REVOLVING LIGHTS
BY
DOROTHY M. RICHARDSON
LONDON: DUCKWORTH & CO.
3, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN
First published in 1923.
All rights reserved.
THE WORK OF
DOROTHY M. RICHARDSON
“In the ordinary novel, the novelist stands
on the banks of the river of life chronicling
how and when people arise, and how it is that
things happen to them. But Miriam (the
central figure of Dorothy Richardson’s work)
pulls us with her into the yielding water.”—
Nation.
“The style grows upon one with familiarity;
it is continually illumined by passages of
brilliant insight, and its half-subconscious
revelation of personality is wonderfully attractive.”—
Daily
Telegraph.
DUCKWORTH & CO.
3 HENRIETTA STREET, LONDON, W.C.
REVOLVING LIGHTS
CHAPTER I
THE building of the large hall had been
brought about by people who gave no
thought to the wonder of moving from one space
to another and up and down stairs. Yet this
wonder was more to them than all the things on
which their thoughts were fixed. If they would
take time to realise it. No one takes time.
No one knows it. . . . But I know it. . . .
These seconds of knowing, of being told, afresh,
by things speaking silently, make up for the
pain of failing to find out what I ought to be
doing. . . .
Away behind, in the flatly echoing hall, was
the busy planning world of socialism, intent on
the poor. Far away in to-morrow, stood the
established, unchanging world of Wimpole Street,
linked helpfully to the lives of the prosperous
classes. Just ahead, at the end of the walk
home, the small isolated Tansley Street world,
full of secretive people drifting about on the edge
of catastrophe, that would leave, when it en-
gulfed them, no ripple on the surface of the tide
of London life. In the space between these
7
8 REVOLVING LIGHTS
surrounding worlds was the everlasting solitude ;
ringing as she moved to cross the landing, with
voices demanding an explanation of her presence
in any one of them.
" Now that,'' she quoted, to counter the fore-
most attack, " is a man who can be trusted to
say what he thinks."
That cloaked her before the clamorous silence.
She was an observant intelligent woman ; ap-
proved. He would never imagine that the
hurriedly borrowed words meant, to her, nothing
but a shadow of doubt cast across the earnest little
socialist. But they carried her across the landing.
And here, at the head of the stairs, was the show
case of cold Unitarian literature. Yet another
world. Bright, when she had first become aware
of it, with freedom from the problem of Christ,
offering, until she had met its inhabitants face
to face, a congenial home. Sending her away,
at a run, from cold humorous intellectuality.
She paused in front of the case, avoiding the
sight of the well-known, chilly titles of the
books, to read what had gathered in her mind
during the evening.
A group of people who had come out just
behind her were going down the stairs arguing
in high-pitched, public platform voices from the
surfaces of their associated minds. Not saying
what they thought. Not thinking. Strong and
controlled enough to keep within pattern of
clever words. Most of them had been born to
it. Born on the stage of clever words, which
yet meant nothing to them. But to one or
REVOLVING LIGHTS 9
two people in the society these words did
mean something. . . .
Nothing came after they had passed but the
refrain that had been the mental accompaniment
of her listening throughout the evening, stepping
forth now as part of a high-pitched argumentative
to and fro. Her part, if she could join in and
shout them all down. Sounding irrelevant and
yet coming right down to earth, one small part of
a picture puzzle set in place ... a clue.
'* Any number of barristers," she vociferated
in her mind, going on down the shallow stair,
"take up JOURNALISM. Get into Parlia-
ment. On the strength of being both educated
and articulate. Weapons, giving an unfair advan-
tage. The easy touch of prominence. Only a
good nervous system wanted. They are psycho-
logists. Up to a point. Enough to convince
nice busy people, rushing through life without
time to bethink themselves. Enough to alarm
and threaten and cajole. They can raise storms ;
in newspapers. And brandish about by name^ at
their centres, like windmills, kept going by the
wind of their psychological cheap-jackery. Yes,
sir. Psychological cheap-jackery. . . . Purple-
faced John Bull paterfamilias. Paterfamiliarity.
Avenging his state by hitting out . . . With
an eye for a pretty face. . . .
The little man had no axe to grind. That
was the only test. An Englishman, and a
barrister, and yet awake to foreign art. His
opaque English temperament not weakened by
it ; but worn a little transparent. He would
lo REVOLVING LIGHTS
be silent in an instant before a superior testi-
mony.
He did not count on anything. When Socialism
came, he would be placed in an administrative
post, and would fill it quietly, working harder
than ever.
He brought the future nearer because he al-
ready moved within it ; by being aware of things
most men did not consider ; aware of relation-
ships : possibly believing in God, certainly in
the soul.
Modern man, individually, is in many respects
less capable than primitive man. Evolution is
related development. Progress towards social
efficiency. Benjamin Kidd.
" These large speculations are most-fatigu-
ing."
" No. When you see truth in them they are
refreshing. They are all there is. All I live for
now, is the arrival in my mind, of fresh general-
isations."
** That is good. But remember also that
these things cost life."
" What does it matter what they cost } A
shape of truth makes you at the moment want
to die, full of gratitude and happiness. It fills
everything with a music to which you could
die. The next piece of life comes as a super-
fluity."
" Le superflu ; chose necessaire."
At the foot of the stairs stood the yellow street-
light, framed in the oblong of the doorway. She
went put into its shelter. The large grey legal
REVOLVING LIGHTS ii
buildings that stood by day a solid, dignified
pile against the sky, a whole remaining region of
the pride of London, showed only their lower
facades, near, gentle frontages of mellow golden
light and soft rectangular shadow, just above
the brightly gilded surface of the deserted road-
way. For a moment she stood listening to the
reflection of the fostering light and breathing in
the dry warm freshness of the London night
air.
The illuminated future faded. The street
lights of that coming time might throw their rays
more liberally, over more beautiful streets. But
something would be lost. In a world consciously
arranged for the good of everybody there would
be something personal . . . without foundation
. . . like a nonconformist preacher's smile. The
pavements of these streets that had grown of
themselves, flooded by the light of lamps rooted
like trees in the soil of London, were more surely
pavements of gold than those pavements of the
future ?
They ofl^ered themselves freely ; the unfailing
magic that would give its life to the swing of her
long walk home, letting her leave without regret
the earlier hidden magic of the evening, the
thoughts that had gathered in her mind whilst
she listened, and that had now slipped away
unpondered, leaving uppermost the outlines of
the lecture to compete with the homeward walk.
The surrounding golden glow through which
she could always escape into the recovery of
certainty, warned her not to return upon the
12 REVOLVING LIGHTS
lecture. But she could not let all she had heard
disappear unnoted, and postponed her onward
rush, apologising for the moments about to be
spent in conning over the store of ideas. In an
instant the glow had gone, miscarried like her
private impressions of the evening. The objects
about her grew clear ; full of current associations ;
and she wondered as her mind moved back
across the linked statements of the lecture,
whether these were her proper concern, or yet
another step upon a long pathway of transgression.
She was grasping at incompatible things, sacri-
ficing the bliss of her own uninfluenced life to the
temptation of gathering things that had been
offered by another mind. Things to which she
had no right ?
But all the things of the mind that had come her
way had come unsought ; yet finding her pre-
pared ; so that they seemed not only her right-
ful property, but also in some way, herself. The
proof was that they had passed her sisters by,
finding no response ; but herself they had drawn,
often reluctant, perpetually escaping and forget-
ting ; out on to a path that it sometimes seemed
she must explore to the exclusion of everything
else in life, exhaustively, the long way round,
the masculine way. It was clearly not her fault
that she had a masculine mind. If she must
pay the penalties, why should she not also reap
the entertainments ?
Still, it was strange, she reflected, with a con-
sulting glance at the returning brilliance, that
without any effort of her own, so very many
REVOLVING LIGHTS 13
different kinds of people and thoughts should
have come, one after the other, as if in an
ordered sequence, into the little backwater
of her life. What for ? To what end was
her life working by some sort of inner arrange-
ment ? To turn, into a beautiful distance out-
spread behind her as she moved on ? What
then ?
For instance, the sudden appearance of the
revolutionaries just at this moment, seemed so
apt. She had always wanted to meet revolu-
tionaries, yet had never gone forth to seek them.
Since her contact with socialists, she had been
more curious about them than ever. And here
they were, on their way to her, just as the meaning
and some of the limitations of socialism were
growing distinct. Yet it was absurd to suppose
that their visit to England, in the midst of their
exciting career, should have been timed to meet
her need. Nor would they convince her. The
light that shone about them was the anticipation
of a momentary intense interest that would leave
her a step farther on the lonely wandering that
so distracted her from the day's work, and kept
her family and the old known life at such an
immeasurable distance. It was her ruling devil
who had just handed her, punctually on the eve
of their arrival, material for conversation with
revolutionaries.
But it also seemed to be the mysterious friend,
her star, the queer strange luck that dogged her
path always reviving happiness, bringing a sudden
joy when there was nothing to account for it,
14 REVOLVING LIGHTS
plunging her into some new unexpected thing
at the very moment of perfect hopelessness. It
was like a game . . . something was havin? a
game of hide and seek with her. She winkc.:,
smiling, at the returned surrounding glow, and
turned back to run up and down the steps ot the
neglected argument.
It was clear in her mind. Freed from the
fascinating distraction of the little man's man-
nerisms, it spread fresh light, in all directi'
tempering the golden light of the street ; shew-
ing, beyond the outer darkness of the night, the
white radiance of the distant future. Wir'^'"
the radiance, troops of people marched aht ,
with springing footsteps ; the sound of song in
their ceaselessly talking voices ; the forward
march of a unanimous, light-hearted humanity
along a pathway of white morning light. . . .
The land of promise that she would never sec ;
not through being born too soon, but by being
incapable of unanimit}\ All these people had
one mind. They approved of each other and
were gay in unity.
The spectacle of their escape from the shadows
lessened the pain of being left behind. Perhaps
even a moment's contemplation of the future
helped to bring it about .'' Ever}' thought vi-
brates through the universe. Then there was
absolution in thought, even from the anger of
everlastingly talking people, contemptuous of
silence and aloofness. And there was unity
with the future.
The surrounding light glowed with a richer
REVOLVING LIGHTS
15
intensity. Flooded through her, thrilling her
feet to swiftness.
If the revolutionaries could be with her now,
they would find in her something of the state
towards which they were violently straining ?
They would pause and hover for a moment,
with half envious indulgence. But sooner or
later they would say things about robust English
health ; its unconsciousness of its surround-
ings.
The mystery of being English. Mocked at
for stupidity and envied for having something
that concerned the mocking people of the two
continents and challenged them to discover its
secret.
But by to-morrow night she would have nothing
but the little set of remembered facts, dulled by
the fatigue of her day's work. These would
save her, for the one evening, from appearing as
the unintelligent Englishwoman of foreigner's
experience. But they would also keep out the
possibility of expressing anything, s/'
Even the bare outlines of socialism, presented
suddenly to unprepared English people, were
unfailing as a contribution to social occasions.
They forced everyone to look at the things they
had taken for granted in a new light, and to re-
member, together with the startling picture, the
person who first drew it for them. But to
appear before these Russians talking English
socialism was to be nothing more than a useful
person in uniform.
What zvas the immediate truth that shone,
r6
REVOLVING LIGHTS
independent of speculation, all about her in the
English light ; the only thing worth telling to
enquiring foreigners ?
It was there at once when she was alone, or
watching other people as an audience, or as an
uncommitted guest, expressing in a great variety
of places different sets of opinions. It was there
radiant, obliterating her sense of existence, when-
ever she was in the midst of things kept going
by other people. It could be given her by a
beggar, purposefully crossing a street . . . not
' pitiful,' as he was so carelessly called — but
something that shook her with gratitude to the
roots of her being. But the instant she was
called upon there came the startled realisation
of being in the world, and the sense of nothing-
ness, preceding and accompanying every remark
she might make.
