for many days they spent their leisure wandering in the green spaces of london, restored to miriam with the frail dream-like wonder they had held in her years of solitude, deepened to a perpetual morning brightness. she recalled, in the hushed reconciliation of the present, while they saw and thought in unison, breaking their long silences with anecdotes, re-living together all they could remember of childhood, their long exhausting, thought-transforming controversies. and as her thoughts had been, so now, in these same green places were her memories transformed.
she watched, wondering, while elderly relatives, hated and banished, standing, forgotten like past nightmares, far away from her independent london life, but still powerful in memory to strike horror into her world, came forth anew, food as she breathlessly spoke their names and described them, for endless speculation. with her efforts to make him see and know them, they grew alive in her hands, significant and attractive as the present, irrecoverable, gone, lonely and pitiful, conquered by her own triumphant existence in a different world, free from obstructions, accompanied, understood. between the movements of conversation from figure to figure, a thread of reflection wove itself in continuous
repetition. perhaps to all these people, life had once looked free and developing. perhaps, if she went their way, she might yet share their fate. never. she was mistress of her fate; there was endless time. the world was changed. they had never known freedom or the endlessness of the passing moment. time for them had been nothing but the continuous pressure of fixed circumstances.
distant parts of london, whither they wandered far through unseen streets, became richly familiar, opening, when suddenly they would realise that they were lost, on some scene, stamped as unforgettably as the magic scenes of holiday excursions. they fingered in long contemplation of all kinds of shop windows, his patient unmoved good-humour while she realised his comparative lack of tastes and preferences, and held forth at length on the difference between style and quality, and the products of the markets, his serene effrontery in taking refuge at last behind the quaintest little tales, satirical, but dreadfully true and illuminating, disarmed her impatience and sent her forward in laughter. he seemed to have an endless supply of these little tales, and told them well, without emphasis, but each one a little drama, perfectly shaped and staged. she collected and remembered and pondered them, the light they shed on unfamiliar aspects of life, playing comfortingly over the future. if judges and generals and emperors and all sorts of people fixed and labelled in social life were really absurd, then social life, with him, might be not merely unaffrighting, but also amusing. at the same time she was affronted by his inclusion of
english society in his satirical references. there were, she was sure, hidden and active, in all ranks in england, a greater proportion of people than in any country of his acquaintance, who stood outside his criticism.
she avoided the house, returning only when the hour justified a swift retreat from the hall to her room; escape from the dimly-lit privacy of the deserted drawing-room. not again could she suffer his nearness, until the foreigner in him, dipped every day more deeply into the well of english feeling, should be changed. when she was alone, she moved, thoughtless, along a pathway that led backwards towards a single memory. far away in the distance, coming always nearer, was the summer morning of her infancy, a permanent standing arrested, level with the brilliance of flower-heads motionless in the sunlit air; no movement but the hovering of bees. beyond this memory towards which she passed every day more surely, a marvellous scene unfolded. and always with the unfolding of its wide prospects, there came a beautifying breath. the surprise of her growing comeliness was tempered by a sudden curious indifference. these new looks of hers were not her own. they brought a strange publicity. she felt, turned upon her, the welcoming, approving eyes of women she had contemptuously neglected, and upon her own face the dawning reflection of their wise, so irritating smile. she recognised them, half fearfully, for they alone were the company gathered about her as she watched the opening marvel. she recognised them for lonely wanderers upon the
earth. they, these women, then were the only people who knew. their smile was the smile of these wide vistas, wrought and shaped, held back by the pity they turned towards the blind life of men; but it was alone in its vision of the spaces opening beyond the world of daily life.
the open scene, that seemed at once without her and within, beckoned and claimed her, extending for ever, without horizons, bringing to her contemplating eye a moving expansion of sight ahead and ahead, earth and sky left behind, across flower-spread plains whose light was purer and brighter than the light of day. here was the path of advance. but pursuing it she must be always alone; supported in the turmoil of life that drove the haunting scene away, hidden beyond the hard visible horizon, by the remembered signs and smiles of these far-off lonely women.
