Chapter III (2)

And then just to lie extinguished in the darkness wondering what point there was in sleeping out if you went to sleep at once. All that jolly tumult. And he had been so intent on the adventure that he had let Miss Prout change her mind without protest, _only_ crying out from the midst of busily arranging his bed on the lawn.... "Have you seen Miriam's pigtails?"

And suddenly everything was prim; the joy of being out in the night surging in the air, waiting for some form of expression. They didn't _know_ how to be joyful; only how to be clever.... She hummed a little song and stopped. It wreathed about her, telling off the beauties of the night, a song sung by someone else, heard, understood, a perfect agreement.

"What is she doing?"

"She's sitting up, waving her banana in the air; conducting an orchestra, I think."

"Tell her to _eat_ the banana and lie down." Alma, Rose Gauntlett, Mrs. Perry and me, starting off just after I came, to paddle in the moonlight.... "Don't, _don't_ do anything that would make a cabman laugh." Why not? Why should he always imagine someone waiting to be shocked? Damn the silly cabman if he _did_ laugh. Who need care? As soon as her head was on the pillow, nothing visible but the huge night and the stars, she spoke quietly to herself, flouting them. He should see, hear, that it was wicked to simmer stuffily down as if they were in the house. He didn't want to. She was making his sounds for him.

"Tell Miriam this is not a conversazione."

His voice was actually sleepy. Kindly, long-suffering, but simply wanting to go to sleep. There was to be no time of being out in the night with him. He was too far off. She imagined herself at his side, a little space of grass between. Silent communication, understanding and peace. All the things that were lost, obliterated by his swift speech, communicated to him at leisure, clear in the night. Here under the verandah, with its roof cutting off a part of the sky, they were still attached to the house. Alma had been quietly posed for sleep from the first moment. They were all more separated than in their separate rooms indoors.

The lingering faint light reflected the day, the large open space of misunderstandings, held off the cloak of darkness in which things grew clear. She lay watching for the night to turn to night.

But the light seemed to grow clearer as the stillness went on. The surrounding objects lost their night-time mystery. Teased her mind with their names as she looked from point to point. Drove up her eyes to search for night in the sky. But there was no night there. Only a wide high thinness bringing an expansion of sight that could not be recalled; drawing her out, beyond return, into a wakefulness that was more than day-time wakefulness; a breathless feeling of being poised untethered in the thin blue-lit air, without weight of body; going forward, more and more thinly expanded, into the pale wide space....

There is no night.... Compared to this expanse of thin, shadowless, boundless light the sunlit sky is a sort of darkness.... Even in a motionless high midday the sky is small, part of it invisible, obliterated by light. After sunset it is hidden by changing colours....

_This_ is the real sky, in full power, stripping away sleep. Time, visible, pouring itself out. Day, not night, is forgetfulness of time. Its movement is a dream. Only in its noise is real silence and peace. This awful stillness is made of sound; the sound of time, _pouring_ itself out; ceaselessly winding off short strips of life, each life a strip of sleepless light, so much, no more, lessening all the time.

What rubbish to talk about the stars. Vast suns, at immense distances, and beyond them, more. What then? If you imagine yourself at any point in space or wafting freely about from star to star you are not changed. Like enlarging the circle of your acquaintance. And finding it, in the end, the same circle, yourself. A difference in degree is also a difference in kind. Yes. But the _same_ difference. Relations remain the same however much things are changed. Interest in the stars is like interest in your neighbours before you get to know them. A way of running away from yourself.

What is there to do? How know what is anyone's best welfare?

To be alive, and to know it, makes a selfless life impossible. Any kind of life accompanied by that stupendous knowledge, is selfish.

Christ? But all the time he was alone with a certainty. Today thou shalt be with me.... He was booked for Paradise from the beginning ... like the man in No. 5 John Street going to live in a slum, imagining he was experiencing a slum, with the latchkey of his west-end house in his pocket.... Now if he had sacrificed Paradise. But he couldn't. Then where was selflessness?

Yet if Christ had never been, the sky would look different. A Grecian or a Jewish sky. Awful. If the personal delight that the sky showed to be nothing were put away? Nothing held on to but the endless pouring down of time? Till an answer came.... Get up tomorrow showing indifference to everything, refusing to be bewitched. There _is_ an answer or there would be no question. Night is torment. That is why people go to sleep. To avoid clear sight and torment.

Tomorrow, certainly, gloriously, the daytime scenes, undeserved, uncontributed to, would go forward again in the sunlight. Forgetfulness would come of itself. Even the thought of the bright scenes, the scenes that did not matter and were nothing, spread over the sky the sense of the dawn it would be obliged to bring; ... the permitted postponement of the problems set by night. Dawn stole into the heart. With a sudden answer. That had no words. An answer that lost itself again in the day. But there would be no dawn; only the pitiless beginning of a day spoiled by the fever of a sleepless night. Torment, for nothing. The sky gazed down mocking at fruitless folly. She turned away. She must, would, sleep. But her eyes were full of the down-bent stars. Condemnation, and the communication that would not speak; stopping short, poised, probing for a memory that was there....

A harsh hissing sigh, far away; gone. The unconscious sea. Coming back. Bringing the morning tide. The sound would increase. The sky would thicken and come near, fill up with increasing blind light, ignoring unanswered pain.

"You can put tea in the bedrooms."