One opinion self-consciously stated made the
light go down. Immediate substitution of the
contrary, produced a chill followed by darkness.
. . . Men called out these contradictory state-
ments, each one with his way of having only one
set of opinions.
How powerful these Russians were, in advance,
making her count herself up. If she saw much
of them she would fail and fade into nothing
under the Russian test. If there were only one
short interview she might escape unknown, and
knowmg all the things about Russian revolu-
tionaries that Michael Shatov had left incom-
plete.
Their scornful revolutionary eyes watched her
REVOLVING LIGHTS 17
glance about amongst her hoard of contradictory
ideas. Statements about different ways of look-
ing at things were irrelevancies that perhaps with
Russians might be abandoned altogether. Yet
to appear before them empt)'-handed, hidden
in her earlier uninfluenced personality', would be
"""^ I not to meet them at all. Personal life to them
""' I was nothing, could be summed up in a few
words, the same for everybody. They lived for
' an idea.
She offered them a comprehensive glimpse of
' the many pools of thought in which she had
plunged, rising from each in turn, to recover the
I bank and repudiate ; unless a channel could be
I driven, that would make all their waters meet.
They laughed when she cried out at the hope-
lessness of uniting them. '* All these things are
nothing."
But a revolutionary' is a man who throws him-
self into space. In Russia there is nowhere else
to throw himself .' That would do as an answer
to their criticisms of English socialism. She
could say also that conservatives are the best
socialists ; being liberal-w/W^c/. Most socialists
were narrow and illiberal, holding on to liberal
ideas. The aim of the Lycurgans, alone amongst
the world's socialists, was to show the English
aristocracy and middle classes that they were,
still, socialists.
There zvere things in England. But thev
struggled at cross purposes, refusing to get into
a shape that would draw one, zi'ho/ej along with it.
But there were things in England with truth
B
i8 REVOLVING LIGHTS
shining behind them. English people did not
shine. But something shone behind them.
Russians shone. But there was nothing behind
them. There were things in England. She
offered them the contents of books. They were
as real as the pools of experience. Yet they, too,
were irreconcilable.
A little blue-lit street ; lamps with large round
globes, shedding moonlight ; shadows, grey and
black. She had somehow got into the west-end
— a little west-end street, giving out its character.
She went softly along the middle of the blue-lit
glimmering roadway, narrow between the narrow
pavements skirting the high facades, flat and
grey, broken by shadowy pillared porticoes ;
permanent exits and entrances on the stage of
the London scene ; solid lines and arches of
pure grey shaping the flow of the pageant, and
emerging, when it ebbed away, to stand in their
own beauty, conjuring back the vivid tumult to
flow in silence, a continuous ghostly garland of
moving shapes and colours, haunting their self-
sufficient calm.
Within the stillness she heard the jingling
of hansoms, swinging in morning sunlight along
the wide thoroughfares of the west-end ; saw
the wide leisurely shop-fronts displaying in a
restrained profusion, comfortably within the ex-
perienced eye half turned to glance from a passing
vehicle, all the belongings of west-end life ; on
the pavements, the trooping succession of masked
life-moulded forms, their unobservant eyes, aware
of the resources all about them, at gaze upon
REVOLVING LIGHTS 19
their continuous adventure, yesterday still with
them as they came out, in high morning light,
into the adventure of to-day. Campaigners,
sure of their weapons in the gaily decked melde,
and sure every day of the blissful solitude of the
interim times.
For as long as she could remember she had
known something of their secret. During the
years of her London life she had savoured be-
tween whiles the quality of their world, divined
its tests and passwords, known what kept their
eyes unseeing and their speech clipped to a
jargon.
Best of all was the illumination that had come
with her penetration of the mystery of their
attitude towards direct questions. There was
something here that had offered her again and
again a solution of the problem of social life, a
safeguard of individuality. Here it was once
more, a still small voice urging that every moment
of association would be transformed if she would
only remember the practice the technique re-
vealed by her contemplation of this one quality.
Always to be solid and resistent ; unmoved.
Having no opinions and only one enthusiasm —
to be unmoved. Momentary experiments had
proved that the things that were about her in
solitude could be there all the time. But forget-
fulness always came. Because most people
brought their worlds with them, their opinions,
and the set of things they believed in ; forcing
in the end direct questions and disagreements.
And most people were ready to answer questions,
20 REVOLVING LIGHTS
showing by their angry defence of their opinions
that they were aware, and afraid, of other ways
of looking at things. But these society people
did not seem to be aware of anything but their
one world. Perhaps that was why their social
method was not able to hold her for long to-
gether. *
" Is this the way to Chippenham ? " But
everyone delights in telling the way. It brintrs
the teller out into adventure ; with his best self
and his best moments all about him. The
surroundings are suddenly new with life, and
beautiful like things seen in passing, on a journey.
English people delight because they are adven-
turous. They prolong the moment, beaming
and expanding, and go on their way refreshed.
Foreigners, except perhaps (iermans, answer
differently. Obsequiously ; or with a studied
politeness that turns the occasic^n into an oppor-
tunity for the display of manners ; or indiffer-
ently, with a cynical suggestion that they know
what you are like, and that you will be the
same when you reach your destination. They
are themselves, without any fulness or wonder.
English people are always waiting to be different,
to be fully themselves. Strangers, to them, arc
gods and angels.
But it is another kind of question that is meant,
the question that is a direct attack on the unseeing
gaze ; a speech to the man at the wheel. That
is where, without knowing it, these people are
philosophers. What Socrates saw, answered all
his questions ; and his counterings of the young
REVOLVING LIGHTS 21
men's questions were invitations to them to look
for themselves. The single world these people
see is, to them, so unquestionable that there is no
room for question. Nothing can be communi-
cated except the latest news ; and scandal ; in-
formation about people who have gone outside
the shape. But, to each other, even their state-
ments are put in the form of questions. ** Fine
day, what ? " So that everyone may be not
questioned, but questioner. It is also a sort of
apology for falling into speech at all.
It was Michael Shatov's amused delight in her
stories of their method that had made her begin
to cherish them as a possession. Gradually she
had learned that irritation with their apparent
insolence was jealousy. Within her early in-
terested unenvious sallies of investigation
amongst the social elite of the V^^impole Street
patients, or as a fellow guest amongst the Orlys*
society friends, there had been moments of
longing to sweep away the defences and discoun-
tenance the individual. But gradually the con-
viction had dawned that with the genuine merfi-
bers of the clan this could not be done. Their
quality went right through, shedding its central
light, a brightness that could not be encircled,
over the whole of humanity. They disarmed
attack, because in their singleness of nature they
were not aware of anything to defend. They
had no contempts ; not being specially intel-
lectual ; and, crediting everyone with their own
condition, they reached to the sources of nobility
in all with whom they came in contact. It was
22 REVOLVING LIGHTS
refreshment and joy merely to be in the room with
them. But also it was an arduous exercise.
They brought such a wide picture and so long a
history. They were England. The world-wide
spread of Christian England was in their minds ;
and to this they kindled, more than to any personal
thing.
The existence of these scattered few, explained
those who were only conventional approxima-
tions. . . .
To-night, immersed in the vision of a future
that threatened their world, she found them one
and all bright figures of romance. She sped as
her footsteps measured off the length of the
little street, into the recesses, the fair and the
evil, of aristocratic English life, and affection-
ately followed the small bright freely moving
troupe as it spread in the past and was at this
moment spreading, abroad over the world, the
unchangeable English quality and its attendant
conventions.
The books about these people are not satis-
factory. . . . Those that show them as a moral
force, suggest that they are the fair flower of a
Christian civilisation. But a Christian civilisa-
tion would be abolishing factories. . . . Lord
Shaftesbury . . . Arnold's barbarian idea made
a convincing picture, but it suggested in the
end, behind his back, that there was something
lacking in the Greeks. Most of the modern
books seemed to ridicule the English conven-
tions, and choose the worst types of people
for their characters.
REVOLVING LIGHTS 23
But in all the books about these people, even
in novelettes, the chief thing they all left out,
was there. They even described it, sometimes
so gloriously that it became more than the people ;
making humanity look like ants, crowding and
perishing as a vast scene. Generally the sur-
roundings were described separately, the back-
ground on which presently the characters began
to fuss. But they were never sufficiently shown
as they were to the people when there was no
fussing ; what the floods of sunshine and beauty
indoors and out meant to these people as single
individuals, whether they were aware of it or
not. The * fine ' characters in the books, act-
ing on principle, having thoughts, and some-
times, the less likeable of them, even ideas,
were not shown as 'being made strong partly
by endless floods of sunshine and beauty. The
feeble characters were too much condemned
for clutching, to keep, at any price within the
charmed circle. . -. .
The antics of imitators, all down the social
scale, were wrongly condemned.
But here^ in this separate existence, was a
shape that could draw her, whole, along with
it . . . and here suddenly, warmly about her
in its evening quiet, was the narrow winding
lane of Bond "Street. . . . Was this bright
shape, that drew her, the secret of her nature
. . . the clue she had carried in her hand through
the maze ?
It would explain my love for kingly old
Hanover, the stately ancient house in Wald-
24 REVOLVING LIGHTS
strasse ; the way the charm of the old-fashioned
well-born Pernes held me so long in the misery
of North London ; the relief of getting away
to Newlands, my determination to remain from
that time forth, at any cost, amidst beautiful
surroundings . . . ? Though life has drawn
me away these things have stayed with me.
They were with me through the awful months.
... If she had been able to escape into the
beauty of outside things, it would not have
happened.
It was not the fear of being alone with the
echoes of the tragedy that made me ill in suburban
lodgings, but the small ugliness and the empty
crude suburban air ; the knowledge that if
I stayed and forgot its ugliness in happiness
it would mould me unawares. My drifting to
the large old house in grey wide Bloomsbury
was a movement of return.
Then I am attached forever to the spacious
gentle surroundings in which I was born ?
Always watching and listening and feeling for
them to emerge ? My social happiness depen-
dent upon the presence of some suggestion
of its remembered features, my secret social
ambition its perfected form in circumstances
beyond my reach .''...
No. There was something within her that
could not tolerate either the people or the
thoughts existing within that exclusive world.
In the silences that flowed about its manifold
unvarying expressions, she would always find
herself ranging off into lively consciousness
REVOLVING LIGHTS 25
of other ways of living, whose smiling mystery
defied its complacent patronage. ... It drew
only her nature, the ease and beauty loving
soul of her physical being, and that only in
critical contemplation. She would never desire
to bestir herself to achieve stateliness.
So that the faraway moment of being driven
forth seemed to bear two meanings. It was
life's stupid error, a cruel blind destruction
of her helpless youth. At this moment if it
were possible she would reverse it and return.
During all these years she had been standing
motionless, fixed tearfully in the attitude of
return. The joy she had found in her invisible
life amongst the servants was the joy of remain-
ing girt and ready for the flight of return, her
original nature stored up and hidden behind
the adopted manner of her bondage.
Or it was life's wisdom, the swift movement
of her lucky star, providence pouncing. And
providence, having seized her indolent blissful
protesting form and flung it forth with a laugh,
had continued to pamper her with a sense of
happiness that bubbled unexpectedly out in
the midst of her utmost attempts to achieve
misery by a process of reason.
It is my strange bungling in misery that
makes everyone seem far off. A perpetual
oblivion not only of my own circumstances,
but, at the wrong moments, of those of other
people, makes me disappoint and shock them,
suddenly disappearing before their eyes in the
midst of a sympathy that they had eagerly
26 REVOLVING LIGHTS
seemed to find satisfying and rare. ... A
light frivolous elastic temperament ? A help-
less going to and fro between two temperaments.