between them and their second week stood a promised visit to the brooms; offering itself each time she surveyed it, under a different guise. but when, for their last evening together, he surprised her, so little did he ever seem to plan or reflect, with stall tickets for the opera she was overwhelmed by the swift regardless pressure of events. opera, for ever outside her means and forgotten, descending thus suddenly upon her without space for preparation of mind, would seem to be wasted. not in such unseemly haste could she approach this crowning ornament of social life. she was speechless, too, before the revelation of his
private ponderings. she knew he was indifferent, even to the theatre, and that he could not afford this tremendous outlay. his recklessness was selfless; a great planning for her utmost recreation. in her satisfaction he was to be content. touched to the heart she tried to express her sense of all these things, much hampered by the dismayed anticipation of failure, on the great evening, to produce any satisfying response. she knew she would dislike opera; fat people, with huge voices, screaming against an orchestra, in the pretence of expressing emotions they had never felt. but he assured her that opera was very beautiful, faust perhaps the most beautiful and charming of all, and drew her attention to the massed voices. to this idea she clung, in the interval, for enlightenment.
but after spending all her available funds on an evening blouse and borrowing a cloak from jan she found herself at the large theatre impressed only by the collected mass of the audience. the sense of being small and alone, accentuated by the presence of little mr. shatov, neatly in evening dress at her side, persisted, growing, until the curtain rose. so long as they had wandered about london and sat together in small restaurants, the world had seemed grouped about them, the vast ignored spectator of a strange romance. but in this huge enclosure, their small, unnoticed, unquestioned presences seemed challenged to account for themselves. all these unmoved people, making the shut-in air cold with their unconcern, even when they were hushed with the strange appealing music
of the overture, were moving with purpose and direction because of their immense unconsciousness. where were they going? what was it all about? what, she asked herself, with a crowning pang of desolation, as the curtain went relentlessly up, were he and she to be or do in this world? what would they become, committed, identified, two small desolate, helpless figures, with the crowding mass of unconscious life?
“i find something of grandeur in the sober dignity of this apartment. it is medi?val germany at its best.”
“it is very dark.”
“wait, wait. you shall see life and sunshine, all in the most beautiful music.”
the sombre scene offered the consolation, suddenly insufficient, that she had found in the past in sliding idly into novels, the restful sense of vicarious life. she had heard of a wonderful philosophy in faust, and wondered at mr. shatov’s claim for its charm. but there was, she felt, no space, on the stage, for philosophy. the scene would change, there was “charm” and sunshine and music ahead. this scene itself was changing as she watched. the old man talking to himself was less full of meaning than the wonderful german interior, the pointed stonework and high, stained windows, the carved chairs and rich old manuscripts. even as he talked, the light from the night-sky, pouring down outside on a beautiful old german town, was coming in. and presently there would be daylight scenes. the real meaning of it all was scenes, each with their separate, rich, silent significance. the
scenes were the story, the translation of the people the actual picture of them as they were by themselves behind all the pother...... she set herself, drifting in solitude away from the complications of the present, to watch germany. the arrival of mephistopheles was an annoying distraction suggesting pantomine. his part in the drama was obscured by mr. shatov’s whispered eulogies of chaliapin, “the only true mephistopheles in europe.” it certainly seemed right that the devil should have “a most profound bass voice.” the chanting of angels in paradise, she suggested, could only be imagined in high clear soprano, whereat he maintained that women’s voices unsupported by the voices of men were not worth imagining at all.
“pippa passes. it is a matter of opinion.”
“it is a matter of fact. these voices are without depth of foundation. what is this pippa?”
“and yet you think that women can rise higher, and fall lower, than men.”
she walked home amidst the procession of scenes, grouped and blending all about her, free of their bondage to any thread of story, bathed in music, beginning their life in her as memory, set up for ever amongst her store of realities. it had been a wonderful evening, opera was wonderful. but the whole effect was threatened, as it stood so lovely all about her in the night air, by his insistence upon a personal interpretation, surprising her in the midst of the garden scene and renewed now as they walked, by little attempts to accentuate the
relationship of their linked arms. once more she held off the threatened obliteration. but the scenes had retreated, far away beyond the darkness and light of the visible street. with sudden compunction she felt that it was she who had driven them away, driven away the wonders that were after all his gift. if she had softened towards him, they would have gone, just the same.... it was too soon to let them work as an influence.
absurd, too, to try to invent life which did not come of itself. he had desisted and was away, fallen into his thoughtful forgetful singing, brumming out shreds of melody that brought single scenes vividly penetrating the darkness. she called him back with a busy repentance, carelessly selecting from her thronging impressions a remark that instantly seemed meaningless.
