Chapter I (2)

"Well, it's _true_, what I'm trying to tell you. It's one of the answers to the question about women and art. It's all there. It doesn't show, like men's art. There's no drama or publicity. _There_; d'you see? It's hard and exacting; needing 'the maximum of detachment and control.' And people have to learn, or be taught, to see it."

"Y...es. Is it conscious?"

"Absolutely. And there you are again. Artists, well, and _literary_ people, say they have to get away from everything at intervals. They associate with queer people, and some of them are dissipated. They can only rest, stop being artists, by getting _away_. That is why so many women get nervy and break down. The only way they can rest, is by being nothing to nobody, leaving off for a while giving out any atmosphere."

"Stop breathing."

"Yes. But if you laugh at that, you must laugh at artists, _and_ literary people."

"I will. I _do_."

"Yes; but in general. You must see the identity of the two things for good or for bad. If people reverence men's art and feel their sacrifices are worth while, to _themselves_, as well as to other people, they must not just _pity_ the art of women. It doesn't matter to women. But it's so jolly bad for men, to go about feeling lonely and superior. Men, and the women who imitate them, bleat about women 'finding their truest fulfilment in _self-sacrifice_.' In speaking of male art it is called _self-realisation_. That's men all over. They get an illuminating theory--man must die, to live--and apply it only to themselves. If a theory is true, you may be sure it applies in a most thorough-going way to women. They don't stop dead at self-sacrifice. They reap ... freedom. Self-realisation. Emancipation. Lots of women hold back. Just as men do--from exacting careers. _I_ do. _I_ don't want to exercise the feminine art."

"It's true you don't compete or exploit yourself, Miriam."

"Some women want to be men. And the contrary, men wanting to be women, is almost unknown. This is supposed to be evidence of the superiority of the masculine state. It isn't. Women only want to be men before they begin their careers. It's a longing for exemptions. Young women envy men, as young men, faced with the hard work of life, envy dogs."

"Harsh Miriam."

"It's true. At any rate it's deserved, after all men have said. And I believe it's _true_."

"Pugilistic Miriam.... Your atmospheric idea is quite illuminating. I think there's some truth in it; and I'd be with you altogether but for one ... damning ... yes, I think absolutely damning, _fact_."

"Well?"

"The men women will marry. The men quite fine, intelligent women marry; and _idolise_, my dear Miriam."

"Many artists have to use any material that comes to hand. The treatment is the thing."

"Treatment that mistakes putty for marble, my dear Miriam----"

"And you don't see that you are proving my point. Women _see_ things when they are not there. That's creativeness. What is meant by women 'making' men."

"They don't. They'll make idols of nothing at all; and go on burning incense--all their lives."

"I don't believe women are _ever_ deceived about their husbands. But they don't give up hope. And there's something in everybody. That's what women see."

"Nonsense, Miriam. Girls, with quite good brains and abilities will marry anything; accept its views and quote them."

"Yes; just as they will show off a child's tricks. Views and opinions are masculine things. Women are indifferent to them, really. Any set will do. I know the way a woman's opinions and interests change with her different husbands, if she marries more than once, is supposed to prove the vacuity of her mind. Half the satirists of women have made their reputation on that idea. It isn't so. It is that women can hold all opinions at once, or any, or none. It's because they see the relations of things which don't change, more than things which are always changing, and mostly the importance to men of the things men believe. But behind it all their own lives are untouched."

"Behind.... What _is_ there behind, Miriam?"

"Life."

"What do they do with it?"

"Live."

"Mysterious, Miriam.... The business of women; the career; that makes you all rivals, is to find fathers. Your material is children."

"Then look here, if you think _that_, there's a perfect instance. If women's material is people, their famous 'curiosity' is the curiosity of the artist. Men call it 'incurable' in women. Men's curiosity, about things, science and so forth, is called divine. There you are. My _word_."

"_I_ don't, Miriam."

"Shaw knows how wildly interested women are in psychology. That's funny.... But about children. If only you could realise how incidental all that is."

"Incidental to what?"

"To the _life_ of the individual."

"Try it, Miriam. Marry your Jew. You know Jew and English makes a good mix."

"You see I never knew he was a Jew. It did not come up until a possible future came in view. I _couldn't_ have Jewish children."

"Incidents. Mere incidents."

"No; the wrong material. I, being myself, couldn't do anything with it; couldn't be anything in relationship to it."

"You'd _be_, through seeing its possibilities and making an atmosphere."

"I've told you I'm _not_ one of those stupendous women."

"What _are_ you?"

"Well, now here's something you will like. If I were to marry a Jew, I should feel that all my male relatives would have the right to _beat_ me."

"That's strange.... And, I think, great nonsense, Miriam."

"And I'm not anti-semite. I think Jews are better Christians than we are. We have things to learn from them. But not by marrying them, until they've learnt things from us. Women, particularly, can't marry Jews. Men can marry Jewesses, if they like."

"Marriage is a more important affair for women than for men. Just so."

"I didn't say so."

"You _did_, Miriam, and it's quite true."

"It appears to be so because, as I've been trying to show you, men don't know where they are."

"Your man'll know, Miriam. You ought to marry and have children. You'd have good children. Good shapes and good brains."

