Chapter II (1)

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 _ele_phant." ... 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."