“yes” he said heartily, “there is, absolutely, something echt, kern-gesund about these old-german things.”
that was it. it had all meant, really, the same for him; and he knew what it was that made the charm; admitting it, in spite of his strange deep dislike of the germans. kern-gesundheit was not a sufficient explanation. but the certainty of his having been within the charm made him real, a related part of the pageant of life, his personal engaging small attribute her own undivided share. on the doorstep, side by side with his renewed silent appeal, she turned and met, standing free, his gentle tremulous salutation.
for a moment the dark silent house blazed into light before her. she moved forward, as he opened
the door, as into a brightness of light where she should stand visible to them both, in a simplicity of golden womanhood, no longer herself, but his marguerite, yet so differently fated, so differently identified with him in his new simplicity, going forward together, his thoughts and visions as simple as her own in the life now just begun, from which their past dropped away grey and cold, the irrelevant experience of strangers.
but the hall was dark and the open dining-room door showed blank darkness. she led the way in; she could not yet part from him and lose the strange radiance surrounding herself. they ought to go forward now, together, from this moment, shedding a radiance. to part was to break and mar, forever, some essential irrecoverable glory. they sat side by side on the sofa by the window. the radiance in which she sat crowned, a figure visible to herself, recognisable, humble and proud and simple, back in its christian origin, a single weak small figure, transfixed with light, dreadfully trusted with the searing, brightly gleaming dower of christian womanhood, was surrounded by a darkness unpenetrated by the faint radiance the high street lamps must be sending through the thick lace curtains. this she thought is what people mean by the golden dream; but it is not a dream. no one who has been inside it can ever be the same again or quite get out. the world it shows is the biggest world there is. it is outer space where god is and christ waits. “i am very happy, do you feel happy?” the small far-off man’s voice sounded out, lost in the impenetrable darkness. yet it was through him,
through some essential quality in him that she had reached this haven and starting place, he who had brought this smiting descent of certainties which were to carry her on her voyage into the unknown darkness, and since he could not see her smile, she must speak.
“i think so,” she said gently. she must, she suddenly realised, never tell him more than that. his happiness was, she now recognised, hearing his voice, different to hers. to admit and acclaim her own would be the betrayal of a secret trust. if she could dare to lay her hand upon him, he might know. but they were too separate. and if he were to touch her now, they would again be separated for longer than before, for always. “good-night,” she said, brushing his sleeve with the tips of her fingers, “dear, funny little man.”
he followed her closely but she was soon away up the familiar stairs in the darkness, in her small close room, and trying to chide herself for her inadequate response, while within the stifling air the breath of sunlit open spaces moved about her.
but in the morning when the way to king’s cross station was an avenue of sunlight, under a blue sky triumphant with the pealing of church bells, his sole conversation was an attempt to induce her to reproduce the epithet. the small scrap of friendliness had made him happy! no one, it seemed, had ever so addressed him. his delight was all her own. she was overcome by the revelation of her power to bless without effort. the afternoon’s visit now seemed a welcome interval in the too swift succession
of discoveries. in the cool noisy shelter of the station, sunday holiday-makers were all about them. he was still charmingly preening himself, set off by the small busy crowd, his eye wandering with its familiar look, a childlike contemplation of the english spectacle. to miriam’s unwilling glance it seemed for observation a fruitless field; nothing exhibited there could challenge speculation.
on each face, so na?vely engrossed with immediate arranged circumstance, character, opinion, social conditions, all that might be expected under the small tests of small circumstances, was plainly written in monotonous reiteration. moving and going, they could go, with all their busy eagerness, no further than themselves. at their destinations other similar selves awaited them, to meet and send them back, unchanged; an endless circling. over their unchanging, unquestioned world, no mystery brooded with black or golden wings. they would circle unsurprised until for each one came the surprise of death. it was all they had. they were dreadful to contemplate because they suggested only death, unpondered death. her eye rested for relief upon a barefooted newspaper boy running freely about with his cry, darting head down towards a shouted challenge.