"The mere sight of a child, moving unconsciously, its little shoulders and busy intentions, makes me catch my breath."

"Marry your Jew, Miriam. Well--perhaps no; don't marry your Jew."

"The other day we were walking somewhere. I was dead-tired. He knew it and kept on suggesting a hansom. Suddenly there was a woman, lugging a heavy perambulator up some steps. He stood still, shouting to _me_ to help her."

"What did you do?"

"I blazed his own words back at him. I daresay I stamped my foot. Meanwhile the woman, who was very burly, had got the perambulator up. We walked on and presently he said in a quiet intensely interested voice '_Why_ did you not help this woman?'"

"What did you say?"

"I began to talk about something else."

"Diplomatic Miriam."

"Not at all. It's _useless_ to talk to _instincts_. I know; because I have tried. Poor little man. I am afraid, now that I am not going to marry him, of hurting and tiring him. I talked one night. We had been agreeing about things, and I went on and on, it was in the drawing-room in the dark, after a theatre, talking almost to myself, very interested, forgetting that he was there. Presently a voice said, trembling with fatigue, 'Believe me, Miriam, I am profoundly interested. Will you perhaps put all this down for me on paper?' Yes. Wasn't it funny and _appalling_. It was three o'clock. Since then I have been afraid. Besides, he will marry a Jewess. If I were not sure of that I could not contemplate his loneliness. It's heartbreaking. When I go to see friends in the evening, he waits outside."

"I _say_. Poor _chap_. That's quite touching. You'll marry him yet, Miriam."

"There are ways in which I like him and am in touch with him as I never could be with an Englishman. Things he understands. And his absolute sweetness. Absence of malice and enmity. It's so strange too, with all his ideas about women, the things he will do. Little things like cleaning my shoes. But look here; an important thing. Having children is just shelving the problem, leaving it for the next generation to solve."

That stood out as the end of the conversation; bringing a sudden bright light. The idea that there was something essential, for everybody, that could not be shelved. Something had interrupted. It could never be repeated. But surely he must have agreed, if there had been time to bring it home to him. Then it might have been possible to get him to admit uniqueness ... individuality. He would. But would say it was negligible. Then the big world he thinks of, since it consists of individuals, is also negligible....

_Something_ had been at work in the conversation, making it all so easy to recover. Vanity? The relief of tackling the big man? Not altogether. Because there had been moments of thinking of death. Glad death if the truth could _once_ be stated. Disinterested rejoicing in the fact that a man who talked to so many people was hearing _something_ about the world of women. And if anyone had been there to express it better, the relief would have been there, just the same, without jealousy. But what an unconscious compliment to men, to feel that it mattered whether or no they understood anything about the world of women....

The remaining days of the visit had glowed with the sense of the beginning of a new relationship with the Wilsons. The enchantment that surrounded her each time she went to see them and always as the last hours went by, grew oppressive with the reminder of its impermanence, shone, at last, wide over the future. The end of a visit would never again bring the certainty of being finally committed to an overwhelming combination of poverties, cut off, by an all-round ineligibility, from the sun-bathed seaward garden, the joyful brilliant seaside light pouring through the various bright interiors of the perfect little house; the inexpressible _charm_, always renewed, and remaining, however deeply she felt at variance with the Wilson reading of life, the topmost radiance of her social year; ignored and forgotten nearly all the time, but shining out whenever she chanced to look round at the resources of her outside life, a bright enduring pinnacle, whose removal would level the landscape to a rolling plain, its modest hillocks, easy to climb, robbed of their light, the bright reflection that came, she half-angrily admitted, from this central height.

But there had been a difference in the return to London after that visit, that had filled her with misgiving. Usually upon the afterpain of the wrench of departure, the touch of her own returning life had come like a balm. That time, she had seemed, as the train steamed off, to be going for the first time, not away from, but towards all she had left behind. There had been a strange exciting sense of travelling, as everyone seemed to travel, preoccupied, missing the adventure of the journey, merely suffering it as an unavoidable time-consuming movement from one place to another. She, like all these others, had a place and a meaning in the outside world. She could have talked, if opportunity had offered, effortlessly, from the surface of her mind, borrowing emphasis and an appearance of availability and interest, from a secure unshared possession. She had suddenly known that it was from this basis of preoccupation with secure unshared possessions that the easy shapely conversations of the world were made. But also that those who made them were committed, by their preoccupations, to a surrounding deadness. Liveliness of mind checked the expressiveness of surroundings. The gritty interior of the carriage had remained intolerable throughout the journey. The passing landscape had never come to life.

But the menace of a future invested in unpredictable activities in a cause that seemed, now that she understood it, to have been won invisibly since the beginning of the world, was lost almost at once in the currents of her London life. Things had happened that had sharply restored her normal feeling of irreconcilableness; of being altogether differently fated, and to return, if ever they should wish it, only at the bidding of the inexpressible charm. There had been things moving all about her with an utterly reassuring independent reality. Mr. Leyton's engagement ... bringing to light as she lived it through chapter by chapter, sitting at work in the busy highway of the Wimpole Street house, a world she had forgotten, and that rose now before her in serene difficult perfection; a full denial of Mr. Wilson's belief in the death of family life. In the midst of her effort to launch herself into a definite point of view, it had made her swerve away again towards the beliefs of the old world. Meeting them afresh after years of oblivion, she had found them unassailably new. The new lives inheriting them brought in the fresh tones, the thoughts and movement of modern life, and left the old symphony recreated and unchanged.