Alma, folded in her dressing-gown, disappearing into the house. The tumbled empty bed on the lawn, white in the open stare of the morning....

"Edna wants to know how we're getting on." Duplication in light and darkness, of memories of the night.... Their two figures, side by side, silhouetted against dark starry blue. Dismantled voices. His _simplicity_. His sharp turn and toga'd march towards the house. A memory of dawn; a deep of sleep ending in faint light tinting the garden? "Edna wants to know how we're getting on." _Then_ starlit darkness? Angry sleep leading direct to this open of morning.

Everyone in the house had plunged already into new beginnings. Panoplied in advantages; able to feel in strong refreshed bodies the crystal brightness of the morning; not worn out as if by long illness.

It was Miss Prout, coming from her quiet night indoors, who was reaping the adventure. She had some strange conscious power. She knew that it was she who was the symbol of morning. Her look of age was gone. She had dared to come out in a wrapper of mealy white, folded softly; and with bare feet that gleamed against the green of the flat grass. Consciously using the glow of adventure left over from the night to engrave her triumphant effect upon the adventurers; of marvellous youth that was not hers but belonged to some secret living in her stillness.... It was not an illusion. He saw it too; let her stand for the morning; was crowning her all the time, preoccupied in everything he said with the business of rendering half-amused approval of her miracle. The talk was hampered, as if, by common consent, prevented from getting far enough to interfere with the set shape of spectacle and spectators; yet easy, its quality heightened by the common recognition of an indelible impression. For a moment it made her power seem almost innocent of its strange horror.

When she had left the day was stricken. Evil had gone from the air, leaving it empty. Everything that happened seemed to be a conspiracy to display emptiness. The daily life of the house came into view, visible as it was, when no guests were there, going bleakly on its way. Hypo appeared and disappeared. Rapt and absent, though still swiftly observant and between whiles his unchanged talking self; falling back, with his chuckling unspoken commentary, for lack of kindred brilliance; escaping to his study as if to a waiting guest.

Miriam came to dinner silently raging; invisible, yet compelled to be seen. Reduced to nonentity by his wrongly directed awareness, his everlasting demand for bright fussy intelligence. It was her own fault. The result of having been beguiled by joy into a pretence of conformity. For the rest of the visit she would be roughly herself. To shreds she would tear his twofold vision of women as bright intelligent response or complacently smiling audience. Force him to see the evil in women who made terms with men, the poison there was in the trivial gaiety of those who accepted male definitions of life and the world. Somehow make him aware of the reality that fell, all the time, in the surrounding silence, outside his shapes and classifications.

Sunk away into separation, she found herself gliding into communion with surrounding things, shapes gleaming in the twilight, the intense thrilling beauty of the deep, lessening colours.... She passed into association with them, feeling him fade, annihilated, while her eased breathing released the strain of battle. He was spending the seconds of silence that to him were a void, in observation, misinterpretations. The air was full of his momentary patience. She turned smiling and caught his smile halting between amused contemplation of vacuity and despairing sympathy with boredom. He had not heard the shouts of repudiation with which she had plunged down into her silence. He dropped her and let his testing eye, which he knew she followed, rest on Alma. Two vacuities ... watched by empty primitive eyes, savage eyes, under shaggy brows, staring speculatively out through a forest of eyelash. Having thus made his statement and caught Alma's attention he made a little drama of childish appeal, with plaintive brows, pleading for rescue.

"Let's have some light. We're almost in darkness," said Alma.

"We are, we are," he wailed, and Miriam caught his eyes flashed upon her to collect her acceptance of his judgment. The central light Alma had risen to switch on, flashed up over the silk-clad firm little column of her body winged on either side by the falling drapery of her extended arms, and revealed as she sat down the triangle of pendant-weighted necklace on her white throat, the soft squareness of her face, peaked below by the delicate sharp chin and above by her piled gold hair. The day had gone; quenched in the decoration of the night set there by Alma, like the first scene of a play into whose speech and movement she was, with untroubled impersonal bearing, already steadily launched, conscious of the audience, untroubled by their anticipation.

"It's _awful_. The evenings are already getting short," cried Miriam, her voice thrilling in conversation with the outer living spaces beyond the shut-in play. His swiftly flashed glance lingered a moment; incredulous of her mental wandering? In stupefaction that was almost interest, over her persistence, after diagnosis, in anachronism, in utter banality?

Alma's voice, strangely free, softly lifted a little above its usual note, but happy and full, as it was with outsiders with whom she was at her best, took possession of the set scene. His voice came in answer, deferring, like that of a delighted guest. Presently they were all in an enchantment. From some small point of departure she had carried them off abroad, into an Italian holiday. He urged her on with his voice, his eyes returning perpetually from the business of his meal to rest in admiring delight upon her face. It was lovely, radiant, full of the joy of the theme she had set in the midst and was holding there with bright reflective voice, unattained by the little bursts of laughter, piling up her monologue, laughing her own laughter in its place, leading on little bridges of gay laughter that did not break her speech, to the points of her stories. All absurd. All making the places she described pathetically absurd, and mysterious strangers, square German housewives and hotel people, whom Miriam knew she would forever remember as they looked in Alma's tales, and love, absurd. But vivid; each place, the look and the sound and the very savour of it, each person....