“before you go” mr. shatov was saying. she turned towards his suddenly changed voice, saw his pale face, grave, and working with the determination to difficult speech; saw him, while she stood listening to the few tense phrases in painful admiration of his courage, horribly transformed, by the images he evoked far away, immovable in the sunshine
of his earlier days. the very trembling of his voice had attested the agonising power of his communication. yet behind it all, with what a calmness of his inner mind, had he told her, now, only now, when they were set in the bright amber of so many days, that he had been lost to her, forever, long ago in his independent past. the train was drawing in. she turned away speechless.
“miriam, miriam” he pleaded in hurried shaken tones close at her side, “remember, i did not know that you would come.”
“well, i must go,” she said briskly, the words sounding out to her like ghostly hammer-blows upon empty space. never again should her voice sound. the movement of getting into the train brought a nerve-crisping relief. she had taken the first step into the featureless darkness where, alone, she was to wait, in a merciful silence, forever.
“i shall meet you this evening,” said his raised voice from the platform. he stood with bowed head, his eyes gravely on her unconsidering gaze, until the train moved out. she set her teeth against the slow movement of the wheels, grinding it seemed, smoke-befouled, deliberate, with awful circling relentlessness over her prostrate body, clenched together for the pang, too numb to feel it if only it would come, but left untouched.
the crushing of full realisation, piling up behind her numbness, must pass over her. there was not much time. the train was carrying her steadily onward, and towards conversation with the unconscious brooms. she tried to relax to its movement,
to hold back from the entanglements of thought and regard the day as an interval outside the hurrying procession of her life. a way opened narrowly ahead, attainable by one rending effort, into a silence, within which the grey light filtering through the dingy windows on to the grime-greyed floor offered itself with a promise of reassurance. it was known to her; by its unvexed communion with her old self. one free breath of escape from the visions she was holding clutched for inspection, and herself would be given back to her. this awful journey would change to an eternity following serenely on a forgotten masquerade. she would not lose her knowing that all solitary journeys go on forever, waiting through intervals, to renew themselves. but the effort, even if she could endure the pain of it, would be treachery until she had known and seen without reservations the whole meaning of the immovable fact. the agony within her must mean that somewhere behind the mere statements, if she could but get through and discover it, there must be a revelation that would set the world going again; bring back the vanquished sunlight. meanwhile life must pause, humanity must stay hushed and waiting while she thought. a grey-shod foot appeared on her small empty patch of floor. with the fever of pain that flooded her she realised that she could go neither forward nor back. life pinned her motionless, in pain. her eye ran up and found the dreaming face of a girl; the soft fresh lineaments of childhood, shaped to a partial awareness by some fixed daily toil, but still, on all she saw, the gleam she did not know could disappear, did not
recognise for what it was, priceless and enough. she would never recognise it. she was one of those women men wrap in lies, persisting unchanged through life, revered and yet odious in the kindly stupidity of thoughts fixed immovably on unreality, the gleam gone, she knew not why, and yet avenged by her awful unconscious production of the kind of social life to which men were tied, compelled to simulate life in her obstinate, smiling fool’s .... hell. the rest of the people in the carriage were aware, in the thick of conscious deceits; playing parts. the women, strained and defaced, all masked watchfulness, cut off from themselves, weaving romances in their efforts to get back, the men betraying their delight in their hidden opportunities of escape by the animation behind the voice and manners they assumed for the fixed calculable periods of forced association; ready to distract attention from themselves and their hidden treasures by public argument, if accident should bring it about, over anything and everything.