The Tansley Street world had been full and bright all that summer with the return of whole parties of Canadians as old friends. With their untiring sociability, their easy inclusion of the abruptly appearing unintroduced foreigners and provincials, they had made the world look like one great family party.

They had influenced even Michael ... steeping him in sunlit gaiety. By breaking up the strain of unrelieved association they had made him seem charming again. Their immense respect for him turned him, in their presence, once more into a proud uncriticised possession.

Rambles round the squares with him, snatched late at night, had been easy to fill with hilarious discussions of the many incidents; serious exhausting talk held in check by the near presence of unquestioning people, and the promise of the lively morrow. Yet every evening, when they had her set down and surrounded at the piano, there came the sense of division. They cared only for music that interpreted their point of view.

Captain Gradoff ... large flat lonely face, pock-marked, eyes looking at nothing, with an expression of fear. Improper, naked old grizzly head, suggesting other displayed helpless heads, above his stout neat sociable Russian skipper's jacket ... praying in his room at the top of his voice, with howls and groans. Suddenly teaching us all to make a long loud syren-shriek with half a Spanish nutshell. He had an invention for the Admiralty ... lonely and frightened, in a ghostly world; with an invention to save the lives of ships.

Engström and Sigerson!

Engström's huge frame and bulky hard red face, shining with simplicity below his great serene intellectual brow and up-shooting hair. His first evening at Mrs. Bailey's right hand, saying gravely out into the silence of the crowded dinner table, "there is in Pareece very much automobiles, and good wash. In London not. I send much manchettes, and all the bords are cassed." Devout reproachfulness in his voice; and his brow pure, motherly serenity. Sweden in the room amongst all the others. Teased, like everyone else, with petty annoyances. But with immense strength to throw everything off. Everyone waiting in the peaceful silence that surrounded the immense gently booming voice; electing him president as he sat burying his jests with downcast eyes that left the mask of his bluntly carven face yielded up to friendship. Waves of strength and kindliness coming from him, bringing exhilaration. Making even the Canadians seem pale and small and powerless. At the mercy of life. And then the harsh kind blaze of his brown eyes again. More unhesitating phrases. He had brought strength and happiness into the house. A rough, clump-worded Swedish song, rawly affronting the English air, words of his separate country, the only words for his deepest meanings, making barriers ... till he leapt, he was so _light_ in his strength, on to a chair to bring out the top note, and the barriers fell.... He pealed his notes in farcical agony towards the ceiling. In that moment he was kneeling, bowed before the coldest, looking through to the hidden sunlight in everybody.... Conducting an imaginary orchestra from behind the piano. Sind the Trommels in Ordna? Everybody had understood, and loved each word he spoke.

"Wo ist the Veoleena Sigerson? I shall bring." Springing from his place near the door, lightly in and out amongst the seated forms, leaping obstacles all over the room on his way back to the open door, struggling noiselessly with all his strength, strong legs sliding under him as he pulled at the handle to open the open door. He and Sigerson had stayed on after the spring visitors. Evenings, voyaging alone with the two of them into strange new music. He had forgotten that he had said, I play nor sing not payshionate musics in bystanding of Miss--little--Hendershon. And the German theatre ... a shamed moving forward into suspicion, even of Irving, in the way they all played, working equally, together ... all taking care of the play ... play and acting, rich with life.

Sigerson was jealous. He wanted all the bright sunlight to himself and tried to hold it with his cold scornful brains. Waspy Schopenhauerism. They went to _Peckham_. The little weepy dabby assistant of the Peckham landlady, her speech ready-made quotations in the worst London English. Impure vowels, slobbery consonants. She reflected his sunlight like a dead moon. There was a large old garden. His first English garden in summer. He had loved it with all the power of the Swedish landscape in him turned on to its romantic strangeness, and identified the dabby girl with it. She fainted when he went away. A despair like death. He had come faithfully back and married her. _What_ could she, forever Peckham, seeing nothing, distorting everything by her speech, make of Stockholm?