A solid charwomanly commonplace kindliness,
spread like a doormat at the disposal of every-
body, and an intermittent perfect dilettantism
that would disgust even the devil ?
That was his temperament ? The quality that
had made him gravitate, unaided, towards exclusive
things, was also in her. But weaker, because
it was less narrow ? He had thrown up every-
thing for leisure to wander in the fields of art
and science and philosophy ; shutting his eyes
to the fact of his diminishing resources. She,
with no resources at all, had dropped to easy
irresponsible labour to avoid being shaped and
branded, to keep her untouched strength free for a
wider contemplation than he would have approved,
a delight in everything in turn, a plebeian dilet-'
tantism, aware and defensive of the exclusive
things, but unable to restrict herself to them,
unconsciously from the beginning resisting the
drawing of lines and setting up of oppositions }
More and more consciously ranged on all sides
simultaneously. More catholic. That was the
other side of the family. But if with his tem-
perament and his sceptical intuitive mind, she
had also the nature of the other side of the
family what a hopeless problem. ... If she
belonged to both, she was the sport of opposing
forces that would never allow her to alight
and settle. The movement of her life would
be like a pendulum. No wonder people found
REVOLVING LIGHTS 27
her unaccountable. But being her own solitary
companion would not go on forever. It would
bring in the end, somewhere about middle age,
the state that people called madness. . . . Per-
haps the lunatic asylums were full of people
who had refused to join up } There were
happy people in them ? " Wandering " in their
minds. But remembering and knowing happi-
ness all the time ? In dropping to nothingness
they escaped forever into that state of amazed
happiness that goes on all the time underneath
the strange forced quotations of deeds and
words.
Oxford Street opened ahead, right and left,
a wide empty yellow-lit corridor of large shut-
tered shop-fronts. It stared indifferently at her
outlined fate.
Even at night it seemed to echo with the harsh
sounds of its oblivious conglomerate traffic.
Since the high light-spangled front of the Prin-
cess's Theatre had changed, there was nothing
to obliterate the permanent sense of the two
monstrous streams flowing all day, fierce and
shattering, east and west. Oxford Street, unless
she were sailing through it perched in sunlight
on the top of an omnibus lumbering steadily
towards the graven stone of the City, always
wrought destruction, pitting its helpless harsh-
ness against her alternating states of talkative
concentration and silent happy expansion. Go-
ing west it was destruction ; forever approach-
ing the west-end, reaching its gates and passing
them by.
28 REVOLVING LIGHTS
Stay here, suggested Bond Street. Walk-
ing here you can keep alive, out in the world,
until the end, an aged crone, still a citizen of
my kingdom, hobbling in the sun, along my
sacred pavements. She turned gladly, encom-
passing the gift of the whole length of the wind-
ing lane with a plan of working round through
Soho, to cross Oxford Street painlessly where
it blended with St. Giles's, and would let her
through northwards into the squares. The
strange new thoughts were about her the moment
she turned back. They belonged to these old,
central finely etched streets where they had begun,
a fresh proof of her love for them ; a new enrich-
ment of their charm.
Whatever might be the truth about heredity,
it was immensely disturbing to be pressed
upon by two families, to discover, in their so
different qualities, the explanation of herself.
The sense of existing merely as a link, without
individuality, was not at all compensated by
the lifting, and distribution backwards, of re-
sponsibility. To be set in a mould, powerless
to alter its shape ... to discover, too late
for association and enquiry, the people she
helplessly belonged to. Yet the very fact that
young people fled their relatives, was an argu-
ment on the side of individuality. But not
all fled their relatives. Perhaps only those
of St. Paul's evil generation, " lacking in natural
affection."
She glanced narrowly, with a curiosity that
embarrassment could no longer hold back, at
REVOLVING LIGHTS 29
her father's side of the family, and while she
waited for them to fall upon her and wrathfully
consume her, she met the shock of a surprise
that caught her breath. They did not object.
Boldly faced, in the light of her new interest,
the vividly remembered forms, paintings and
photographs almost as vividly real, came for-
ward and grouped themselves about her as if
mournfully glad at last of the long-deferred
opportunity. They offered, not themselves, but
what they saw and knew, holding themselves
withdrawn, rigorously in place about the centre
of their preoccupation. Yet they vjere personal.
The terrible gentleness with which they asked
her why for so long she had kept aloof from
consultation with them, held a personal appeal
that made her glow. Deeply desiring it, she
held herself away from the solicited familiarity
in a stillness of fascinated observation.
They were Purita?is. . . . More wonderful
than she had known in thinking of them as
nonconformists, a disgrace her father had escaped
together with the trade he had abandoned in
youth. They were the Puritans she had read
of ; but not Cromwellian, certainly not Round-
heads. Though they were tall and gaunt with
strongly moulded features, their thoughtless,
generous English ancestry showed in them,
moulded by their sternness to a startling . . .
beauty. They had well-shaped hands, alive and
speaking amongst their rich silks and fine old
laces. They wore with a dignified austerity,
but still they wore, and must therefore have
30 REVOLVING LIGHTS
thought about, silk and lace and broadcloth
and fine frilled linen, as well as the sin in them-
selves and in the world. But principally they
were aware of sin, gazing with stern meditative
eyes, through the pages of their gloomily bound
books, into the abyss yawning at their feet.
She held herself in her place, growing bolder,
longing now for parley with their silent resist-
ance, disguising nothing, offering them pell-mell,
the least suitable of her thoughts. But the
eyes they turned on her, still dreadfully begging
her to remember now, in the days of her youth,
were kind, lit by a special smiling indulgence.
. . . Their strong stern lives, full of the know-
ledge of experience, that had led down to her,
had made them kind. However far she might
stray, she was still their favourite, their different
stubby round-faced darling, never to be con-
demned to the abyss. Listening as they called
to their part in her, she shared the salvation
they had wrought . . . salvage ... of hard
fine lives, reared narrowly, in beauty, above
the gulf.
Yet it was also from their incompleteness
that they called to her ; the darkness in them,
visible in the air about them as they moved,
that she had always feared and run away from.
The thought of the stern gaunt chairs in which
they sat and died of old age was horrible even
at this moment, and now that she no longer
feared them, sne knew, though she felt a home-
sick longing for their stern righteousness, that
it was incomplete. The pressing darkness kept
REVOLVING LIGHTS 31
them firm, fighting the devil every inch of the
way. . . .
But the devil was not dark, he was bright.
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning.
V/hat shocking profanity. Something has made
me drunk. I am always drunk in the west-end.
Satan was proud. God revenged himself.
Revengeful, omnipotent, jealous, " the first of
the autocrats." . . .
There was a glory hidden in that old dark-
ness, but they did not know it ; though they
followed it. Accepting them, plunging into
their darkness she would never be able to keep
from finding the bright devil and wandering
wrapt in gloom, but forgetful, perpetually in
the bright spaces within the darkness. And
perhaps it was God. Impossible to say. Reli-
gious people shunned the bright places believ-
ing them haunted by the devil. Other religious
people believed they were the gift of God and
would presently be everywhere, for everybody,
the kingdom of God upon Earth. But even
if factories were abolished and the unpleasant
kinds of work shared out so that they pressed
upon nobody, how could the Kingdom of Heaven
come upon earth as long as there were childbirth
and cancer ?
Light makes shadows. The devil is God's
shadow ? The Persians believed that in the
end the light would absorb the darkness. That
was credible. But it could never happen on
earth. That was where the Puritans were
right with their vale of tears, and why they
32 REVOLVING LIGHTS
were more deeply attractive than the other
side of the family. Their roots in life were
deeper and harder and the light from the Heavenly
City fell upon their foreheads because they
struggled in the gloom. If only they knew
what the gloom was, the marvel of its being
there. They were solemn and reproachful
because they could not get at their own gaiety.
• • •
The others were too jolly, too much turned
out towards life, deliberately cheerful and roy-
stering, not aware of the wonder and beauty
of gloom, yet more dreadfully haunted and
afraid of it, showing its uncomprehended pres-
ence by always deliberately driving it away.
They spread gloom about them, by their per-
petual impatient cheerfulness, afraid to listen
and look. Their wild spirits were tragic, bright
tragedy, making their country life sound in
the distance like one long maddening unbroken
noise, afraid to stop, rushing on, taking every-
thing for granted, and troubling about nothing.
People who lived in the country were different.
Fresh. All converted by their surroundings
into perpetual noise } The large spaces gave
them large rich voices . . . rounded sturdy
west country yeomen, blunt featured and jolly,
with big voices. Jesting with women. The
women all dark and animated . . . arch . . .
minxes. Any amount of flirting. All the scan-
dals of the family were on that side. Girls,
careering, with flying hair, round paddocks,
on unbroken bare-backed ponies. Huge fam-
REVOLVING LIGHTS 33
ilies. Hunting. Great Christmas and Harvest
parties. Maypoles in the spring. They always
saw the spring, every year without fail. Per-
haps that was their secret ? Wherever they
were they saw nothing but dawn and spring,
the light coming from the darkness. They
shouted against the darkness because they knew
the light was hidden in it. If you're waking,
call me early, call me early . . .
So ear-ly in, the mor-ning,
My Belov-ed
My Beloved.
T/wse women's voices pealed out into the
wakening air of pure silver dawns. The chill
pure dawn and dark over the fields where
L'Allegro walked in her picture, the dewy
dawn-lit grass under her white feet, her hair
blown softly back by the morning breeze flow-
ing over her dawn-lit face, shaping her garments
to her happy limbs as she walked dancing,
towards the increasing light. Little pools and
clumps of wet primroses over the surface of the
grey-green grass, flushed with rose, like her
glowing dancing face as she skimmed, her
whole bright form pealing with song towards
the increasing light. Was that sort of life still
going on somewhere }
Yet II Penseroso knew and L'Allegro did
not.
Long-featured Sarah was on the Puritan
side, with a strain of the artist, drawn from
34 REVOLVING LIGHTS
the other half, tormenting her. Eve, delicately
and unscrupulously adventurous, was the west-
country side altogether.
Within me . . . the third child, the longed-
for son, the two natures, equally matched, mingle
and fight .'* It is their struggle that keeps me
adrift, so variously interested and strongly
attracted, now here, now there ? Which will
win } . . , Feeling so identified with both, she
could not imagine either of them set aside.
Then her life would be the battle field of her
two natures. Which of them had been thrilled
through and through, so that she had seemed
to enter, lightly waving her hand to all that
had gone before, for good, into a firelit glow,
the door closing behind her, and leaving her
launched, without her belongings, but richly
accompanied, on a journey to the heart of an
unquenchable joy ? It was not socialism that
had drawn her, though the moment before,
she had been, spontaneously a socialist, for
the first time. The glow that had come with
his words was still there, drawing her, an unful-
filled promise. She was still waiting to be,
consciously, in league and everlasting company
with others, a socialist. Yet the earlier lonely
moment had been so far her only experience
of the state ; everything that had followed
had been a slow gradual undoing of it.
What was the secret of the immense relief,
.the sense of being and doing in an unbounded
immensity that had come with her dreamy
sudden words } One moment sitting on the
REVOLVING LIGHTS 35
hearth-rug living in the magic of the woven
text, feeling its message rise from the quiet
firelit room, drive through the sound of the
winter sea and out and away over the world,
to everyone who had ears to hear ; giving the
power of hearing to those who had not, until
they equally possessed it. And then hearing
her own voice, like a whisper in the immensity,
thrilled with the sense of a presented truth,
coming given, suddenly, from nowhere, the glad
sense of a shape whose denial would be death,
and bringing as she dreamily followed its
prompting, a willingness to suffer in its ser-
vice.