By the end of dinner, in the midst of eating a peach, Alma was impersonating a fat shiny Italian opera star, flinging out without losing her dainty charm, a scrap of a rolling cadence, its swift final run up and up in curling trills to leap clear at the end to a single note, terrifically high, just touched and left on the air, the fat singer silent below it, unmoved and more mountainous than before.

Hypo was wholly won by the enchantment she had felt and cast. His face was smooth with the pleasure that wreathed it whenever he passed, listening, from laughter that was not of his own making, to more laughter. He carried Alma off to the study with the bright eagerness he gave to an entertaining guest, but intimately, with his arm through hers.

They sat side by side on the wide settee. There was to be no music. He did not want to go away by himself to the other end of the room and make music. Sitting forward with his hands clasped, towards Alma enthroned, he suddenly improvised a holiday abroad.... "We'll go mad, stark staring mad. Switzerland. Your ironmongery in my rucksack and off we'll go."

To go away, not the wonderful eventful holiday life here; to go away, with Alma, was reward and holiday for him.... This life, with its pattern of guests was the hard work of everyday? These times abroad were the bright points of their long march together? Then if this life and its guests were so little, she was once more near to them. She had shared their times abroad, by first unconsciously kindling them to go. And presently they were deferring to her. It was strange that having preceded them, created, even with them, the sense of advantage persisting so long after they had outdone in such wide sweeps the scope of her small experience.

She had never deliberately "gone abroad." Following necessity she had found herself in Germany and in Belgium. Pain and joy in equal balance all the time and in memory only joy. So that all going abroad by other people seemed, even while envy rose at the ease and quantity of their expeditions, their rich collection of notorious beauty, somehow slight. Envy was incomplete. She could not by stern reasoning and close effort of imagination persuade herself that they had been so deeply abroad as she. That they had ever utterly lost themselves in foreign things. She forgot perpetually, in this glad moment she again found that she had forgotten, having been abroad. She forgot it when she read and thought by herself of other parts of the world. Yet when, as now, anyone reminded her, she was at once alight, weighed down by the sense of accomplishment, of rich deeps of experience that would never leave her. Others were bright and gay about their wanderings. But even while pining for their free movement she was beside herself with longing to convey to them the clear deep sense they seemed to lack of what they were doing. The wonder of it. She talked to them about Switzerland, where they had already been. It was for her the unattainable ideal of a holiday. She resented it when he belittled the scenery, gathered it up in a few phrases and offered any good gorge in the Ardennes as an alternative. It was not true. He _was_ entranced with Switzerland. It was the protuberance of the back of his head that made him oppose. And his repudiation of any form of expression that did not jest. She sought and found a weapon. To go to Switzerland in the summer was not to go. She had suddenly remembered all she had heard about Swiss winters. Switzerland in the summer was an oleograph. In winter an engraving. That impressed him. And when she had described all she remembered, she had forgotten she had not been. They had forgotten. They had come into her experience as it looked to herself. Their questions went on, turned to her life in London. She was besieged by things to communicate, going on and on, wondering all the time where the interest lay, in remote people, most of them perceived only once and remembered once as speech, yet feeling it, and knowing that they felt it. There was a clue, some clue to some essential thing, in her mood. Suddenly she awoke to see them sitting propped close against each other, his cheek cushioned on her crown of hair, both of them blinking beseechingly towards her.

"_How_ long," she raged, "have you been sitting there cursing me?"

"Not been cursing, Miriam. You've been interesting, no end. But there's a thing, Miriam, an awful thing called tomorrow morning."

"Is it late?" The appalling, the utter and everywhere appalling scrappiness of social life....

"Not for you, Miriam. We're poor things. We envy. We can't compete with your appetite, your disgraceful young appetite for late hours."

"Things always end just as they're beginning."

"Things end, Miriam, so that other things may begin."

She roused herself to give battle. But Alma drifted between, crying gaily that there was tomorrow. A good strong tomorrow. Warranted to stand hard wear.

"And turn; and take a dye when you're tired of the colour."

He laughed, really amused? Or crediting her with an attempt to talk in a code?

"A tomorrow that will wear forever and make a petticoat afterwards."

He laughed again. Quite simply. He had not heard that old jest. Seemed never to have heard the old family jests. Seemed to have grown up without jests.... Tomorrow, unless no one came, would not be like today.

* * * * *

The morning offered a blissful eternity before lunch. She had wakened drowsy with strength and the apprehension of good, and gone through breakfast like a sleepwalker, playing her part without cost, independent of sight and hearing and thought. Successful. Dreamily watching a play, taking a part inaudibly dictated, without effort, seeing it turn into the chief part, more and more turned over to her as she lay still in the hands of the invisible prompter; withdrawn in an exploration of the features of this state of being that nothing could reach or disturb. If, this time, she could discover its secret, she would be launched in it forever.

Back in her room she prepared swiftly to go out and meet the day in the open; all the world, waiting in the happy garden.... Through the house-stillness sounded three single downward-stepping notes ... the first phrase of the seventh symphony.... Perfect. Eternity stating itself in the stillness. He knew it, choosing just this thing to play to himself, alone; living in space alone, at one with everybody, as everyone was, the moment life allowed. Beethoven's perfect expression of the perfection of life, first thing in the morning. Morning stillness; single dreaming notes that blossomed in it and left it undisturbed; moved on into a pattern and then stood linked together in a single perfect chord. Another pattern in the same simple notes and another chord. Dainty little chords bowing to each other; gentle gestures that gradually became an angelic little dance through which presently a song leapt forth, the single opening notes brought back, caught up and swept into song pealing rapturously out.