And all the time the Wimpole Street days had glowed more and more with the forgotten story. Thanks to the scraps of detail in Mr. Leyton's confidences she had lived in the family of girls, centred round their widowed mother in the large old suburban house, garden girt, and bordering on countrified open spaces. She imagined it always sunlit, and knew that it rang all the morning with the echoes of work and laughter, and the sharp-tongued ironic commentary of a family of Harrietts freed from the shadows that had surrounded Harriett's young gaiety, by the presence of an income, small but secure. The bustle of shared work, all exquisitely done in the exacting, rewarding old-fashioned way, nothing bought that could be home-made, filled each morning with an engrossing life of its own, lit, by a surrounding endless glory, and left the house a prepared gleaming orderliness, and the girls free to retreat to a little room where a sewing machine was enthroned amidst a licensed disorder of fashion papers, with coloured plates, and things in process of making according to the newest mode, from oddments carefully selected at the west-end sales. When they were there, during the times of busy work following on consultations and decisions, gossip broke forth; and thrilling the tones of their gossiping voices, and shining all about them, obliterating the walls of the room and the sense of the day and the hour, was a bright eternity of recurring occasions, when the sum of their household labours blossomed unto fulfilment ... at-home days; calls; winter dances; huge picnic parties in the summer, to which they went, riding capably, in their clever home-made cycling costumes on brilliantly gleaming bicycles. And all the year round, shed over each revolving week, the glamour of Sunday ... the perpetual rising up, amongst the varying seasons and days, of a single unvarying shape, standing, in the morning quiet, chill and accusing between them and the warm, far-off everyday life. The relief of the descent into the distractions of dressing for church and bustling off in good time; the momentary return of the challenging shape with the sight of the old grey ivy-grown church; escape from it again into the refuge of the porch amongst the instreaming neighbours, and the final fading of its outlines into the colour and sound of the morning service, church shapes in stone and wood and metal, secure round about their weakness, holding them safe. The sermon, though they suffered it uncritically, could not, preached by an intelligent or stupid man, but secure, soft-living and married, revive the morning strength of the challenging shape, and as it sounded on towards its end, the grey of another Sunday morning had brought in sight the rest of the day, when, at the worst, if nobody came, there was the evening service, the escape in its midst into a state of bliss that stilled everything, and went on forever, making the coming week, even if the most glorious things were going to happen, wonderful only because it was so amazing to be alive at all ... That was too much ... these girls did not consciously feel like that; perhaps partly because they had a brother, were the kind of girls who would have at least one brother, choking things back by obliviousness, but breezy and useful in many ways. It's good to have brothers; but there is something they kill, if they are in the majority, absolutely, so that one girl with many brothers rarely becomes a woman, but can sometimes be a nice understanding jolly sort of man. Brothers without sisters are worse off than sisters without brothers; unless they are very gifted ... in which case they are really, as people say of the poets, more than three parts women. But Sundays, for all girls, were in a way the same. And though these girls did not reason and were densely unconscious of the challenge embodied in their religion, and enjoyed being snobbish without knowing it, or knowing the meaning and good of snobbishness, their unconsciousness was harmless, and the huge Sunday things they lived in, held and steered their lives, making, in England, in them and in all of their kind, a world that the clever people who laughed at them had never been inside.... _They_ did not laugh, except the busy enviable blissful laughter permitted by God, from the midst of their lives, about nothing at all. They thought liberals vulgar--mostly chapel people; and socialists mad. But in the midst of their conservatism was something that could never die, and that these other people did not seem to possess....

And the best, most Charlotte Yonge part of the story, was the arrival of Mr. Leyton and his cousin, whilst these girls were still at home amongst their Sundays; and the opening out, for two of them at once, of a future; with the past behind it undivided.

And they had suddenly asked her to their picnic. And she had been back, for the whole of that summer's afternoon, in the world of women; and the forgotten things, that had first driven her away from it, had emerged again, no longer mysterious, and with more of meaning in them, so that she had been able to achieve an appearance of conformity, and had felt that they regarded her not with the adoration or half-pitying dislike she had had from women in the past, but as a woman, though only as a weird sort of female who needed teaching. They had no kind of fear of her; not because they were massed there in strength. Any one of them, singly, would, she had felt, have been equal to her in any sort of circumstances; her superior; a rather impatient but absolutely loyal and chivalrous guide in the lonely exclusive feminine life.

Surprised by the unanticipated joy of a summer holiday in miniature, their gift, wrested by their energies from the midst of the sweltering London July, and with their world and its ways pulling at her memory, and the door of their good fellowship wide open before her, for an hour she had let go and gone in and joined them, holding herself teachable, keeping in check, while she contemplated the transformation of Mr. Leyton under the fire of their chaff, her impulse to break into the ceaseless jesting with some shape of conversation. And she had felt that they regarded her as a postulant, a soul to be snatched from outer darkness, a candidate as ready to graduate as they were, to grant a degree. And the breaking of the group had left her free to watch the way, without any gap of silence or difficulty of transition, they had set the men to work on the clearing up and stowing away of the paraphernalia of the feast; training them all the while according to the Englishwoman's pattern, an excellent pattern, she could not fail to see, imagining these young males as they would be, undisciplined by this influence, and comparing them with the many unshaped young men she had observed on their passage through the Tansley Street house.

But all the time she had been half aware that she was only watching a picture, a charmed familiar scene, as significant and as unreal as the set figure of a dance. Giving herself to its discipline she would reap experience and knowledge, confirming truths; but only truths with which she was already familiar, leading down to a lonely silence, where everything still remained unanswered, and the dancers their unchanged unexpressed selves. Individual converse with these young men on the terms these women had trained them to accept, was impossible to contemplate. Every word would be spoken in a dark void.

Breaking in, as the little feast ended in a storm of flying buns and eggshells, a little scene that she had forgotten completely at the moment of its occurrence had risen sharply clear in her mind.... A family party of quiet soberly dressed Scotch Canadian people from the far-west, seated together at the end of the Tansley Street dinner-table, coming out, on the eve of their departure, from the enclosure of their small, subduedly conversing group, to respond, in level friendly tones, to some bold person's enquiries as to the success of their visit. The sudden belated intimacy, ripened in silence, had seemed very good, compressed into a single occasion that would leave the impression of these homely people single and strong, so well worth losing that their loss would be a permanent acquisition. Suddenly from their midst, the voice of the youngest daughter, a pale, bitter-faced girl with a long thin pigtail of sandy hair, had rung out down the table.