** You ought to cut out the pathos in that
passage."
*' tVhich passage, Miriametta } " The effort
of throwing off the many distractions of the
interested, mocking, critical voice.
*' You weaken the whole argument by coming
forward in those three words to tell your readers
what they ought to feel. An enormous amount
of time is lost, while attention is turned from
the spectacle to yourself."
" Yes. TVhich passage ? "
"In the moment that the reader turns away,
everything goes, and they come back distracted
and different, having been racing all over their
own world, perhaps indifferent.''*^
" Passage, passage "
** The real truth is that you don't feel that
pathos to yourself, or not in that way and in
those words . . . there are one or two earlier
26 REVOLVING LIGHTS
passages that stopped me, the same sort of
thing."
" Right. V^e'll have 'm all out."
" Without them the book will convince every-
body."
" No sane person can read it and keep out
of socialism."
" No." But how fearful that sounds said
by the author. As if he knew something else
as well.
" Y'know you ought to be a Lycurgan,
Miriam." And then had come the sense of
the door closing on all past loneliness, the rich
sense of being carried forward to some new
accompanied moulding change ; but without
any desire to go. Even with him., a moment
of expression, seeming, while it lasted, enough
in itself ; the whole of life, when it happened
not alone, but in an understanding presence ;
led to results^ the destructive demand for the
pinning of it down to some small shape of
specialised action. Could he not see that the
thing so surprising her and coming to him also
as a surprise, was enough in itself . . . would
disappear if she rushed forward into activities,
masquerading, with empty hands, as one who
had something to give. Yet he was going
forward into activities. . . . She ought, having
learned from him a clear theory of the working
of the whole of human life, to be willing to
follow, only too glad of the opportunity of any
sort of share, even as an onlooker in the making
of the new world.
REVOLVING LIGHTS 37
But if she responded, she would be support-
ing his wrong estimate of her, his way of endow-
ing everyone with his own gifts, seeing people
only as capability, waiting for opportunities for
action. She wanted only further opportunities
with him, of forgetful ness, and the strange
following moments of expression.
" Everyone will be socialists soon ; there's
no need to join societies."
'* There's mountains, my dear Miriam, moun-
tains of work ahead, that only an organised
society can compass. And you'd like the Lycur-
gans. We'll make you a Lycurgan."
" What could I do } "
** You can talk. You might write. Edit.
You've got a deadly critical eye. Yes, you
are a Lycurgan. That's settled."
" How can you say I can talk } "
" You've got a tenacity. I'd back you against
anyone in argument, when you're roused."
" Argument is no good to anybody, world
without end, amen."
** Don't be frivolous, Miriam. Real argu-
ment's a fine clean weapon."
" Cutting both ways ; proving anything^
" Quarrelsome Miriam."
** And you know what you think about my
writing. That I, or anybody could learn to
write, passably."
" If you have written anything, I've not
seen it. You shall learn to write, passably,
in the interests of socialism."
What an awful fate. To sit in a dusty corner,
38 REVOLVING LIGHTS
loyally doing odd jobs, considered by him
" quite a useful intelligent creature " among
other much more clever, and to him, more
attractive creatures, all working submissively
in the interests of a theory that he understood
so well that he must already be believing in
something else. But she was already a useful
fiercely loyal creature, that was how he described
her, at Wimpole Street But that was for
the sake of freedom. Working with him there
would be no freedom at all. Only a series
of loyal posings.
Standing upon the footstool to get out, back,
away from the wrong turning into the sense
of essential expression. The return into the
room of the sound of the sea, empty and harsh,
in a void.
" That's admirable. You could carry off
any number of inches, Miriam. You only
want the helmet and the trident. You're Brit-
annia, you know. The British Constitution.
You're infinitely more British than I am."
** Foreigners always tell me I am the only
English person who understands them."
'* Flattery, You've no idea how British you
are. A mass of British prejudice and intelligent
obstinacy. I shall put you in a book."
" Then how can you want me to be a socialist.
I am a Tory and an anarchist by turns."
" You're certainly an anarchist. You're an
individualist you know, that's what's wrong with
you.
" And what's wrong with you ? "
REVOLVING LIGHTS 39
** And now you shall experiment in being a
socialist."
" Tories are the best socialists."
*' You shall be a Tory socialist. My dear
Miriam, there will be socialists in the House of
Lordsr ^ ^
The same group of days had contained the
relief of the beginning of generalisations ; the
end, on her pa?t, of stories about people, told
with an eye upon his own way of observing
and stating. These stories had, during the
earlier time, kept him so amused and, with his
profane comments and paraphrases, so per-
petually entertaining, that a large part of her
private councils during the visits were spent
in reviewing the long procession of Tansley
Street boarders, the patients at Wimpole Street
and people ranged far away in her earlier lives,
as material for anecdote. But throughout the
delight of his interest and his surprising reiter-
ated envy of the variety of her contacts, there
had been a haunting sense of misrepresentation,
and even of treachery to him, in contributing
to his puzzling almost unvarying vision of
people as pitifully absurd, from the small store
of experiences she had dropped and forgotten,
until he drew them forth and called them
wealth.
His refusal to believe in a Russian's individu-
ality because no one had heard of him had set
a term to these communications, leaving an
abrupt pain. It was so strange that he should
fail to recognise the distinction of the Russian
40 REVOLVING LIGHTS
beings the quality of the Russian attitude towards
life. He had followed with interest, gentle
and patient at first before her overwhelming
conviction, allowing her to add stroke after
stroke to her picture, seeming for a moment
to see what she saw and then What has
he done ? Either it was that his pre-arranged
picture of European life had no place for these
so different, inactive Russians, or her attempts
to represent people in themselves, without bor-
rowed methods of portrayal, were useless because
they fell between the caricature which was
so uncongenial to her and the methods of des-
cription current in everyday life, which equally
refused to serve by reason of their tacit refer-
ence to ideas she could not accept.
But the beginnings of abstract discussion
had brought a most joyful relief, and a confirm-
ing intensification of the beauty of the interiors
and of the surrounding landscape, in which their
talks were set. Discussing people, save when
he elaborated legend and profanity until privately
she called upon the hosts of heaven to share
this brightest terrestrial mirth, cast a spell
of sadness all about her. With every finished
vignette there came a sense of ending. Sacri-
ficed to its sharp expressiveness were the real
moments of these people's lives ; and the moments
of the present, counting themselves off, ignored
and irrecoverable, offering, as their extension,
time that was unendurably narrow and confined,
a narrow featureless darkness, its walls grinning
with the transfixed features of consciousness
REVOLVING LIGHTS 41
that had always been, and must, if the pictures
were accepted as true, forever be, a motionless
absurdity.
Launched into wide opposition, no longer
trying to see with his eyes, while still hoarding,
as a contrasting amplification of her own visions,
much that he had given her, she found people
still there ; rallying round her in might,
ranging forward through time, each one stand-
ing clear of everything that offered material
for ironic commentary, in a radiant individu-
ality.
Wide generalisation was, she had immediately
vowed, the way to illuminating contemplation
of humanity. Its exercise made the present
moment a life in itself, going on forever ; the
thought of the speakers and the surroundings
blended in an unforgettable whole ; her past
life gleaming about her in a chain of moments ;
leaping glad acceptances or ardent refusals, of
large general views.
The joy of making statements not drawn
from things heard or read but plumbed directly
from the unconscious accumulations of her
own experience was fermented by the surprise
of his interested attention, and the pride of
getting him occasionally to accept an idea or
to modify a point of view. It beamed com-
pensation for what she was losing in sacrificing,
whenever expression was urgent in her, his
unmatchable monologue to her own shapeless
outpourings. But she laboured, now and then
successfully, to hold this emotion in subjection
42 REVOLVING LIGHTS
to the urgency of the things she longed to
express.
" Women^ everybody knows nowadays, have
made civilisation, the thing civilisation is so
proud of — social life. It's one of the things
I dislike in them. There you are, by the way,
women were the first socialists." Havelock
Ellis ; and Emerson quoting Firdusi's descrip-
tion of his Persian Lilla . . . but the impres-
sion, remaining more sharp and deep than
the event, became one's own by revealing an
inborn sharing of the view expressed. And
waiting behind it now, was the proof, in life,
as she had seen it.
" I don't mean that idea of public opinion
' the great moulding and civilising force steered
by women ' that even the most pessimistic
men admit, in horror."
" What do you mean, Miriam ? " Patient
scepticism.
" Something quite different. It's amazing,
the blindness in men, even in you, about women.
There must be a reason for it. Because it's
universal. It's no good looking, with no matter
what eyes, if you look in the wrong place. All
that men have done, since the beginning of
the world, is to find out and give names to and
do, the things that were in women from the
beginning, and that the best of them have been
doing all the time. Not me."
*' Tou^ Miriam, are an incorrigible loafer,
I've a sneaking sympathy with that.''
*' Well, the thing is, that whereas a few men
REVOLVING LIGHTS 43
here and there are creators, originators . . .
artists^ women are this all the time."
** My dear Miriam, I don't know what women
are. I'm enormously interested in sex ; but
I don't know anything about it. Nobody does.
That's just where we are."
" Because you're a man and have no person-
ality."
'* Don't talk nonsense, Miriam."
** How can a man have personality ? "
** All right. Men — have no personality."
"You see women simply as a sex. That's
one of the proofs."
Right. Women have no sex
You are doubtful about ' emancipating '
women, because you think it will upset their
sex-life."
" I don't know anything^ Miriam. No per-
sonality. No knowledge. But there's Miss
Waugh, with a thoroughly able career behind
her ; been everywhere^ done everything^ my dear
Miriam ; come out of it all, shouting you back
into the nursery."
" I don't know her. Perhaps she's jealous,
like a man, of her freedom. But the point is,
there's no emancipation to be done. Women
are emancipated."
" Prove it, Miriam."
" I can. Through their pre-eminence in an
art. The art of making atmospheres. It's as
big an art as any other. Most women can
exercise it, for reasons, by fits and starts. The
best women work at it the whole of the time.
44 REVOLVING LIGHTS
Not one man in a million is aware of it. It's
like air within the air. It may be deadly.
Cramping and awful, or simply destructive,
so that no life is possible within it. So is the
bad art of men. At its best it is absolutely
life-giving. And not soft. Very hard and stern
and austere in its beauty. And like mountain
air. And you can't get behind it, or in any
way divide it up. Just as with * Art.' Men
live in it and from it all their lives without know-
ing. Even recluses."
" Don't drive it too far, Miriam."
" Well ; I'm so staggered by it. All women,
of course, know about it, and there's the explana-
tion of why women clash. Over what men
call ' trifles.' Because the thing I mean goes
through everything. A woman's way of * being'
can be discovered in the way she pours out tea.
Men can't get on together. If they're boxed
up. Do you know there's hardly a partner-
ship in Wimpole Street that's not a permanent
feud. Yes. Would you believe it. And for
scandal and gossip and jealousy there's nothing
to beat the professors in a University Town.
Several of them don't speak. They communicate
by letter. . . . But it's the women who are
not grouped who can see all this most clearly.
By moving, amongst the grouped women, from
atmosphere to atmosphere. It's one of my
principal social entertainments. I feel the atmo-
sphere created by the lady of the house as soon
as I get on to the door step."
** Perceptive Miriam. . . . You have a flair,
REVOLVING LIGHTS 45
Miriam. I grant you that. I believe in your
flair."
" Well, it's true^ what I'm trying to tell you.
It's one of the answers to the question about
women and art. It's all there. It doesn't
show, like men's art. There's no drama or
publicity. There ; d'you see ? It's hard and
exacting ; needing ' the maximum of detach-
ment and control.' And people have to learn,
or be taught, to see it."