He was revealing himself as he was when alone, admitting Beethoven's vision of life as well as seeing the marvellous things Beethoven did with his themes? But he liked best the slamming, hee-hawing rollick of the last movement.... Because it did so much with a theme that was almost nothing.... _Bang_, toodle-oodle-oodle, _Bang_, toodle-_oodle_-oodle, _Bang_ toodle-oodle-oodle-_oo_. A lumpish phrase; a Clementi finger exercise played suddenly in startling fortissimo by an impatient schoolboy; smashed out with the full force of the orchestra, taken up, slammed here and there, up and down, by a leaping, plunging, heavy hoofed pantaloon, approving each variation with loud guffaws.... The sly swift dig-in-the-ribs of the sudden pianissimos....

To watch a shape adds interest to listening. But something disappears in listening with the form put first. Hearing only form is a kind of perfect happiness. But in coming back there is a reproach; as if it had been a kind of truancy.... People who care only for form think themselves superior. Then there is something wrong with them.

On the landing table a letter lay waiting for the post. She passed by, gladly not caring to glance. But a tingling in her shoulders drew her back. She had reached the garden door. The music now pouring busily through from the next room urged her forward. But once outside she would have become a party to bright reasonableness, a foolish frontage, caricatured from behind. She fled back along her path to music that was once more the promise of joy ... to read the address of one of Alma's tradespeople, a distasteful reminder of the wheels of dull work perpetually running under the surface of beauty. But this morning it would not attain her.... It was not Alma's hand, but the small running shape like a scroll, each part a tiny perfection. She bent over it. _Miss Edna Prout...._ This, then, was what she had come back to find; poison for the day. The house was silent as a desert; empty, swept clear of life. The roomful of music was in another world. Alone in it, he had written to her and then sat down, thinking of her, to his music.

* * * * *

Complications are enlivening.... Within the sunlight, in the great spread of glistening sea, in the touch of the free air and the look of the things set down on the bench there was a lively intensity. A demand for search; for a thought that would obliterate the smear on the blue and gold of the day. The thought had been there even at the moment of shock. The following tumult was the effort to find it. To get round behind the shock and slay it before it could slay. To agree. That was the answer. Not to care. To show how much you care by deliberately not caring? People show disapproval of their own actions by defending them. By deliberately not hiding or defending them, they show off a version of their actions. That they don't themselves accept.

Meantime everything passes. There are always the powerful intervals. Meetings, and then intervals in which other things come up and life speaks directly, to the individual.... Except for married people. Who are all a little absurd, to themselves and to all other married people. That is why they always talk so hard when two couples are together? To cover the din of their thoughts.... Their marriage was a success without being an exception to the rule that all marriages are failures, as he said. Why are they failures? Science, the way of thinking and writing that makes everybody seem small, in all these new books. Biology, _Darwin_. The way men, who have no inner convictions, no self, fasten upon an idea and let it describe life for them. Always a new idea. Always describing and destroying, filtering down, as time goes on to quite simple people, poisoning their lives, because men must have a formula. Men are gossips. Science is ... cosmic scandalmongering.

Science is Cosmic Scandalmongering. Perhaps that might do for the House of Lords. But those old fogies are not particularly scientific. They quote the Classics. The same thing. Club gossip. Centuries of unopposed masculine gossip about the universe.

Years ago he said there will be no more him and her, the novels of the future will be clear of all that.... Poetry nothing. Religion nothing. Women a biological contrivance. And now. Women still a sort of attachment to life, useful, or delightful ... the "civilised women of the future" to be either bright obedient assistants or providers of illusion for times of leisure. Two kinds, neatly arranged, each having only one type of experience, while men have both, _and_ their work, into which women can only come as Hindus, obediently carrying out tasks set by men, dressed in uniform, deliberately sexless and deferential. How can anyone feel romantic about him? Alma. But that is the real old-fashioned romance of everyday, from her girlhood. Hidden through loyalty to his shifting man's ideas? Half convinced by them? How can people be romantic impermanently, just now and again?

Romance is solitary and permanent. Always there. In everybody. That is why the things one hears about people are like stories, not referring to life. Why I always forget them when the people themselves are there. Or believe, when they talk of their experiences, that they misread them. I can't believe even now in the reality of any of his experiences. But then I don't believe in the experiences of anyone, except a few people who have left sayings I know are true.... Everything else, all the expressions, history and legend and novels and science and everybody's talk, seems irrelevant. That's why I don't want experience, not to be caught into the ways of doing and being that drive away solitude, the marvellous quiet sense of life at first hand.... But he knows that too. "Life drags one along by the hair shrieking protests at every yard."

"Hullo! What is she doing all alone?"

The surrounding scene that had gradually faded, leaving her eyes searching in the past for the prospect she could never quite recall, shone forth again.

"I've got to do a review."

"What's the book?"

"When you are in France, does a French river look different to you; _French_?"

"No, Miriam. It--doesn't look different."

He glanced for a moment shaggily from point to point of the sunlit scene and sat companionably down, turned towards her with a smile at her discomfiture. "What's the book, Miriam? It's jolly down here. We'll have some chairs. Yes? You can't write on a bench."

