper boy running freely about with his cry, darting head down towards a shouted challenge.
“Before you go” Mr. Shatov was saying. She turned towards his suddenly changed voice, saw his pale face, grave, and working with the determination to difficult speech; saw him, while she stood listening to the few tense phrases in painful admiration of his courage, horribly transformed, by the images he evoked far away, immovable in the sunshine
of his earlier days. The very trembling of his voice had attested the agonising power of his communication. Yet behind it all, with what a calmness of his inner mind, had he told her, now, only now, when they were set in the bright amber of so many days, that he had been lost to her, forever, long ago in his independent past. The train was drawing in. She turned away speechless.
“Miriam, Miriam” he pleaded in hurried shaken tones close at her side, “remember, I did not know that you would come.”
“Well, I must go,” she said briskly, the words sounding out to her like ghostly hammer-blows upon empty space. Never again should her voice sound. The movement of getting into the train brought a nerve-crisping relief. She had taken the first step into the featureless darkness where, alone, she was to wait, in a merciful silence, forever.
“I shall meet you this evening,” said his raised voice from the platform. He stood with bowed head, his eyes gravely on her unconsidering gaze, until the train moved out. She set her teeth against the slow movement of the wheels, grinding it seemed, smoke-befouled, deliberate, with awful circling relentlessness over her prostrate body, clenched together for the pang, too numb to feel it if only it would come, but left untouched.
The crushing of full realisation, piling up behind her numbness, must pass over her. There was not much time. The train was carrying her steadily onward, and towards conversation with the unconscious Brooms. She tried to relax to its movement,
to hold back from the entanglements of thought and regard the day as an interval outside the hurrying procession of her life. A way opened narrowly ahead, attainable by one rending effort, into a silence, within which the grey light filtering th............