" Y . . . es. Is it conscious ? "
" Absolutely. And there you are again.
Artists, well, and literary people, say they have
to get away from everything at intervals. They
associate with queer people, and some of them
are dissipated. They can only rest, stop being
artists, by getting away. That Is why so many
women get nervy and break down. The only
way they can rest, is by being nothing to nobody,
leaving off for a while giving out any atmo-
sphere.
" Stop breathing."
" Yes. But if you laugh at that, you must
laugh at artists, and literary people." -
1; I will. I dor
" Yes ; but In general. You must see the
Identity of the two things for good or for bad.
If people reverence men's art and feel their
sacrifices are worth while, to themselves^ as well
as to other people, they must not just pty the
art of women. It doesn't matter to women.
But it's so jolly bad for men, to go about feeling
lonely and superior. Men, and the women
46 REVOLVING LIGHTS
who imitate them, bleat about women ' finding
their truest fulfilment in self-sacrifice' In speak-
ing of male art it is called self-realisation. That's
men all over. They get an illuminating theory
— man must die, to live — and apply it only to
themselves. If a theory is true, you may be
sure it applies in a most thorough-going way
to women. They don't stop dead at self-sacri-
fice. They reap . . . freedom. Self-realisa-
tion. Emancipation. Lots of women hold back.
Just as men do — from exacting careers. /
do. / don't want to exercise the feminine
art."
" It's true you don't compete or exploit
yourself, Miriam."
" Some women want to be men. And the
contrary, men wanting to be women, is almost
unknown. This is supposed to be evidence
of the superiority of the masculine state. It
isn't. Women only want to be. men before
they begin their careers. It's a longing for
exemptions. Young women envy men, as young
men, faced with the hard work of life, envy
dogs."
" Harsh Miriam."
" It's true. At any rate it's deserved, after
all men have said. And I believe it's true.""
" Pugilistic Miriam. . . . Your atmospheric
idea is quite illuminating. I think there's
some truth in it ; and I'd be with you altogether
but for one . . . damning . . . yes, I think
absolutely damning, fact.'"
" Well } "
REVOLVING LIGHTS 47
" The men women will marry. The men
quite fine, intelligent women marry ; and idolise^
my dear Miriam."
** Many artists have to use any material that
comes to hand. The treatment is the thing."
" Treatment that mistakes putty for marble,
my dear Miriam "
** And you don't see that you are proving
my point. Women see things when they are
not there. That's creativeness. What is meant
by women * making ' men."
*' They don't. They'll make idols of nothing
at all ; and go on burning incense — all their
lives."
" I don't believe women are ever deceived
about their husbands. But they don't give up
hope. And there's something in everybody.
That's what women see."
" Nonsense, Miriam. Girls, with quite good
brains and abilities will marry anything ; accept
its views and quote them."
'* Yes ; just as they will show off a child's
tricks. Views and opinions are masculine things.
Women are indifferent to them, really. Any set
will do. I know the way a woman's opinions
and interests change with her different husbands,
if she marries more than once, is supposed to
prove the vacuity of her mind. Half the satirists
of women have made their reputation on that
idea. It isn't so. It is that women can hold all
opinions at once, or any, or none. It's because
they see the relations of things which don't
change, more than things which are always
48 REVOLVING LIGHTS
changing, and mostly the importance to men
of the things men believe. But behind it all
their own lives are untouched."
*' Behind. . . . What is there behind,
Miriam } "
" Life."
" What do they do with it .? "
" Live."
" Mysterious, Miriam. . . . The business
of women ; the career ; that makes you all
rivals, is to find fathers. Your material is
children."
** Then look here, if you think that, there's a
perfect instance. If women's material is people,
their famous ' curiosity ' is the curiosity of the
artist. Men call it ' incurable ' in women.
Men's curiosity, about things, science and so
forth, is called divine. There you are. My
wordy
" / don't, Miriam."
" Shaw knows how wildly interested women
are in psychology. That's funny. . . . But
about children. If only you could realise how
incidental all that is."
" Incidental to what } "
" To the life of the individual."
" Try it, Miriam. Marry your Jew. You
know Jew and English makes a good mix."
'* You see I never knew he was a Jew. It
did not come up until a possible future came in
view. I couldn't have Jewish children."
" Incidents. Mere incidents."
" No ; the wrong material. I, being myself,
REVOLVING LIGHTS 49
couldn't do anything with it ; couldn't be any-
thing in relationship to it."
" You'd be^ through seeing its possibilities and
making an atmosphere."
" I've told you I'm not one of those stupendous
women."
, " What are you } "
" Well, now here's something you will like.
If I were to marry a Jew, I should feel that all
my male relatives would have the right to beat
me."
** That's strange . . . And, I think, great
nonsense, Miriam."
** And I'm not anti-semite. I think Jews are
better Christians than we are. We have things
to learn from them. But not by marrying them,
until they've learnt things from us. Women,
particularly, can't marry Jews. Men can marry
Jewesses, if they like."
*' Marriage is a more important affair for women
than for men. Just so."
" I didn't say so."
" You did^ Miriam, and it's quite true."
" It appears to be so because, as I've been
trying to show you, men don't know where they
are."
" Your man'll know, Miriam. You ought
to marry and have children. You'd have
good children. Good shapes and good
brains. "j
*' The mere sight of a child, moving uncon-
sciously, its little shoulders and busy intentions,
makes me catch my breath,"
D
so REVOLVING LIGHTS
" Marry your Jew, Miriam. \\ ell — perhaps
no ; don't marry your Jew."
" The other day we were walking somewhere.
I was dead-tired. He knew it and kept on sug-
gesting a hansom. Suddenly there was a woman,
lugging a heavy perambulator up some steps.
He stood still, shouting to me to help her."
" What did you do ? "
** I blazed his own words back at him. I
daresay I stamped my foot. Meanwhile the
woman, who was veiy burly, had got the peram-
bulator up. We walked on and presently he
said in a quiet intensely interested voice ' If'^/iy
did you not help this woman ? ' "
" What did you say ? "
" I began to talk about something else."
" Diplomatic Miriam."
" Not at all. It's use/ess to talk to instincts. I
know ; because I have tried. Poor little man. 1
am afraid, now that I am not going to marry
him, of hurting and tiring him. I talked one
night. We had been agreeing about things, and
I went on and on, it was in the drawing-room in
the dark, after a theatre, talking almost to myself,
very interested, forgetting that he was there.
Presently a voice said, trembling with fatigue,
' Believe me, Miriam, I am profoundly interested.
Will you perhaps put all this down for me on
paper } ' Yes. Wasn't it funny and appalling.
It was three o'clock. Since then I have been
afraid. Besides, he will marry a Jewess. If I
were not sure of that I could not contemplate
his loneliness. It's heartbreaking. W'hen I
REVOLVING LIGHTS 51
go to see friends in the evening, he waits out-
side."
** I say. Poor chap. That's quite touching.
You'll marry him yet, Miriam."
*' There are ways in which I like him and am
in touch with him as I never could be with an
Englishman. Things he understands. And
his absolute sweetness. Absence of malice and
enmity. It's so strange too, with all his ideas
about women, the things he will do. Little
things like cleaning my shoes. But look here ;
an important thing. Having children is just
shelving the problem, leaving it for the next .
generation to solve." '
That stood out as the end of the conversation ;
bringing a sudden bright light. The idea that
there was something essential, for everybody, that
could not be shelved. Something had inter-
rupted. It could never be repeated. But surely
he must have agreed, if there had been time to
bring it home to him. Then it might have been
possible to get him to admit uniqueness . . .
individuality. He would. But would say
it was negligible. Then the big world he
thinks of, since it consists of individuals, is also
negligible. . . .
Something had been at work in the conversation,
making it all so easy to recover. Vanity }
The relief of tackling the big man ? Not alto-
gether. Because there had been moments of
thinking of death. Glad death if the truth could
once be stated. Disinterested rejoicing in the
fact that a man who talked to so many people
52 REVOLVING LIGHTS
was hearing something about the world of women.
And if anyone had been there to express it better,
the relief would have been there, just the same,
without jealousy. But what an unconscious
compliment to men, to feel that it mattered
whether or no they understood anything about
the T'srld of women. . . .
The remaining days of the visit had glowed
with the sense of the beginning of a new rela-
tionship with the Wilsons. The enchantment
that surrounded her each time she went to see
them and always as the last hours v/ent by, grew
oppressive with the reminder of its impermanence,
shone, at last, wide over the future. The end
of a visit would never again bring the certainty
of being finally committed to an overwhelming
combination of poverties, cut off, by an all-round
ineligibility, from the sun-bathed seaward garden,
the joyful brilliant seaside light pouring through
the various bright interiors of the perfect little
house ; the inexpressible charm, always renewed,
and remaining, however deeply she felt at variance
with the Wilson reading of life, the topmost
radiance of her social year ; ignored and for-
gotten nearly all the time, but shining out when-
ever she chanced to look round at the resources
of her outside life, a bright enduring pinnacle,
whose removal would level the landscape to a
rolling plain, its modest hillocks, easy to climb,
robbed of their light, the bright reflection that
came, she half-angrily admitted, from this cen-
tral height.
But there had been a difference in the return
REVOLVING LIGHTS ^3
to London after that visit, that had filled her with
misgiving. Usually upon the afterpain of the
wrench of departure, the touch of her own re-
turning life had come like a balm. That time,
she had seemed, as the train steamed off, to be
going for the first time, not away from, but
towards all she had left behind. There had
been a strange exciting sense of travelling, as
everyone seemed to travel, preoccupied, missing
the adventure of the journey, merely suffering it
as an unavoidable time-consuming movement
from one place to another. She, like all these
others, had a place and a meaning in the outside
world. She could have talked, if opportunity
had offered, effortlessly, from the surface of her
mind, borrowing emphasis and an appearance of
availability and interest, from a secure unshared
possession. She had suddenly known that it was
from this basis of preoccupation with secure un-
shared possessions that the easy shapely conversa-
tions of the world were made. But also that
those who made them were committed, by their
preoccupations, to a surrounding deadness.
Liveliness of mind checked the expressiveness of
surroundings. The gritty interior of the car-
riage had remained intolerable throughout the
journey. The passing landscape had never come
to life.
But the menace of a future invested in unpre-
dictable activities in a cause that seemed, now
that she understood it, to have been won invisibly
since the beginning of the world, was lost almost
at once in the currents of her London life.
54 REVOLVING LIGHTS
Things had happened that had sharply restored
her normal feeling of irreconcilableness ; of
being altogether differently fated, and to return,
if ever they should wish it, only at the bidding
of the inexpressible charm. There had been
things moving all about her with an utterly
reassuring independent reality. Mr. Leyton's
engagement . . . bringing to light as she lived
it through chapter by chapter, sitting at work in
the busy highway of the Wimpole Street house,
a world she had forgotten, and that rose now
before her in serene difficult perfection ; a full
denial of Mr. Wilson's belief in the death of
family life. In the midst of her effort to launch
herself into a definite point of view, it had made
her swerve away again towards the beliefs of the
old world. Meeting them afresh after years
of oblivion, she had found them unassailably
new. The new lives inheriting them brought
in the fresh tones, the thoughts and movement of
modern life, and left the old symphony recreated
and unchanged.
The Tansley Street world had been full and
bright all that summer with the return of whole
parties of Canadians as old friends. With their
untiring sociability, their easy inclusion of the
abruptly appearing unintroduced foreigners and
provincials, they had made the world look like
one great family party.
They had influenced even Michael . . .
steeping him in sunlit gaiety. By breaking up
the strain of unrelieved association they had made
him seem charming again. Their immense
REVOLVING LIGHTS SS
respect for him turned him, in their presence,
once more into a proud uncriticised posses-
sion.