He was gone. Meaning to come back. In the midst of the morning; in the midst of his preoccupations sociably at leisure. She felt herself sink into indifference. The unique opportunity was offering itself in vain. He came back just as she had begun to imagine him caught, up at the house, by a change of impulse. Or perhaps an unexpected guest.

"What's the review?"

"The House of Lords."

"Read it?"

"I can't. It's all post hoc."

"Then you've read it."

"I haven't read it. I've only sniffed the first page."

"That's enough. Glance at the conclusion. Get your statement, three points; that'll run you through a thousand words. Look here--shall I write it for you?"

"I've got _fifty_ ideas," she said beginning to write.

"That's too many, Miriam. That's the trouble with you. You've got too many ideas. You're messing up your mind, quite a good mind, with too swift a succession of ideas." She wrote busily on, drinking in his elaboration of his view of the state of her mind. "H'm," he concluded, stopping suddenly; but she read in the sound no intention of breaking away because she had nothing to say to him. He was watching, in some way interested. He sat back in his chair; sympathetically withheld. Actually deferring to her work....

She tore off the finished page and transfixed it on the grass with a hatpin. Her pencil flew. The statement was finished and leading to another. Perhaps he was right about three ideas. A good shape. The last must come from the book. She would have to consult it. No. It should be left till later. Her second page joined the first. It was incredible that he should be sitting there inactive, obliterated by her work.

She tore off the third sheet and dropped her pencil on the grass.

"Finished? Three sheets in less than twenty minutes. How do you do it, Miriam?"

"It'll do. But I shall have to copy it. I've resisted the temptation to say what _I_ think about the House of Curmudgeons. Trace it back to the First Curmudgeon. Yet it seems somehow wrong to write in the air, so _currently_. The first time I did a review, of a bad little book on Whitman, I spent a fortnight of evenings reading."

"You began at the Creation. Said everything you had to say about the history of mankind."

"I went nearly mad with responsibility and the awfulness of discovering the way words express almost nothing at all."

"It's not quite so bad as that. You've come on no end though, you know. The last two or three have been astonishingly good. You're not creative. You've got a good sound mind, a good style and a curious intense critical perception. You'll be a critic. But writing, Miriam, should be done with a pen. Can't call yourself a writer till you do it _direct_."

"How can I write with a pen, in bed, on my knee, at midnight or dawn?"

"A fountain pen?"

"No one can write with a fountain pen."

"Quite a number of us do. Quite a number of not altogether unsuccessful little writers, Miriam."

"Well, it's wrong. How can thought or anything, well thought perhaps can, which doesn't matter and nobody really cares about, wait a minute, nothing _else_ can come through a hand whose fingers are held stiffly apart by a fat slippery barrel. A writing machine. A quill would be the thing, with a fine flourishing tail. But it is too important. It squeaks out an important sense of _writing_, makes people too objective, so that it's as much a man's pen, a mechanical, see life steadily and see it whole (when nobody knows what life _is_) man's view sort of implement as a fountain pen. A pen should be thin, not disturbing the hand, and the nib flexible and silent, with up and down strokes. Fountain pen writing is like ... democracy."

"Why not go back to clay tablets?"

"Machine-made things are dead things."

"You came down here by _train_, Miriam."

"I ought to have flown."

"You'll fly yet. No. Perhaps you won't. When your dead people have solved the problem, you'll be found weeping over the rusty skeleton of a locomotive."

"I don't mean Lilienfeld and Maxim. I can be fearfully interested in all that when I think of it. But to the people who do not see the beginning of flying it won't seem wonderful. It won't change anything."

"It'll change, Miriam, pretty well everything. And if you don't mean Lilienfeld and Maxim what _do_ you mean?"

"Well, by inventing the telephone we've damaged the chances of telepathy."

"Nonsense, Miriam. You're suffering from too much Taylor."

"The most striking thing about Taylor is that he does not want to develop his powers."

"What powers?"

"The things in him that have made him discover things that you admit are true; that make you interested in his little paper."

"They're not right you know about their phosphoric bank; energy is not a simple calculable affair."

"Now here's a strange thing. That time you met them, the first thing you said when they'd gone, was what's _wrong_ with them? And the next time I met them they said there's something _wrong_ with him. The truth is you are polar opposites and have everything to learn from each other."

"Elizabeth Snowden Poole."

"Yes. And without him no one would have heard of her. No one understood. And now psychology is going absolutely her way. In fifty years' time her books will be as clear as daylight."

"Damned obstructive classics. That's what all our books will be. But I'll give you Mrs. Poole. Mrs. Poole is a very wonderful lady. She's the unprecedented."

"There you are. Then you must admit the Taylors."

"I'm not so sure about your little Taylors. There's nothing to be said, you know, for just going about not doing things."

"They _are_ wonderful. Their atmosphere is the freest I know."

"I envy you your enthusiasms, Miriam. Even your misplaced enthusiasms."

"You go there, worn out, at the end of the day, and have to walk, after a long tram-ride through the wrong part of London, along raw new roads, dark little houses on either side, solid, without a single break, darkness, a street-lamp, more darkness, another lamp; and something in the air that lets you down and down. Partly the thought of these streets increasing, all the time, all over London. Yet when someone said walking home after a good evening at the Taylors' that the thought of having to settle down in one of those houses made him feel suicidal, I felt he was wrong; and saw them, from inside, bright and big; people's homes."

"They're not big, Miriam. You wanted to marry him."