at least she saw. but what was the use of not being deceived? how in the vast spread of humanity expose the sham? how escape, without surrendering life itself, treacherous countenancing of the fiendish spectacle? what good would death do? what did “eine fur viele” do? brought home the truth to one man, who probably after the first shock, soon came to the conclusion that she had been mad.
she talked through lunch to the brooms with such an intensity of animation that when at last the
confrontation was at an end and the afternoon begun in the shelter of the dim little drawing-room, she found grace and florrie grouped closely about her, wrapped and eager for more. she turned, at bay, explaining in shaken unmeditated words that the afternoon must be spent by her in thinking out a frightful problem, and relapsed, averted swiftly from their sensitive faces, suddenly pale about eyes that reflected her distress, towards the open door of the little greenhouse leading miserably into the stricken garden. they remained motionless in the chairs they had drawn close to the little settee where she sat enthroned, clearly prepared so to sit in silent sympathy while she gazed at her problem in the garden. she sat tense, but with their eyes upon her she could not summon directly the items of her theme. they appeared transformed in words, a statement of the case that might be made to them, ‘anyone’s’ statement of the case, beginning with “after all”; and leaving everything unstated. applied to her own experience they seemed to have no meaning at all. summaries were no good. actual experience must be brought home to make anything worth communicating. “when he first kissed me” started her mind “those women were all about him. they have come between us forever.” she flushed towards the garden. the mere presence in her mind of such vileness was an outrage on the broom atmosphere. she could not again face the girls. for some time she sat, driving from point to point in the garden the inexorable fact that she had reached a barrier she could not break down. she could, if she were alone, face the
possibility of dashing her life out against it. if she were to turn back from it, she would be rent in twain, and how then, base and deformed could she find spirit to face anyone at all? at last, still with her eyes on the garden, she told them, she must go and think in the open air. they cherished and indulged her in their unaltered way and she escaped, exempted from coming back to tea.
suppose, said the innumerable voices of the road, as she wandered down it relieved and eager in the first moments of freedom, he had not told you? it was sincere and fine of him to tell. not at all. he wanted to have an easy mind. he has only explained what it was that came between us at the first, and has been waiting ever since to be there again....
“remember; i did not know you would come.”
why did men not know? that was the strange thing. why did they make their first impressions of women such as would sully everything that came after? that was the extraordinary thing about the average man and many men who were not average at all. why?
the answer must be there if she could only get through to it. some immovable answer. the wrong one perhaps, but sufficient to frame an irreversible judgment. there was an irreversible judgment at the heart of it all that would remain, even if further fuller truer reasons were reached later on. anything that could take the life out of the sunlight was wrong. every twist and turn of the many little side roads along which she made her way told her that. it was useless to try
to run away from it. it remained, the only point of return from the wilderness of anger into which with every fresh attempt at thought, she was immediately flung. the more angry she grew the further she seemed to move from the possibility of finding and somehow expressing, in words that had not sounded in her mind before, the clue to her misery.
she reached the park at tea-time. its vistas were mercifully empty. she breathed more freely within its greenery. hidden somewhere here, was relief for the increasing numbness of her brain and the drag of her aching heart. the widening sky understood and would presently, when she had reached the statement that lay now, just ahead, offer itself in the old way, for companionship. wandering along a little path that wound in and out of a thicket of shrubs, she heard a subdued rumble of voices and came in a moment upon two men, bent-headed in conversation side by side on a secluded seat. they looked up at her and upon their shiny german faces, and in the cold rheumy blue eyes beneath their unconscious intelligent german foreheads, was the horrible leer of their talk. looking up from it, scanning her in the spirit of the images of life they had evoked in their sequestrated confidential interchange, they identified her with their vision. she turned back towards the wide empty avenues. but there was no refuge in them. their bleak emptiness reflected the thoughtless lives of english men. behind her the two germans were immovably there, hemming her in. they were the answer. sitting hidden there, in the
english park, they were the whole unconscious male mind of europe surprised unmasked. thought out and systematised by them, openly discussed, without the cloudy reservations of englishmen, was the whole masculine sense of womanhood. one image; perceived only with the body, separated and apart from everything else in life. men were mind and body, separated mind and body, looking out at women, below their unconscious men’s brows, variously moulded and sanctified by thought, with one unvarying eye. there was no escape from its horrible blindness, no other life in the world to live .... the leer of a prostitute was .... reserved .... beautiful, suggesting a daily life lived independently amongst the impersonal marvels of existence, compared to the headlong desirous look of a man. the greed of men was something much more awful than the greed of a prostitute. she used her last strength to wrench herself away from the hopeless spectacle and wandered impatient and thoughtless in a feverish void. far away from this barren north london, the chosen perfect stage for the last completion of a misery as wide as the world, was her own dream world at home in her room, her strange unfailing self, the lovely world of lovely things seen in silence and tranquillity, the coming and going of the light, the myriad indescribable things of which day and night, in solitude, were full, at every moment; the marvellous forgetfulness of sleep, followed by the smiling renewal of inexhaustible sameness .... thought flashed in, stabbing her weakness with the reminder that solitude had failed and from its