Rambles round the squares with him, snatched
late at night, had been easy to fill with hilarious
discussions of the many incidents ; serious ex-
hausting talk held in check by the near presence
of unquestioning people, and the promise of the
lively morrow. Yet every evening, when they
had her set down and surrounded at the piano,
there came the sense of division. They cared only
for music that interpreted their point of view.
Captain Gradoff . . . large flat lonely face,
pock-marked, eyes looking at nothing, with an
expression of fear. Improper, naked old grizzly
head, suggesting other displayed helpless heads,
above his stout neat sociable Russian skipper's
jacket . . . praying in his room at the top
of his voice, with howls and groans. Suddenly
teaching us all to make a long loud syren-shriek
with half a Spanish nutshell. He had an inven-
tion for the Admiralty . . . lonely and frightened,
in a ghostly world ; with an invention to save
the lives of ships.
Engstrom and Sigerson !
Engstrom's huge frame and bulky hard red
face, shining with simplicity below his great
serene intellectual brow and up-shooting hair.
His first evening at Mrs. Bailey's right hand,
saying gravely out into the silence of the crowded
dinner table, " there is in Pareece very much
automobiles, and good wash. In London not.
I send much manchettes, and all the bords are
S6 REVOLVING LIGHTS
cassed." Devout reproachful ness in his voice ;
and his brow pure, motherly serenity. Sweden
in the room amongst all the others. Teased,
like everyone else, with petty annoyances. But
with immense strength to throw everything off.
Everyone waiting in the peaceful silence that
surrounded the immense gently booming voice ;
electing him president as he sat burying his jests
with downcast eyes that left the mask of his
bluntly carven face yielded up to friendship.
Waves of strength and kindliness coming from
him, bringing exhilaration. Making even the
Canadians seem pale and small and powerless.
At the mercy of life. And then the harsh kind
blaze of his brown eyes again. More unhesitat-
ing phrases. He had brought strength and
happiness into the house. A rough, clump-
worded Swedish song, rawly affronting the
English air, words of his separate country, the
only words for his deepest meanings, making
barriers . . . till he leapt, he was so light in his
strength, on to a chair to bring out the top note,
and the barriers fell . . . He pealed his notes
in farcical agony towards the ceiling. In that
moment he was kneeling, bowed before the
coldest, looking through to the hidden sunlight
in everybody. . . . Conducting an imaginary
orchestra from behind the piano. Sind the
Trommels in Ordna ? Everybody had under-
stood, and loved each word he spoke.
** Wo ist the Veoleena Sigerson ^ I shall
bring." Springing from his place near the door,
lightly in and out amongst the seated formSj
REVOLVING LIGHTS 57
leaping obstacles all over the room on his way
back to the open door, struggling noiselessly
with all his strength, strong legs sliding under
him as he pulled at the handle to open the open
door. He and Sigerson had stayed on after the
spring visitors. Evenings, voyaging alone with
the two of them into strange new music. He had
forgotten that he had said, I play nor sing not
payshionate musics in bystanding of Miss —
little — Hendershon. And the German theatre
... a shamed moving forward into suspicion,
even of Irving, in the way they all played, working
equally, together ... all taking care of the
play . . . play and acting, rich with life.
Sigerson was jealous. He wanted all the bright
sunlight to himself and tried to hold it with
his cold scornful brains. Waspy Schopenhauer-
ism. They went to Peckham. The little weepy
dabby assistant of the Peckham landlady, her
speech ready-made quotations in the worst Lon-
don English. Impure vowels, slobbery conso-
nants. She reflected his sunlight like a dead
moon. There was a large old garden. His first
English garden in summer. He had loved it
with all the power of the Swedish landscape in
him turned on to its romantic strangeness, and
identified the dabby girl with it. She fainted
when he went away. A despair like death. .He
had come faithfully back and married her.
What could she, forever Peckham, seeing no-
thing, distorting everything by her speech, make
of Stockholm ?
And all the time the Wimpole Street days had
58 REVOLVING LIGHTS
glowed more and more with the forgotten story.
'Thanks to the scraps of detail in Mr. Leyton's
confidences she had lived in the family of girls,
centred round their widowed mother in the
large old suburban house, garden girt, and
bordering on countrified open spaces. She
imagined it always sunlit, and knew that it rang
all the morning with the echoes of work and
laughter, and the sharp-tongued ironic commen-
tary of a family of Harrietts freed from the
shadows that had surrounded Harriett's young
gaiety, by the presence of an income, small but
secure. The bustle of shared work, all exquis-
itely done in the exacting, rewarding old-fashioned
way, nothing bought that could be home-made,
filled each morning with an engrossing life of
its own, lit, by a surrounding endless glory, and
left the house a prepared gleaming orderliness,
and the girls free to retreat to a little room where
a sewing machine was enthroned amidst a licensed
disorder of fashion papers, with coloured plates,
and things in process of making according to the
newest mode, from oddments carefully selected
at the west-end sales. When they were there,
during the times of busy work following on con-
sultations and decisions, gossip broke forth ;
and thrilling the tones of their gossiping voices,
and shining all about them, obliterating the walls
of the room and the sense of the day and the hour,
was a bright eternity of recurring occasions,
when the sum of their household labours blos-
somed unto fulfilment . . . at-home days ;
calls ; winter dances ; huge picnic parties in the
REVOLVING LIGHTS 59
summer, to which they went, riding capably,
in their clever home-made cycling costumes on
brilliantly gleaming bicycles. And all the year
round, shed over each revolving week, the glamour
of Sunday . . . the perpetual rising up, amongst
the varying seasons and days, of a single unvarying
shape, standing, in the morning quiet, chill and
accusing between them and the warm, far-off
everyday life. The relief of the descent into
the distractions of dressing for church and bust-
ling off in good time ; the momentary return of
the challenging shape with the sight of the old
grey ivy-grown church ; escape from it again into
the refuge of the porch amongst the instreaming
neighbours, and the final fading of its outlines
into the colour and sound of the morning service,
church shapes in stone and wood and metal,
secure round about their weakness, holding them
safe. The sermon, though they suiTered it un-
critically, could not, preached by an intelligent
or stupid man, but secure, soft-living and married,
revive the morning strength of the challenging
shape, and as it sounded on towards its end, the
grey of another Sunday morning had brought in
sight the rest of the day, when, at the worst, if
nobody came, there was the evening service, the
escape in its midst into a state of bliss that stilled
everything, and went on forever, making the
coming week, even if the most glorious things
were going to happen, wonderful only because it
was so amazing to be alive at all . . . That
was too much . . . these girls did not consciously
feel like that ; perhaps partly because they had a
6o REVOLVING LIGHTS
brother, were the kind of girls who would have
at least one brother, choking things back by
obliviousness, but breezy and useful in many ways.
It's good to have brothers ; but there is some-
thing they kill, if they are in the majority, abso-
lutely, so that one girl with many brothers rarely
becomes a woman, but can sometimes be a nice
understanding jolly sort of man. Brothers with-
out sisters are worse off than sisters without
brothers ; unless they are very gifted ... in
which case they are really, as people say of the
poets, more than three parts women. But
Sundays, for all girls, were in a way the same.
And though these girls did not reason and were
densely unconscious of the challenge embodied
in their religion, and enjoyed being snobbish
without knowing it, or knowing the meaning and
good of snobbishness, their unconsciousness was
harmless, and the huge Sunday things they lived
in, held and steered their lives, making, in
England, in them and in all of their kind, a world
that the clever people who laughed at them had
never been inside. . . . They did not laugh,
except the busy enviable blissful laughter per-
mitted by God, from the midst of their lives, about
nothing at all. They thought liberals vulgar —
mostly chapel people ; and socialists mad. But
in the midst of their conservatism was some-
thing that could never die, and that these other
people did not seem to possess. . . .
And the best, most Charlotte Yonge part of the
story, was the arrival of Mr. Leyton and his
cousin, whilst these girls were still at home
REVOLVING LIGHTS 6i
amongst their Sundays ; and the opening out,
for two of them at once, of a future ; with the
past behind it undivided.
And they had suddenly asked her to their
picnic. And she had been back, for the whole
of that summer's afternoon, in the world of
women ; and the forgotten things, that had first
driven her away from it, had emerged again, no
longer mysterious, and with more of meaning in
them, so that she had been able to achieve an
appearance of conformity, and had felt that they
regarded her not with the adoration on half-
pitying dislike she had had from women in the
past, but as a woman, though only as a weird sort
of female who needed teaching. They had no
kind of fear of her ; not because they were
massed there in strength. Any one of them,
singly, would, she had felt, have been equal to
her in any sort of circumstances ; her superior ;
a rather im.patient but absolutely loyal and
chivalrous guide in the lonely exclusive feminine
life.
Surprised by the unanticipated joy of a summer
holiday in miniature, their gift, wrested by their
energies from the midst of the sweltering London
July, and with their world and its ways pulling at
her memory, and the door of their good fellow-
ship wide open before her, for an hour she had
let go and gone in and joined them, holding her-
self teachable, keeping in check, while she con-
templated the transformation of Mr. Leyton
under the fire of their chaff, her impulse to break
into the ceaseless jesting with some shape of con-
62 REVOLVING LIGHTS
versation. And she had felt that they regarded
her as a postulant, a soul to be snatched from
outer darkness, a candidate as ready to graduate
as they were, to grant a degree. And the break-
ing of the group had left her free to watch the
way, without any gap of silence or difficulty of
transition, they had set the men to work on the
clearing up and stowing away of the paraphernalia
of the feast ; training them all the while according
to the Englishwoman's pattern, an excellent
pattern, she could not fail to see, imagining these
young males as they would be, undisciplined by
this influence, and comparing them with the
many unshaped young men she had observed
on their passage through the Tansley Street
house.
But all the time she had been half aware that
she «was only watching a picture, a charmed
familiar scene, as significant and as unreal as the
set figure of a dance. Giving herself to its dis-
cipline she would reap experience and knowledge,
confirming truths ; but only truths with which
she was already familiar, leading down to a lonely
silence, where everything still remained unan-
swered, and the dancers their unchanged unex-
pressed selves. Individual converse with these
young men on the terms these women had trained
them to accept, was impossible to contemplate.
Every word would be spoken in a dark void.
Breaking in, as the little feast ended in a storm
of flying buns and eggshells, a little scene that
she had forgotten completely at the moment of
its occurrence had risen sharply clear in her mind.
REVOLVING LIGHTS 63
... A family party of quiet soberly dressed
Scotch Canadian people from the far-west, seated
together at the end of the Tansley Street dinner-
table, coming out, on the eve of their departure,
from the enclosure of their small, subduedly con-
versing group, to respond, in level friendly tones,
to some bold person's enquiries as to the success
of ' their visit. The sudden belated intimacy,
ripened in silence, had seemed very good, com-
pressed into a single occasion that would leave
the impression of these homely people single and
strong, so well worth losing that their loss would
be a permanent acquisition. Suddenly from their
midst, the voice of the youngest daughter, a pale,
bitter-faced girl with a long thin pigtail of sandy
hair, had rung out down the table.
" London's 7?;^^. But the folks don't all match
it. The girls don't. They're just queer. I
reckon there's two things they don't know. How
to wear their waists, and how to go around with
the boys. When I hear an English girl talking
to boys, I just have to think she's funny in the
head. If Canadian girls were stiff like that,
they'd have the dullest time on earth." Her
expressionless pale blue eyes had fixed no one,
and she had concluded her speech with a little
fling that had settled her back in her chair,
unconcerned.;??
And in the interval before the ride home, when
the men had been driven off, and she was alone
with the sisters and saw them relax and yawn,
speak in easy casual tones and apostrophise small
things, with great gusto, in well-chosen forcible
64 REVOLVING LIGHTS
terms, while the men were no doubt also enjoying
the same blessed relief, she had felt that the
Canadian girl was more right than she knew.