"Good Heavens. An Adam's apple, sloping shoulders and a Cockney accent."

"_I_ have a Cockney accent, Miriam."

"..."

"Don't go about classifying with your ears. People, you know, are very much alike."

"They're utterly different."

"Your vanity. Go on with your Taylors."

"They are very much like other people."

"With _my_ Taylors. I'm interested; really."

"Well, suddenly you are in their kitchen. White walls and aluminium and a smell of fruit. Do you know the smell of root vegetables cooking slowly in a casserole?"

"I'll imagine it. Right. Where are the Taylors?"

"You are all standing about. Happy and undisturbed. None of that feeling of darkness and strangeness and the need for a fresh beginning. Tranquillity. As if someone had gone away."

"The devil; exorcised, poor dear."

"No but glorious. Making everyone move like a song. And talk. You are all, at once, bursting with talk. All over the flat, in and out of the rooms. George washing up all the time, wandering about with a dish and a cloth and Dora probably doing her hair in a dressing-gown, and cooking. It's the only place where I can talk exhausted and starving."

"What do you talk about?"

"Everything. We find ourselves sitting in the bathroom, engrossed--long speeches--they talk to each other, like strangers talking intimately on a 'bus. Then something boils over and we all drift back to the kitchen. Left to herself Dora would go on forever and sit down to a few walnuts at midnight."

"Mary."

"But she is an absolutely perfect cook. An artist. She invents and experiments. But he has a feminine consciousness, though he's a most manly little man with a head like Beethoven. So he's practical. Meaning he feels with his nerves and has a perfect sympathetic imagination. So presently we are all sitting down to a meal and the evening begins to look short. And yet endless. With them everything feels endless; the present I mean. They are so immediately alive. Everything and everybody is abolished. We _do_ abolish them I assure you. And a new world is there. You feel language changing, every word moving, changed, into the new world. _But_, when their friends come in the evening, weird people, real cranks, it disappears. They all seem to be attacking things they don't understand. I gradually become an old-fashioned Conservative. But the evening is wonderful. None of these people mind how far or how late they walk. And it goes on till the small hours."

"You're getting your college time with these little people."

"No. I'm easily the most stupidly cultured person there."

"Then you're feeding your vanity."

"I'm not. Even the charlatans make me feel ashamed of my sham advantage. No; the thing that is most wonderful about those Tuesdays is waking up utterly worn out, having a breakfast of cold fruit in the cold grey morning, a rush for the train, a last sight of the Taylors as they go off into the London Bridge crowd and then suddenly feeling utterly refreshed. They do too. It's an effect we have on each other."

"How did you come across them?"

"Michael. Reads _Reynolds's_. A notice of a meeting of London Tolstoyans. We rushed out in the pouring rain to the Edgware Road and found nothing at the address but a barred up corner shop-front. Michael wanted to go home. I told him to go and stood staring at the shop waiting for it to turn into the Tolstoyans. I knew it would. It did. Just as Michael was almost screaming in the middle of the road, I turned down a side street and found a doorway, a bead of gas shining inside just showing a stone staircase. We crept up and found a bare room, almost in darkness, a small gas jet, and a few rows of kitchen chairs and a few people sitting scattered about. A young man at a piano picked out a few bars of Grieg and played them over and over again. Then the meeting began. Dora, reading a paper on Tolstoy's ideas. Well, I felt I was hearing the whole truth spoken aloud for the first time.... But oh the discussion.... A gaunt man got up and began to rail at everything, going on till George gently asked him to keep to the subject. He raved then about some self-help book he had read. Quite incoherent; and convincing. Then the young man at the piano made a long speech about hitching your waggon to a star and at the end of it a tall woman, so old that she could hardly stand, stood up and chanted, in a deep laughing voice, Waggons and Stars. Waggons and stars. Today I am a waggon. Tomorrow a star. I'm reminded of the societies who look after young women. Meet them with a cup of tea, call a cab, put the young woman and the cup of tea into the cab. Am I to watch my brother's blunderings? No. I am his lover. Then he becomes a star. And I am a star. Then an awful man, very broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, with a low forehead and a sweeping moustache bounded up and shouted; I am a God! You, madam, are a goddess! Tolstoy is over-civilised! That's why he loves the godlike peasant. All metaphysicians, artists and pious people are sensualists. All living in unnatural excesses. The Zulu is a god. How many women in filthy London can nurse their children? What is a woman? _Children._ What is the glory of man? Unimaginable to town slaves. They go through life ignorant of manhood, and the metaphysicians wallow in pleasures. Men and women are divine. There is no other divinity. Let them not sell their godhead for filthy food and rotting houses and moloch factories. What stands in the way? The pious people, the artists and the metaphysicians.... Then a gentleman, in spectacles at the back, quietly said that Tolstoy's ideas were eclectic and could never apply generally.... Of course he was right, but it doesn't make Tolstoy any the less true. And you know when I hear all these convincing socialists planning things that really would make the world more comfortable, they always in the end seem ignorant of _humanity_; always behind them I see little Taylor, unanswerable, standing for more difficult deep-rooted individual things. It's _individuals_ who must change, one by one."

"Socialism will give the individual his chance."

"Yes, I know. I agree in a way. You've shown me all that. I know environment and ways of thinking _do_ partly make people. But Taylor makes socialism, even when its arguments floor him, look such a feathery, passing thing."