"London's _fine_. But the folks don't all match it. The girls don't. They're just queer. I reckon there's two things they don't know. How to wear their waists, and how to go around with the boys. When I hear an English girl talking to boys, I just have to think she's funny in the head. If Canadian girls were stiff like that, they'd have the dullest time on earth." Her expressionless pale blue eyes had fixed no one, and she had concluded her speech with a little fling that had settled her back in her chair, unconcerned.

And in the interval before the ride home, when the men had been driven off, and she was alone with the sisters and saw them relax and yawn, speak in easy casual tones and apostrophise small things, with great gusto, in well-chosen forcible terms, while the men were no doubt also enjoying the same blessed relief, she had felt that the Canadian girl was more right than she knew. Between men and girls, throughout English life there was no exchange, save in the ways of love. Except for those moments when they stood, to each other, for all the world, they never met. And the sense of these sacred moments embarrassed, even while it shaped and beautified, every occasion. Women were its guardians and hostesses. Their guardianship made them hostesses for life. Upon the faces of these girls as they sat about unmasked and pathetically individual, it shed its radiance and, already, its heavy shadows.

Yet American girls with their easy regardlessness seemed lacking in depth of feminine consciousness, too much turned towards the surfaces of life, and the men with their awakened understanding and quick serviceableness, by so much the less men. In any case there was not the recognisable difference in personality that was so striking in England, and that seemed in some way, even at one's moments of greatest irritation with the women, to bring all the men under a reproach. Many young American men had faces moulded on the lines of responsible middle-aged German housewives; while some of the quite young girls looked out at life with the sharp shrewd repudiation of cynical elderly bachelors. If it were the building up of a civilisation that had brought the sexes together, for generations, in relations that came in English society only momentarily, at a house-warming or a picnic, would the results remain? Or would there be, in America, later on, a beginning of the English differences, the women moving, more and more heavily veiled and burdened, towards the heart of life and the men getting further and further away from the living centre. Ought men and women to modify each other, each standing as it were, halfway between the centre and the surface, each with a view across the other's territory? Or should they accentuate their natural differences? _Were_ the differences natural?

As they rode home through the twilit lanes, the insoluble problem, sounding for her in every shouted remark, had been continually soothed away by the dewy, sweet-scented, softly streaming air. The slurring of their tyres in unison along the smooth roadway, the little chorus of bells as they approached a turning, made them all one entered for good into the heritage of the accomplished day. Nothing could touch the vision that rose and the confessions that were made within its silence. Within each one of the indistinguishable forms the sense of the day was clearing with each moment; its incidents blending and shaping, an irrevocable piece of decisive life; but behind and around and through it all was summer, smiling. Before each pair of eyes, cleared of heat and dust by the balm of the evening air, the picture of the English summer, in blue and gold and green, stood clear within the outspread invisible distances. _That_ was the harvest, the thing that drew people to the labour of organising picnics, that remained afterwards forever; that would remain for the lovers after their love was forgotten; that linked all the members of the party in a fellowship stronger than their differences.

But when they reached the suburbs, the problem was there again in might, incessant as the houses looming by on either side, driven tyrannously home by the easy flight ahead, as Highgate sloped to London, of the two whose machines were fitted with "free" wheels.... Only a mind turned altogether towards outside things could invent....

And then _London_ came, opening suddenly before me as I rode out alone from under a dark archway into the noise and glare of a gaslit Saturday night.

Trouble fell away like a cast garment as I swung forward, steering with thoughtless ease, into the southernmost of the four converging streets.

This was the true harvest of the summer's day; the transfiguration of these northern streets. They were not London proper; but tonight the spirit of London came to meet her on the verge. Nothing in life could be sweeter than this welcoming--a cup held brimming to her lips, and inexhaustible. What lover did she want? No one in the world could oust this mighty lover, always receiving her back without words, engulfing and leaving her untouched, liberated and expanding to the whole range of her being. In the mile or so ahead, there was endless time. She would travel further than the longest journey, swifter than the most rapid flight, down and down into an oblivion deeper than sleep; and drop off at the centre, on to the deserted grey pavements, with the high quiet houses standing all about her in air sweetened by the evening breath of the trees, stealing down the street from either end; the sound of her footsteps awakening her again to the single fact of her incredible presence within the vast surrounding presence. Then, for another unforgettable night of return, she would break into the shuttered house and gain her room and lie, till she suddenly slept, tingling to the spread of London all about her, herself one with it, feeling her life flow outwards, north, south, east and west, to all its margins.

And it had been so. Nothing had intervened, but, for a moment, the question, coming as the wild flowers fell from her unclasped belt, bringing back the long-forgotten day--what of those others, lost, for life, in perpetual association?