Between men and girls, throughout English life
there was no exchange, save in the ways of love.
Except for those moments when they stood, to
each other, for all the world, they never met.
And the sense of these sacred moments embar-
rassed, even while it shaped and beautified, every
occasion. Women were its guardians and host-
esses. Their guardianship made them hostesses
for life. Upon the faces of these girls as they
sat about unmasked and pathetically individual,
it shed its radiance and, already, its heavy
shadows.
Yet American girls with their easy regardless-
ness seemed lacking in depth of feminine con-
sciousness, too much turned towards the surfaces
of life, and the men with their awakened under-
standing and quick serviceableness, by so much
the less men. In any case there was not the
recognisable difference in personality that was so
striking in England, and that seemed in some way,
even at one's moments of greatest irritation with
the women, to bring all the men under a reproach.
Many young American men had faces moulded
on the lines of responsible middle-aged German
housewives ; while some of the quite young girls
looked out at life with the sharp shrewd repudi-
ation of cynical elderly bachelors. If it were the
building up of a civilisation that had brought the
sexes together, for generations, in relations that
came in English society only momentarily, at a
REVOLVING LIGHTS 65
house-warming or a picnic, would the results
remain ? Or would there be, in America, later
on, a beginning of the English differences, the
women moving, more and more heavily veiled and
burdened, towards the heart of life and the men
getting further and further away from the living
centre. Ought men and women to modify each
other, each standing as it were, halfway between
the centre and the surface, each with a view across
the other's territory ? Or should they accentuate
their natural differences ? fVere the differences
natural ?
As they rode home through the twilit lanes, the
insoluble problem, sounding for her in every
shouted remark, had been continually soothed
away by the dewy, sweet-scented, softly streaming
air. The slurring of their tyres in unison along
the smooth roadway, the little chorus of bells as
they approached a turning, made them all one
entered for good into the heritage of the accom-
plished day. Nothing could touch the vision
that rose and the confessions that were made
within its silence. Within each one of the indis-
tinguishable forms the sense of the day was clear-
ing with each moment ; its incidents blending
and shaping, an irrevocable piece of decisive life ;
but behind and around and through it all was
summer, smiling. Before each pair of eyes,
cleared of heat and dust by the balm of the evening
air, the picture of the English summer, in blue
and gold and green, stood clear within the out-
spread invisible distances. Thai was the harvest,
the thing that drew people to the labour of organ-
E
66 REVOLVING LIGHTS
ising picnics, that remained afterwards forever ;
that would remain for the lovers after their love
was forgotten ; that linked all the members of
the party in a fellowship stronger than their
differences.
But when they reached the suburbs, the prob-
lem was there again in might, incessant as the
houses looming by on either side, driven tyran-
nously home by the easy flight ahead, as Highgate
sloped to London, of the two whose machines
were fitted with " free " wheels. . . . Only a
mind turned altogether towards outside things
could invent. . . .
And then London came, opening suddenly
before me as I rode out alone from under a dark
archway into the noise and glare of a gaslit
Saturday night.
Trouble fell away like a cast garment as I
swung forward, steering with thoughtless ease,
into the southernmost of the four converging
streets.
This was the true harvest of the summer's
day ; the transfiguration of these northern
streets. They were not London proper ; but
tonight the spirit of London came to meet her on
the verge. Nothing in life could be sweeter
than this welcoming — a cup held brimming to
her lips, and inexhaustible. What lover did she
want } No one in the world could oust this
mighty lover, always receiving her back without
words, engulfing and leaving her untouched,
liberated and expanding to the whole range of
her being. In the mile or so ahead, there was
REVOLVING LIGHTS 67
endless time. She would travel further than the
longest journey, swifter than the most rapid
flight, down and down into an oblivion deeper
than sleep ; and drop off at the centre, on to the
deserted grey pavements, with the high quiet
houses standing all about her in air sweetened by
the evening breath of the trees, stealing down
the street from either end ; the sound of her
footsteps awakening her again to the single fact
of her incredible presence within the vast sur-
rounding presence. Then, for another unfor-
gettable night of return, she would break into the
shuttered house and gain her room and lie, till
she suddenly slept, tingling to the spread of
London all about her, herself one with it, feeling
her life flow outwards, north, south, east and
west, to all its margins.
And it had been so. Nothing had intervened,
but, for a moment, the question, coming as the
wild flowers fell from her unclasped belt, bring-
ing back the long-forgotten day — what of those
others, lost, for life, in perpetual association ?
The long lane of Bond Street had come to
an end, bringing her out into the grey-brown
spaciousness of Piccadilly, lit sparsely by infre-
quent globes of gold. The darkness cast by
the massive brown buildings thrilled heavily
about the shrouded oblivion of west-end life.
She passed elderly men, black coated and muf-
flered over their evening dress, wrapped in their
world, stamped with its stamp, still circulating,
like the well preserved coins of a past reign —
thinking their sets of thoughts, going home to
68 REVOLVING LIGHTS
the small encirclement of clubs and chambers, a
little aware of the wide night and the time of
year told on the air as they had passed along
where the Green Park slept on the far side of the
road. This was their moment, between today
and tomorrow, of freedom to move amongst the
crowding presences gathered through so many
years within themselves ; slowly, mannishly ; old-
mannishly, perpetually pulled up, daunted, taking
refuge in their sets of thoughts ; not going far,
never returning to renew a sally, for the way
home was short, and their gait showed them going,
almost marching, to the summons of their various
destinations. Some of their faces betrayed as
they went by, unconscious of observation, the
preoccupation that closed in on all their solitude ;
a look of counting, but with liberal evening hand,
the days that remained for them to go their
rounds. One came prowling with slow, gentle-
manly stroll, half-halting to stare at her, dim-
eyed, from his mufflings. Here and there a
woman, strayed away from the searching light and
the rivalry of the Circus, hovered in the shadows.
Presently, across the way, the Park moved by,
brimming through its railings a midnight fresh-
ness into the dry sophisticated air. Through
this strange mingling, hansoms from the theatres
beyond the Circus, swinging, gold-lamped, one
by one, along the centre of the deserted roadway,
drew bright threads of younger west-end life,
meshed and tangled, men and v/omen from social
throngs, for whom no solitude waited.
Piccadilly Circus was almost upon her, the need
REVOLVING LIGHTS 69
for thoughtless hurrying across its open spaces ;
the awakening on the far side with the west-end
dropping away behind ; and the tide of her own
neighbourhood setting towards her down Shaftes-
bury Avenue ; bringing with it the present move-
ment of her London life. . . . Why hadn't
she a club down here ; a neutral territory where
she could finish her thoughts undisturbed ?
Defying the surrounding influences, she
glanced back at the months following the picnic
... the shifting of the love-story into the midst
of the Wimpole Street household, making her
room like a little theatre where at any moment
the curtain might go up on a fresh scene . . .
knowing them all so well, being behind the
scenes as well as before them, she had watched
with a really cruel indifference, and let the light
of the new theories play on all she saw. For
unconscious unquestioning people were certainly
ruled by something. The acting of the play had
been all carefully according to the love-stories
of the sentimental books, would always be, for
good kind people brought up on the old traditions.
And a predictable future was there, another home
life carrying the traditions forward. All the old
family sayings applied. Many of them were
quoted with a rueful recognition. But they were
all proud of playing these recognisable parts.
All of their faces had confessed, as they had come,
one by one, betweenwhiles, to talk freely to her
alone, their belief in the story that had lain, hidden
and forgotten, in the depths of her heart ; making
her affection for them blaze up afresh from the
70 REVOLVING LIGHTS
roots of her being. She had seen the new theories
disproved. Not that there was not some faint
large outline of truth in them, but that it was so
large and loose that it did not fit individuals. It
did not correspond to any individual experience
because it was obliged to ignore the underlying
things of individuality. . . . Blair Leighton . . .
Marcus Stone . . . Watts ; Mendelssohn, cor-
responded to an actual individual truth. . . .
The new people did not know it because they were
odd, isolated people without up-bringing and
circumstances ? They did not know because
they were without backgrounds ? Quick and
clever, like Jews without a country ? They
would fasten in this story on the critical dismay
of the parents, make comedy or tragedy out of the
lack of sympathy between the two families, the
persistence of unchanged character in each one,
that would tell later on. But comedy and tragedy
equally left everything unstated. No blind vic-
timising force could account for the part of the
story they left untold, something that justified
the sentimental books they all jeered at ; a light,
that had come suddenly holding them all gentle
and hushed behind even their busiest talk ;
bringing wide thoughts and sympathies ; cen-
tring in the girl ; breaking down barriers so
completely that for a while they all seemed to
exchange personalities. Blind force could not
soften and illuminate. . . . There was some-
thing more than an allurement of " nature," a
veil of beauty disguising the " brutal physical
facts." Why brutal ? Brutal is deliberate, a
REVOLVING LIGHTS 71
thing of the will. They meant brutish. But
what was wrong with the brutes, except an absence
of freewill ? Their famous " brutal frankness "
was brutish frankness, showing them pitifully
proud of their knowledge of facts that looked so
large, and ignorant of the tiny enormous undying
fact of freewill. Perhaps women have more
freewill than men ?
It is because these men write so well that it is
a relief, from looking and enduring the clamour of
the way things state themselves from several
points of view simultaneously, to read their large
superficial statements. Light seems to come,
a large comfortable stretching of the mind,
things falling into an orderly scheme, the flatter-
ing fascination of grasping and elaborating the
scheme. But the after reflection is gloom . . .
a poisoning gloom over everything. . . . "Good
writing " leaves gloom. Dickens doesn't. . . .
But people say he's not a good writer. . . .
Youth. . . . and Typhoon. . . . Oh " Stalked
about gigantically in the darkness.''' . . . Fancy
forgetting that. And he is modern and a
good writer. New. They all raved quietly
about him. But it was not like reading a book
at all. . . . Expecting good difficult *' writing "
some mannish way of looking at things, and then
. . . complete forgetfulness of the worst time of
the day on the most grilling day of the year in a
crowded Lyons' at lunch-time and afterwards
joyful strength to face the disgrace of being an
hour or more late for afternoon work. . . .
They leave life so small that it seems worthless.
72 REVOLVING LIGHTS
He leaves everything big ; and all he tells added
to experience forever. It's dreadful to think o{
people missing him ; the forgetfulness and the
new birth into life. Even God would enjoy
reading Typhoon. . . . Then that is " great
fiction ? " " Creation ? " Why these falsifying
words, making writers look cut-off and mysteri-
ous ? Imagination, What is imagination ? It
always seems insulting, belittling, both to the
writer and to life. . . . He looked and listened
with his whole self — perhaps he is a small pale
invalid — and then came ' stalked about gigan-
tically ' . . . not made, nor created, nor be-
gotten, but proceeding . . . and working his
salvation. That is. what matters to him. . . .
In the day of Judgment, though he is a writer,
he will be absolved. Those he has redeemed
will be there to shout for him. But he will still
have to go to Purgatory ; or be born again as a
woman. Why come forward suddenly, in the
midst of a story to say they live far from reality }
A sudden smooth complacent male voice, making
your attention rock between the live text and the
picture of a supercilious lounging form, slippers,
a pipe, other men sitting round, and then the
phrase so smooth and good that it almost com-
pels belief. Why cannot men exist without
thinking themselves all there is }
She was in the open roadway, passing into the
deeps of the central freedom of Piccadilly Circus,
the crowded corner unknowingly left behind.