"You stand firm, Miriam. Socialism isn't feathery. _You're_ feathery. One thinks you're there and suddenly finds you playing on the other side of the field."

"It's the fact that socialism is a _side_ that makes it look so shaky. And then there's Reich; an absolute blaze of light ... on the outside side of things."

"Not a blaze of anything, my dear Miriam ... a poor, hard-working, popular lecturer."

"Everybody in London is listening. Hearing the most illuminating things."

"What do they illuminate?"

"Ourselves. The English. Continuing Buckle. He's got a clear cool hard unprejudiced foreign mind."

"Your foreigners, Miriam. They haven't the monopoly of intelligence."

"I know. You think the English are _the_ people. But so does Reich. Really he would interest you. You _must_ let me tell you his idea. Just the shape of it. Badly. He puts it so well that you know he has something up his sleeve. He has. He's a Hungarian patriot. That is his inspiration. That England shall save Europe, and therefore Hungary, from the Germans. You must let me just tell you without interrupting. Two minutes."

"_I'm_ intelligent, Miriam. _You're_ intelligent. You have distinction of mind. But a really surprising lack of expression you know. You misrepresent yourself most tremendously."

"You mean I haven't a voice, that way of talking about things that makes one know people don't believe what they say and are thinking most about the way they are talking. Bah."

"Clear thought makes clear speech."

"Well. Reich says that history so far is always one thing. The Hellenisation of Europe.... The Greeks were the first to evolve universal ideals. Which were passed on. Through two channels. Law-giving Rome. And the Roman church; Paul, who had made Christianity a universal working scheme. So Europe has been Hellenised. And the Hellenisation of the _rest_ of the world will be through its Europeanisation. The enemy to this is the rude materialistic modern Germany. The only hope, England. Which he calls a nation of ignorant specialists, ignorant of history; believing only in race, which doesn't exist--a blindfold humanitarian giant, utterly unaware that other people are growing up in Europe and have the use of their eyes. The French don't want to do anything outside their large pleasant home. They are the sedentary Greeks; townspeople. The English are Romans, official, just, inartistic. Good colonists, not intrinsically, but because they send so much of their best away from their little home. A child can see that the English and Americans care less for money than any people in the western world, are adventurous and wandering and improvident; the only people with ideals and a sense of the future. Inartistic...."

"Geography he calls the ground symphony of history, but nothing more, or Ireland would play first fiddle in Great Britain. The rest is having to fight for your life and being visited by your neighbours. England has attracted thousands of brilliant foreigners, who have made her, including the Scotch, who until they became foreigners in England were nothing. And the foreigner of foreigners is the permanently alien Jew. And the genius of all geniuses Loyola, because he made all his followers permanent aliens. Countries without foreigners are doomed. Like Hungary. Doomed to extinction if England does not beat Germany. That's all."

"There won't, if we can help it, be any need for England to beat Germany. There are, you know, possibly unobserved by your rather wildly rocketting Reich, a few eyes in England. That war can be written away; by journalists and others, written into absurdity."

"Oh, I'm so glad. Listening to Reich makes one certain that the things that seem to be happening in the world are illusions and the real result of the unseen present movement of history is war with Germany. I don't like Reich. His idea of making everything begin with Greece. His awful idea that art follows only on pressure and war. Yet it is true that the harassed little seaboard peoples who lived insecurely _did_ have their art periods after they had fought for their lives. Then no more wars no more Art.... _Well_; perhaps Art like war is just male ferocity!"

"Nonsense, Miriam."

"Do you really think the war can be written away? There are so many opinions, and reading keeps one always balanced between different sets of ideas."

"You're too omnivorous, Miriam. You get the hang of too many things. You're scattered."

"The better you hear a thing put, the more certain you are there's another view. And then there are _motives_."

"Ah, now you're talking.... Motives; can be used. Almost any sort of motive can be roped in; and directed. You ought to write up that little meeting by the way. You're lucky you know, Miriam, in your opportunities for odd experience. Write it up. Don't forget."

"You weren't there. It wasn't a joke. I don't want to be facetious about it."

"You're too near. But you will. Save it up. You'll see all these little excursions in perspective when you're round the next corner."

"Oh I _hate_ all these written up things; 'Jones always wore a battered cricket cap, a little askew.' They simply drive me _mad_. You know the whole thing is going to be lies from beginning to end."

"You're a romantic, Miriam."

"I'm not. It's the 'always wore.' Trying to get at you, just as much as 'Iseult the Fair.' Just as unreal, just as much in an assumed voice. The amazing thing is the way men go prosing on for ever and ever, admiring each other, never suspecting."

"You've got to create an illusion you know."

"Why illusion? Life isn't an illusion."

"We don't know what life is. You don't know what life is. You think too much. Life's got to be lived. The difference between you and me is that you think to live and I live to think. You've made a jolly good start. Done things. Come out and got your economic independence. But you're stuck."

"Now _there's_ somebody who's writing about life. Who's shown what has been going on from the beginning. Mrs. Stetson. It was the happiest day of my life when I read _Women and Economics_."

"It's no good, you know, that idea of hers. Women have got to specialise. They are specialists from the beginning. They can't run families, and successful careers at the same time."

"They could if life were differently arranged. They will. It's not that so much. Though it's a relief to know that homes won't be always a tangle of nerve-racking heavy industries which ought to be done by men. But the blaze of light she brings is by showing that women were social from the first and that _all_ history has been the gradual socialisation of the male. It is partly complete. But the male world is still savage."