failure she had been saved by the companionship of a man; of whom until to-day she had been proud in a world lit by the glory and pride of achieved companionships. but it was an illusion, fading and failing more swiftly than the real things of solitude ..... there was no release save in madness; a suddenly descending merciful madness, blotting everything out. she imagined herself raging and raving through the park, through the world, attacking the indifferent sky at last with some final outbreaking statement, something, somewhere within her she must say, or die. she gazed defiance upwards at the cloudless blue. the distant trees flattened themselves into dark clumps against the horizon. swiftly she brought her eyes back to the diminishing earth. something must be said; not to the sky, but in the world. she grew impatient for mr. shatov’s arrival. if only she could convey to him all that was in her mind, going back again and again endlessly to some central unanswerable assertion, the truth would be out. stated. at least one man brought to book, arrested and illuminated. but what was it? that men are not worthy of women. he would agree, and remain pleading. that men never have, never can, understand the least thing about even the worst woman in the world? he would find things to say. she plunged back groping for weapons of statement, amongst the fixities of the world, there from the beginning, and pressing at last with their mocking accomplishment, against her small thread of existence. long grappling in darkness against the inexorable images, she fell back at last upon wordless
repudiation, and again the gulf of isolation opened before her. the struggle was not to be borne. it was monstrous, unforgivable, that it should be demanded of her. yet it could not be given up. the smallest glance in the direction of even the simulation of acceptance, brought a panic sense of treachery that flung her back to cling once more to the vanishing securities of her own untouched imagination.
when at last he appeared, the sight of the familiar distinctive little figure plunging energetically along, beard first, through the north london sunday evening crowd drifting about the park gates, their sounds quenched by the blare of the salvation army’s band marching townwards along the battered road, for one strange moment while a moving light came across the gravel pathway at her feet, decking its shabby fringe of grass with the dewy freshness of some remembered world far away and unknown to this trampling blind north london, she asked herself what all the trouble was about. what after all had changed? not herself, that was clear. walking in fevered darkness had not destroyed the light. but he had joined her, pulling up before her with white ravaged face and hands stretched silently towards her.
“for pity’s sake don’t touch me,” she cried involuntarily and walked on, accompanied, examining her outcry. it was right. it had a secret knowledge. they rode in silence on tram and bus. below them on the dimly-lit pavements people moved, shadows broken loose and scattered in the
grey of night. gaslit, talking faces succeeded each other under the street lamps; not one speaking its thoughts; no feeling expressed that went even as deep as the screening chatter of words in the mind. but presently all about her, as she sat poised for the length of the journey between the dead stillness within her and the noise of the silence without, a world most wonderful was dawning with strange irrelevance, forcing her attention to lift itself from the abyss of her fatigue. look at us, the buildings seemed to say, sweeping by massed and various and whole, spangled with light. we are here. we, are the accomplished marvel. buildings had always seemed marvellous; and in their moving, changing aspects an endless fascination, except in north london, where they huddled without distinction, defaced in feature and outline by a featureless blind occupancy. but to-night, it was north london that was revealing the marvel of the mere existence of a building. north londoners were not under the spell; but it was there. their buildings rising out of the earth where once there had been nothing, proclaimed it as they swept dreaming by, making roadways that were like long thoughts, meeting and crossing and going on and on, deep alleyways and little courts where always was a pool of light or darkness, pouring down from their secret communion with the sky a strange single reality upon the clothed and trooping multitude below. and all the strange unnoticed marvel of buildings and clothes, the even more marvellously strange unnoticed clothing of speech, all existing alone and independent outside the small existence
of single lives and yet proclaiming them ..... an exclamation of wonder rose to her lips, and fell back checked, by the remembered occasion, to which for an instant she returned as a stranger seeing the two figures side by side chained in suspended explanations that would not set them free, and left her gazing again, surrendered, addressing herself with a deepening ease of heart to the endless friendly strength flowing from things unconsciously brought about. it brought a balm that lulled her almost to sleep, so that when at last their journey was at an end she found herself wordless and adrift in a tiresome pain, that must be removed only because it blotted out marvels.