The long lane of Bond Street had come to an end, bringing her out into the grey-brown spaciousness of Piccadilly, lit sparsely by infrequent globes of gold. The darkness cast by the massive brown buildings thrilled heavily about the shrouded oblivion of west-end life. She passed elderly men, black coated and mufflered over their evening dress, wrapped in their world, stamped with its stamp, still circulating, like the well preserved coins of a past reign--thinking their sets of thoughts, going home to the small encirclement of clubs and chambers, a little aware of the wide night and the time of year told on the air as they had passed along where the Green Park slept on the far side of the road. This was their moment, between today and tomorrow, of freedom to move amongst the crowding presences gathered through so many years within themselves; slowly, mannishly; old-mannishly, perpetually pulled up, daunted, taking refuge in their sets of thoughts; not going far, never returning to renew a sally, for the way home was short, and their gait showed them going, almost marching, to the summons of their various destinations. Some of their faces betrayed as they went by, unconscious of observation, the preoccupation that closed in on all their solitude; a look of counting, but with liberal evening hand, the days that remained for them to go their rounds. One came prowling with slow, gentlemanly stroll, half-halting to stare at her, dim-eyed, from his mufflings. Here and there a woman, strayed away from the searching light and the rivalry of the Circus, hovered in the shadows. Presently, across the way, the Park moved by, brimming through its railings a midnight freshness into the dry sophisticated air. Through this strange mingling, hansoms from the theatres beyond the Circus, swinging, gold-lamped, one by one, along the centre of the deserted roadway, drew bright threads of younger west-end life, meshed and tangled, men and women from social throngs, for whom no solitude waited.

Piccadilly Circus was almost upon her, the need for thoughtless hurrying across its open spaces; the awakening on the far side with the west-end dropping away behind; and the tide of her own neighbourhood setting towards her down Shaftesbury Avenue; bringing with it the present movement of her London life.... Why hadn't she a club down here; a neutral territory where she could finish her thoughts undisturbed?

Defying the surrounding influences, she glanced back at the months following the picnic ... the shifting of the love-story into the midst of the Wimpole Street household, making her room like a little theatre where at any moment the curtain might go up on a fresh scene ... knowing them all so well, being behind the scenes as well as before them, she had watched with a really cruel indifference, and let the light of the new theories play on all she saw. For unconscious unquestioning people were certainly ruled by _something_. The acting of the play had been all carefully according to the love-stories of the sentimental books, would always be, for good kind people brought up on the old traditions. And a predictable future was there, another home life carrying the traditions forward. All the old family sayings applied. Many of them were quoted with a rueful recognition. But they were all proud of playing these recognisable parts. All of their faces had confessed, as they had come, one by one, betweenwhiles, to talk freely to her alone, their belief in the story that had lain, hidden and forgotten, in the depths of her heart; making her affection for them blaze up afresh from the roots of her being. She had _seen_ the new theories disproved. Not that there was not some faint large outline of truth in them, but that it was so large and loose that it did not fit individuals. It did not correspond to any individual experience because it was obliged to ignore the underlying things of individuality.... Blair Leighton ... Marcus Stone ... Watts; Mendelssohn, corresponded to an actual individual truth.... The new people did not know it because they were odd, isolated people without up-bringing and circumstances? They did not know because they were without backgrounds? Quick and clever, like Jews without a country? They would fasten in this story on the critical dismay of the parents, make comedy or tragedy out of the lack of sympathy between the two families, the persistence of unchanged character in each one, that would tell later on. But comedy and tragedy equally left everything unstated. No blind victimising force could account for the part of the story they left untold, something that justified the sentimental books they all jeered at; a light, that had come suddenly holding them all gentle and hushed behind even their busiest talk; bringing wide thoughts and sympathies; centring in the girl; breaking down barriers so completely that for a while they all seemed to exchange personalities. Blind force could not soften and illuminate.... There was something more than an allurement of "nature," a veil of beauty disguising the "brutal physical facts." Why brutal? Brutal is deliberate, a thing of the will. They meant brutish. But what was wrong with the brutes, except an absence of freewill? Their famous "brutal frankness" was brutish frankness, showing them pitifully proud of their knowledge of facts that looked so large, and ignorant of the tiny enormous undying fact of freewill. Perhaps women have more freewill than men?

It is because these men _write_ so well that it is a relief, from looking and enduring the clamour of the way things state themselves from several points of view simultaneously, to read their large superficial statements. Light seems to come, a large comfortable stretching of the mind, things falling into an orderly scheme, the flattering fascination of grasping and elaborating the scheme. But the after reflection is gloom ... a poisoning gloom over everything.... "Good writing" leaves gloom. Dickens doesn't.... But people say he's not a good writer.... _Youth_ ... and _Typhoon_.... Oh "_Stalked about gigantically in the darkness_." ... Fancy forgetting that. And he is modern and a good writer. New. They all raved quietly about him. But it was not like reading a book at all.... Expecting good difficult "writing" some mannish way of looking at things, and then ... complete forgetfulness of the worst time of the day on the most grilling day of the year in a crowded Lyons' at lunch-time and afterwards joyful strength to face the disgrace of being an hour or more late for afternoon work.... They leave life so small that it seems worthless. He leaves everything big; and all he tells added to experience forever. It's dreadful to think of people missing him; the forgetfulness and the new birth into life. Even God would enjoy reading Typhoon.... Then _that_ is "great fiction?" "Creation?" Why these falsifying words, making writers look cut-off and mysterious? _Imagination._ What is imagination? It always seems insulting, belittling, both to the writer and to life.... He looked and listened with his whole self--perhaps he is a small pale invalid--and then came 'stalked about gigantically' ... not made, nor created, nor begotten, but _proceeding_ ... and working his salvation. That is what matters to him.... In the day of Judgment, though he is a writer, he will be absolved. Those he has redeemed will be there to shout for him. But he will still have to go to Purgatory; or be born again as a woman. _Why_ come forward suddenly, in the midst of a story to say they live far from reality? A sudden smooth complacent male voice, making your attention rock between the live text and the picture of a supercilious lounging form, slippers, a pipe, other men sitting round, and then the phrase so smooth and good that it almost compels belief. Why cannot men exist without thinking themselves all there is?