"The squaw, Miriam, was--"

"Absolutely social and therefore civilised, compared to the hunting male. She went out of herself. Mother and son was society. _He_ had no chance. Everyone, even his own son, was an enemy and a rival."

"That's old Ellis's idea. There's _been_ a matriarchate all right, Miriam, for your comfort."

"I don't want comfort, I want truth."

"Oh you _don't_, Miriam. One gives you facts and you slide away from them."

* * * * *

Household life breaks everything up. Comes crashing down on moments that cannot recur.... Thought runs on, below the surface to conclusions, arriving distractingly at the wrong moment.

It always seems a deliberate conspiracy to suppress conclusions. Lunch, grinning like a Jack-in-the-box, in a bleak emptiness. People ought not to meet at lunch time. If the bleakness is overcome it is only by borrowing from the later hours. And the loan is wasted by the absence of after-time, the business of filling up the afternoon with activities; leaving everything to be begun all over again later on.

How can guests _allow_ themselves to arrive to lunch? The smooth young man had come primed for his visit. Carefully talking in the Wilson way; carefully finding everything in the world amusing. And he was not amused. He was a cold selfish baffled young man, lost in a set. Welcomed here as a favoured emissary from a distant potentate....

And now with just the same air of reflected brilliance he was blithely playing tennis. Later on he would have to begin again with his talk; able parroting, screening hard coldness, the hard coldness of the pale yellow-haired Englishman with good features.... A blindfold humanitarian giant? Where are Reich's English giants? Blind. Amongst the old-fashioned, conservatives? Gentlepeople with fixed ideas who don't want to change anything? The Lycurgans are not humanitarians. Because they are humanitarians deliberately. Liberals and socialists are humanitarian intellectually, through anger. Humanitarian idealists. The giants are humanitarian unconsciously, through breeding. Reich said the strongest motives, the motives that made history, were _unconscious_.... Consciousness is increasing. The battle of unconscious fixed ideas and conscious chosen fixed ideas. Then the conservatives must always win! They make socialists and then absorb them. The socialists give them ideas. Neither of them are quite true. Why doesn't God state truth once and for all and have done with it?

And all the time, all over the western world, life growing more monstrous. The human head growing bigger and bigger. A single scientific fact, threatening humanity. Hypo's _amused_ answer to the claims of the feminists. The idea of having infants scooped out early on, and artificially reared. Insane. Science rushing on, more and more clear and mechanical.... "Life becomes more and more a series of surgical operations." How _can_ men contemplate the increasing awfulness of life for women and yet wish it to go on? The awfulness they have created by swaddling women up; regarding them as instruments of pleasure. Liking their cooking. _Stereotyping_ in their fixed mechanical men's way a standard of deadly cooking that is destroying everybody, teeth first. And they call themselves creators.... Knickers or gym skirts. A free stride from the hips, weight forward on toes pointing straight, like Orientals. Squatting, like a savage, keeping the pelvis ventilated and elastic instead of sitting, knees politely together, stuffy and compressed and unventilated. All the rules of ladylike deportment ruin the pelvis.... Ladies are awful. Deportment and a rigid overheated pelvis. In the kitchen they have to skin rabbits and disembowel fowls. Otherwise no keep. Polite small mouthfuls of squashy food and pyorrhoea. Good middleaged church people always suggest stuffy bodies and pyorrhoea. Somewhere in the east people can be divorced for flatulence.

But the cranks are so uncultured; cut off from books and the past. Martyrs braving ridicule? The salt of the earth, making here and there a new world, unseen? Their children will not be cranks....

A rose fell at her feet flung in through the window.

"Come out and play!"

* * * * *

This is joy. To stand back from the court, fall slack, losing sight of the scatter of watching people round the lawn. Nothing but the clasp of the cool air and the firm little weight of the rough-coated ball in a slack hand. The loose-limbed plunge forward to toe the line. One measuring glance and the whole body a taut projectile driving the ball barely clear of the net, to swish furrowing along the ground.

"The lady serves from the cliff and Hartopp volleys from the sky. They're invincible." The yellow young man was charming the other side of the net. Not yellow. His hair a red gold blaze when the sun was setting, loose about his pale eager sculptured face; and now dull gold. He had welcomed her wrangling rush to the net after the first set, rushing forward at once, wrangling, without hearing, Hypo coming too, squealing incoherent contributions. And then the young man had done it again, for her, to make a little scene for the onlookers. But the third time it had been a failure and Hypo had filled the gap with witty shoutings. And all the time the tall man with dense features had said not a word, only swung sympathetically about. Yet he was a friend. From the moment he came up through the garden from France with his bag, uninvited, and sat down and murmured gently in response to vociferous greetings. Ill, after a bad crossing. So huge and so gentle that it had been easy to go up to his chair as everyone else had done, and say lame things, instead of their bright ones, and get away with a sense of having had an immense conversation. He played the game, thinking of nothing else. Understood the style and rhythm of all the incidental movements. The others were different. They had learned their tennis; could remember a time when they did not play. Playing did not take them back to the beginning of life. Was not pure joy to them.

He was wonderful. He altered the tone. The style and peace of his slow sentences. Half German. The best kind of German. Now _he_ could prevent war with Germany, if he could be persuaded to waft to and fro, for Reich's ten years, between the two countries, talking.