he began at once, standing before her, relating in simple unbroken speech the story of his student days, without pleading or extenuation; waiting at the end for her judgment.
“and that first photograph that i liked, was before; and the other, after.”
“that is so.”
“in the first there is someone looking out through the eyes; in the other that someone has moved away.”
“that is so. i agree.”
“well, can’t you see? never to come back. never to come back.”
“miriam. remember i am no more that man. i was in suffering and in ignorance. it would have been better otherwise. i agree with you. but that is all past. i am no more that man.”
“can’t you see that there is no past?”
“i confess i do not understand this.”
“it is crowding all round you. i felt it. don’t you remember? before i knew. it comes between us all the time. i know now. it’s not an idea; or prudishness. it’s more solid than the space of air between us. i can’t get through it.”
“remember i was suffering and alone.” somewhere within the vibrating tones was the careless shouting of his boyhood; that past was there too; and the eager lifting voice of his earlier student days, still sometimes alive in the reverie of his lifted singing brows. the voice had been quelled. in his memory as he stood there before her was pain, young lonely pain. within the life thrown open without reservation to her gaze, she saw, confronting her determination to make him suffer, the image of unhealed suffering, still there, half stifled by his blind obedience to worldly ignorant advice, but waiting for the moment to step forward and lay its burden upon her own unwilling heart, leaving him healed and free. tears sprang to her eyes, blotting him out, and with them she sprang forth into a pathless darkness, conscious far away behind her, soon to be obliterated on the unknown shores opening ahead, but there gladly in hand, of a debt, signed and to be honoured even against her will, by life, surprised once more at this darkest moment, smiling at her secretly, behind all she could gather of opposing reason and clamourous protests of unworthiness. “poor boy” she gasped, gathering him as he sank to his knees, with swift enveloping hands against her breast. the unknown woman sat alone, with eyes wide open towards the
empty air above his hidden face. this was man; leaning upon her with his burden of loneliness, at home and comforted. this was the truth behind the image of woman supported by man. the strong companion was a child seeking shelter; the woman’s share an awful loneliness. it was not fair.
she moved to raise and restore him, at least to the semblance of a supporting presence. but with a sudden movement he bent and caught a fold of her dress to his lips. she rose with a cry of protest, urging him to his feet.
“i know now,” he said simply, “why men kneel to women.” while in her heart she thanked heaven for preserving her to that hour, the dreadful words invested her in yet another loneliness. she seemed to stand tall and alone, isolated for a moment from her solid surroundings, within a spiral of unconsuming radiance.
“no one ought to kneel to anyone,” she lied in pity, and moved out restlessly into the room. we are real. as others have been real. there is a sacred bond between us now, ratified by all human experience. but oh the cost and the demand. it was as if she were carrying in her hands something that could be kept safe only by a life-long silence. everything she did and said in future must hide the sacred trust. it gave a freedom; but not of speech or thought. it left the careless dreaming self behind. only in ceaseless occupation could it hold its way. its only confidant would be god. holding to it, everything in life, even difficulties, would be transparent. but seen from the outside,
by the world, an awful mysteriously persistent commonplace. it was not fair that men did not know the whole of this secret place and its compact. why was god in league only with women?