She was in the open roadway, passing into the deeps of the central freedom of Piccadilly Circus, the crowded corner unknowingly left behind. Just ahead was the island, the dark outline of the fountain, the small surmounting figure almost invisible against the shadowy upper mass of a bright-porched building over the way. The grey trottoir, empty of the shawled flowerwomen and their great baskets, was a quiet haven. The surrounding high brilliancies beneath which people moved along the pavements from space to space of alternating harsh gold and shadowy grey, met softly upon its emptiness, drawing a circle of light round the shadow cast by the wide basin of the fountain. There was a solitary man's figure standing near the curb, midway on her route across the island to take to the roadway opposite Shaftesbury Avenue; standing arrested; there was no traffic to prevent his crossing; a watchful habitué; she would pass him in a moment, the last fragment of the west-end ... good-bye, and her thoughts towards gaining the wide homeward-going lane. A little stoutish dapper grey-suited ... _Tommy Babington!_ Standing at ease, turned quite away from the direction that would take him home; still and expressionless, unrecognisable save for the tilt of his profile and the set of his pince-nez. She had never before seen him in unconscious repose, never with this look of a motionless unvoyaged soul encased in flesh; yet had always known even when she had been most attracted, that thus he was. He had glanced. Had he recognised her? It was too late to wheel round and save his solitude. Going on, she must sweep right across his path. Fellow-feeling was struggling against her longing to touch, through the medium of his voice, the old home-life so suddenly embodied. He had seen her, and his unawakened face told her that she would neither pause nor speak. Years ago they would have greeted each other vociferously.... She was now so shrouded that he was not sure she had recognised him. Through his stupefaction smouldered a suspicion that she wished to avoid recognition. He was obviously encumbered with the sense of having placed her amidst the images of his preoccupation. She rushed on, passing him with a swift salute, saw him raise his hat with mechanical promptitude as she stepped from the curb and forward, pausing an instant for a passing hansom, in the direction of home. It was done. It had always been done from the very beginning. They had met equally at last. This was the reality of their early association. Her spirits rose, clamorous. It was epical she felt. One of those things arranged above one's head and perfectly staged. Tommy of all people wakened thus out of his absorption in the separated man's life that so decorated him with mystery in the feminine suburbs; shocked into helpless inactivity; glum with an irrevocable recognising hostility. It had been arranged. Silent acceptance had been forced upon him, by a woman of his own class. She almost danced to the opposite pavement in this keenest, witnessed moment of her yearslong revel of escape. He would presently be returning to that other enclosed life to which, being a man, and dependent on comforts, he was fettered. Already in his mind was one of those formulas that echoed about in the enclosed life ... "Oui, ma chère, little Mirry _Henderson_, strolling, at midnight, across Piccadilly Circus."

Suddenly it struck her that the life of men was pitiful. They hovered about the doors of freedom, returning sooner or later to the hearth, where even if they were autocrats they were not free; but passing guests, never fully initiated into the house-life, where the real active freedom of the women resided behind the noise and tumult of meetings. Man's life was bandied to and fro ... from _word_ to _word_. Hemmed in by women, fearing their silence, unable to enter its freedom--being himself made of words--cursing the torrents of careless speech with which its portals were defended.

And all the time unselfconscious thoughtless little men, with neat or shabby sets of unconsidered words for everything, busily bleating through cornets, blaring through trombones and euphoniums, thrumming undertones on double-basses. She summoned Harriett and shrieked with laughter at the cheerful din. It was cheerful, even in a funeral march. There would certainly be music in heaven; but not books.

The shock of meeting Tommy had brought the grey of tomorrow morning into the gold-lit streets. There was a fresh breeze setting down Shaftesbury Avenue. Here, still on the Circus, was that little coffee-place. Tommy was going home. _She_ was rescuing the last scrap of a London evening here at the very centre and then going home, on foot, still well within the charmed circle.

The spell of the meeting with Tommy broke as she went down the little flight of steps. Here was eternity, the backward vista indivisible, attended by throngs of irreconcilable interpretations. Years ago, a crisis of loneliness, this little doorway, a glimpse, from the top of the steps, of a counter and a Lockhart urn, a swift descent, unseen people about her, companions; misery left behind, another little sanctuary added to her list. The next time, coming coldly with Michael Shatov, in a unison of escape from everlasting conflict; people clearly visible, indifferent and hard; the moment of catching, as they sat down, the flicker of his mobile eyelid, the lively unveiled recognising glance he had flung at the opposite table, describing its occupants before she saw them; the rush of angry sympathy; a longing to _blind_ him; in some way to screen them from the intelligent unseeing glance of all the men in the world.

"You don't _see_ them; they are not _there_ in what you see."

"These types are generally quite rudimentary; there is no question of a soul there."

"If you could only have seen your look; the most horrible look I have ever seen; _alive_ with interest."

"There is always a certain interest."

The strange agony of knowing that in that moment he had been alone and utterly spontaneous; simple and whole; that it had been, for him, a moment of release from the evening's misery; a sudden plunge into his own eternity, his unthreatened and indivisible backward vista. The horrible return, again and again, in her own counsels, to the fact that she had seen, that night, for herself, more than he had ever told her; that the pity he had appealed to was unneeded; his appeal a bold bid on the strength of his borrowed conviction that women do not, in the end, really care. How absolutely men are deceived by a little cheerfulness....

And now she herself was interested; had attained unawares a sort of connoisseurship, taking in, at a glance, nationality, type, status, the difference between inclination and misfortune. Was it he who had aroused her interest? Was this contamination or illumination?

And Michael's past was a matter of indifference.... Only because it no longer concerned her? Then it _had_ been jealousy? Her new calm interest in these women was jealousy. Jealousy of the appeal to men of their divine simplicity?

"... which women don't understand.

And them as sez they does is not the marryin' brand."

Oh, the hopeless eternal inventions and ignorance of men; their utter cleverness and ignorance. _Why_ had they been made so clever and yet so fundamentally stupid?

She ordered her coffee at the counter and stood facing upstairs towards the oblong of street. The skirts of women, men's trousered legs, framed for an instant in the doorway, passed by, moving slowly, with a lifeless intentness.... Is the absence of personality original in men? Or only the result of their occupations? Original. Otherwise environment is more than the human soul. It is original. Belonging to maleness; to Adam with his spade; lonely in a universe of _things_. It causes them to be moulded by their occupations, taking shape, and status, from what they do. A barrister, a waiter, recognisable. Men have no natural rank. A woman can become a waitress and remain herself. Yet men pity women, and think them hard because they do not pity each other.

It is man, puzzled, astray, always playing with breakable toys, lonely and terrified in his universe of chaotic forces who is pitiful. The chaos that torments him is his own rootless self. The key, unsuspected, at his side.

In women like Eleanor Dear? Calm and unquestioning. Perfectly at home in life. With a charm beyond the passing charm of a man. She was central. All heaven and earth about her as she spoke. Illiterate, hampered, feeling her way all the time. And yet with a perfect knowledge. _Perfect_ comprehension in her smile. All the maddening moments spent with her, the endless detail and fussing, all afterwards showing upon a background of gold.

Men weave golden things; thought, science, art, religion upon a black background. They never _are_. They only make or do; unconscious of the quality of life as it passes. So are many women. But there is a moment in meeting a woman, any woman, the first moment, before speech, when everything becomes new; the utter astonishment of life is there, speech seems superfluous, even with women who have not consciously realised that life is astonishing. It persists through all the quotations and conformities, and is there again, the one underlying thing that women have to express to each other, at parting. So that between women, all the practical facts, the tragedies and comedies and events, are but ripples on a stream. It is not possible to share this sense of life with a man; least of all with those who are most alive to "the wonders of the universe." Men have no present; except sensuously.... That would explain their _ambition_ ... and their doubting speculations about the future.

Yet it would be easier to make all this clear to a man than to a woman. The very words expressing it have been made by men.

It was just after coming back from the Wilsons, in the midst of the time round about Leyton's wedding, that Eleanor had suddenly appeared on the Tansley Street doorstep.... I was just getting to know the houseful of Orly relations ... Mrs. Sloan-Paget, whisking me encouragingly into everything.... "my dear you've got style, and taste; stunning hair and a good complexion. Look at my girls. Darlings, I know. But what's the good of putting clothes on figures like that?" ... Daughterless Mrs. Orly looked pleased like a mother when Mrs. Paget said "S'Henderson's got to come down to Chumleigh." ... I almost gave in to her reading of me; feeling whilst I was with her, back in the conservative, church point of view. I could have kept it up, with good coats and skirts and pretty evening gowns. Playing games. Living hilariously in roomy country houses, snubbing "outsiders," circling in a perpetual round of family events, visits to town, everything fixed by family happenings, hosts of relations always about, everything, even sorrow, shared and distributed by large rejoicing groups; the warm wide middle circle of English life ... secure. And just as the sense of belonging was at its height, punctually, Eleanor had come, sweeping everything away. As if she had been watching. Coming out of the past with her claim.... Skimpier and more beset than ever. Yet steely with determination. Deepening her wild-rose flush and her smile. It was all over in a moment. Wreckage. Committal to her and her new set of circumstances.... She would not understand that a sudden greeting is always wonderful; even if the person greeted is not welcome. But Andrew Lang did not know what he was admitting. Men greet only themselves, their own being, past, present or future.... I am a man. The more people put you at your ease, the more eagerly you greet them.... That is why we men like "ordinary women." And always disappoint them. They mistake the comfort of relaxation for delight in their society.

Eleanor swept everything away. By seeming to know in advance everything I had to tell, and ignore it as not worth consideration. But she also left her own circumstances unexplained; sitting about with peaceful face, talking in hints, telling long stories about undescribed people, creating a vast leisurely present, pitting it against the whole world, with graceful condescending gestures.