Just ahead was the island, the dark outline of the
fountain, the small surmounting figure almost
REVOLVING LIGHTS 73
invisible against the shadowy upper mass of a
bright-porched building over the way. The
grey trottoir, empty of the shawled flowerwomen
and their great baskets, was a quiet haven. The
surrounding high brilliancies beneath which
people moved along the pavements from space
to space of alternating harsh gold and shadowy
grey, met softly upon its emptiness, drawing a
circle of light round the shadow cast by the wide
basin of the fountain. There was a solitary man's
figure standing near the curb, midway on her
route across the island to take to the roadway
opposite Shaftesbury Avenue ; standing arrested ;
there was no traffic to prevent his crossing ;
a watchful habitue ; she would pass him in a
moment, the last fragment of the west-end . . .
good-bye, and her thoughts towards gaining the
wide homeward-going lane. A little stoutish
dapper grey-suited . . . Tommy BaUngton !
Standing at ease, turned quite away from the
direction that would take him home ; still and
expressionless, unrecognisable save for the tilt
of his profile and the set of his pince-nez. She
had never before seen him in unconscious repose,
never with this look of a motionless unvoyaged
soul encased in flesh ; yet had always known
even when she had been most attracted, that thus
he was. He had glanced. Had he recognised
her } It was too late to wheel round and save
his solitude. Going on, she must sweep right
across his path. Fellow-feeling was struggling
against her longing to touch, through the medium
of his voice, the old home-life so suddenly em-
74 REVOLVING LIGHTS
bodied. He had seen her, and his unawakened
face told her that she would neither pause nor
speak. Years ago they would have greeted
each other vociferously. . . . She was now so
shrouded that he was not sure she had recognised
him. Through his stupefaction smouldered a
suspicion that she wished to avoid recognition.
He was obviously encumbered with the sense of
having placed her amidst the images of his pre-
occupation. She rushed on, passing him with
a swift salute, saw him raise his hat with mechani-
cal promptitude as she stepped from the curb
and forward, pausing an instant for a passing
hansom, in the direction of home. It was done.
It had always been done from the very beginning.
They had met equally at last. This was the
reality of their early association. Her spirits
rose, clamorous. It was epical she felt. One
of those things arranged above one's head and
perfectly staged. Tommy of all people wakened
thus out of his absorption in the separated man's
life that so decorated him with mystery in the
feminine suburbs ; shocked into helpless in-
activity ; glum with an irrevocable recognising
hostility. It had been arranged. Silent accept-
ance had been forced upon him, by a woman of
his own class. She almost danced to the opposite
pavement in this keenest, witnessed moment of
her yearslong revel of escape. He would pre-
sently be returning to that other enclosed life
to which, being a man, and dependent on com-
forts, he was fettered. Already in his mind was
one of those formulas that echoed about in the
REVOLVING LIGHTS js
enclosed life ... " Oui, ma chere, little Mirry
Henderson^ strolling, at midnight, across Picca-
dilly Circus."
Suddenly it struck her that the life of men was
pitiful. They hovered about the door^yof free-
dom, returning sooner or later to the 'hearth,
where even if they were autocrats they were not
free ; but passing guests, never fully initiate
into the house-life, where the real active freedom
of the women resided behind the noise and
tumult of meetings. Man's life was bandied to
and fro . . . from word to word. Hemmed in
by women, fearing their silence, unable to enter
its freedom — being himself made of words —
cursing the torrents of careless speech with which
its portals were defended.
And all the time unselfconscious thoughtless
little men, with neat or shabby sets of uncon-
sidered words for everything, busily bleating
through cornets, blaring through trombones and
euphoniums, thrumming undertones on double-
basses. She summoned Harriett and shrieked
with laughter at the cheerful din. It was
cheerful, even in a funeral march. There
would certainly be music in heaven ; but not
books.
The shock of meeting Tommy had brought
the grey of tomorrow morning into the gold-lit
streets. There was a fresh breeze setting down
Shaftesbury Avenue. Here, still on the Circus,
was that little coffee-place. Tommy was going
home. She was rescuing the last scrap of a
London evening here at the very centre and then
^(> REVOLVING LIGHTS
going home, on foot, still well within the charmed
circle.
The spell of the meeting with Tommy broke as
she went down the little flight of steps. Here was
eternity, the backward vista indivisible, attended
by throngs of irreconcilable interpretations.
Years ago, a crisis of loneliness, this little doorway,
a glimpse, from the top of the steps, of a counter
and a Lockhart urn, a swift descent, unseen
people about her, companions ; misery left be-
hind, another little sanctuary added to her list.
The next time, coming coldly with Michael
Shatov, in a unison of escape from everlasting
conflict; people clearly visible, indifferent and
hard ; the moment of catching, as they sat down,
the flicker of his mobile eyelid, the lively unveiled
recognising glance he had flung at the opposite
table, describing its occupants before she saw
them ; the rush of angry sympathy ; a longing
to blind him ; in some way to screen them from
the intelligent unseeing glance of all the men in
the world.
" You don't see them ; they are not there in
what you see."
" These types are generally quite rudimentary ;
there is no question of a soul there."
** If you could only have seen your look ; the
most horrible look I have ever seen ; alive
with interest."
" There is always a certain interest."
The strange agony of knowing that in that
moment he had been alone and utterly spon-
taneous ; simple and whole ; that it had been.
REVOLVING LIGHTS 77
for him, a moment of release from the evening's
misery ; a sudden plunge into his own eternity,
his unthreatened and indivisible backward vista.
The horrible return, again and again, in her
own counsels, to the fact that she had seen,
that night, for herself, more than he had ever
told her ; that the pity he had appealed to was
unneeded ; his appeal a bold bid on the strength
of his borrowed conviction that women do
not, in the end, really care. How absolutely
men are deceived by a little cheerfulness.
• • •
And now she herself was interested ; had
attained unawares a sort of connoisseurship,
taking in, at a glance, nationality, type, status,
the difference between inclination and mis-
fortune. Was it he who had aroused her
interest .'' Was this contamination or illumina-
tion ?
And Michael's past was a matter of indiffer-
ence. . . . Only because it no longer concerned
her .'' Then it /lad been jealousy .'' Her new
calm interest in these women was jealousy.
Jealousy of the appeal to men of their divine
simplicity .''
"... which women don't understand.
And them as sez they does is not the marryin'
brand."
Oh, the hopeless eternal inventions and ignor-
ance of men ; their utter cleverness and ignor-
ance. PF/iy had they been made so clever and
yet so fundamentally stupid ?
She ordered her coffee at the counter and
78 REVOLVING LIGHTS
stood facing upstairs towards the oblong of
street. The skirts of women, men's trousered
legs, framed for an instant in the doorway,
passed by, moving slowly, with a lifeless intent-
ness. . . . Is the absence of personality original
in men ? Or only the result of their occupa-
tions ? Original. Otherwise environment is
more than the human soul. It is original.
Belonging to maleness ; to Adam with his
spade ; lonely in a universe of things. It
causes them to be moulded by their occupations,
taking shape, and status, from what they do.
A barrister, a waiter, recognisable. Men have
no natural rank. A woman can become a
waitress and remain herself. Yet men pity
women, and think them hard because they
do not pity each other.
It is man, puzzled, astray, always playing
with breakable toys, lonely and terrified in
his universe of chaotic forces who is pitiful.
The chaos that torments him is his own
rootless self. The key, unsuspected, at his
side.
In women like Eleanor Dear ? Calm and
unquestioning. Perfectly at home in life. With
a charm beyond the passing charm of a man.
She was central. All heaven and earth about
her as she spoke. Illiterate, hampered, feeling
her way all the time. And yet with a perfect
knowledge. Perfect comprehension in her
smile. All the maddening moments spent
with her, the endless detail and fussing, all
afterwards showing upon a background of gold.
REVOLVING LIGHTS 79
Men weave golden things ; thought, science,
art, religion upon a black background. They
never are. They only make or do ; uncon-
scious of the quality of life as it passes. So
are many women. But there is a moment
in meeting a woman, any woman, the first mo-
ment, before speech, when everything becomes
new ; the utter astonishment of life is there,
speech seems 'superfluous, even with women
who have not consciously realised that life is
astonishing. It persists through all the quota-
tions and conformities, and is there again, the
one underlying thing that women have to express
to each other, at parting. So that between
women, all the practical facts, the tragedies
and comedies and events, are but ripples on a
stream. It is not possible to share this sense
of life with a man ; least of all with those
who are most alive to " the wonders of the
universe." Men have no present ; except sensu-
ously. . . . That would explain their ambi-
tion . . . and their doubting speculations about
the future.
Yet it would be easier to make all this
clear to a man than to a woman. The very
words expressing it have been made by
men.
It was just after coming back from the Wil-
\Sons, in the midst of the time round about
Leyton's wedding, that Eleanor had suddenly
appeared on the Tansley Street doorstep. . . .
I was just getting to know the houseful of Orly
relations . . . Mrs. Sloan-Paget, whisking me
8o REVOLVING LIGHTS
encouragingly into everything. ..." my dear
you've got style, and taste ; stunning hair
and a good complexion. Look at my girls.
Darlings, I know. But what's the good of
putting clothes on figures like that ? " . . .
Daughterless Mrs. Orly looked pleased like a
mother when Mrs. Paget said " S'Henderson's got
to come down to Chumleigh." ... I almost
gave in to her reading of me ; feeling whilst
I was with her, back in the conservative, church
point of view. I could have kept it up, with
good coats and skirts and pretty evening gowns.
Playing games. Living hilariously in roomy
country houses, snubbing " outsiders," circling
in a perpetual round of family events, visits
to town, everything fixed by family happenings,
hosts of relations always about, everything, even
sorrow, shared and distributed by large rejoicing
groups ; the warm wide middle circle of English
life . . . secure. And just as the sense of
belonging was at its height, punctually, Eleanor
had come, sweeping everything away. As if
she had been watching. Coming out of the
past with her claim. . . . Skimpier and more
beset than ever. Yet steely with determination.
Deepening her wild-rose flush and her smile.
It was all over in a moment. W^reckage. Com-
mittal to her and her new set of circumstances.
. . . She would not understand that a sudden
greeting is always wonderful ; even if the person
greeted is not welcome. But Andrew Lang
did not know what he was admitting. Men
greet only themselves, their own being, past,
REVOLVING LIGHTS 8i
present or future. ... I am a man. The
more people put you at your ease, the
more eagerly you greet them. . . . That is
why we men like " ordinary women." And
always disappoint them. They mistake the
comfort of relaxation for delight in their
society.
Eleanor swept everything away. By seeming
to know in advance everything I had to tell,
and ignore it as not worth consideration. But
she also left her own circumstances unexplained ;
sitting about with peaceful face, talking in
hints, telling long stories about undescribed
people, creating a vast leisurely present, pitting
it against the whole world, with graceful con-
descending gestures.
It was part of her mystery that she should
have come back just that very afternoon. Then
she was in the right. If you are in the right
everything works for you. The original thing
in her nature that made her so beautiful, such
a perpetually beautiful spectacle, was right.
The moment that had come whilst she must
have been walking, brow modestly bent, with
her refined, conversational little swagger of
the shoulders, aware of all the balconies, down
the street, had worked for her. . . .
The impulses of expansive moments always
make things happen. Or the moments come
when something is about to happen ? How
can people talk about coincidence .'' How not
be struck by the inside pattern of life } It
is so obvious that everything is arranged.
F
82 REVOLVING LIGHTS
Whether by God or some deep wisdom in
oneself does not matter. There is something
that does not alter. Coming up again and again,
at long intervals, with the same face, generally
arresting you in midway, offering the same
choice, ease or difficulty. Sometimes even a
lure, to draw you back into difficulty. Deter-
minists say that you choose according to your
temperament, even if you go against your inclina-
tions. But what is temperament .''... Unique-
ness . . . something that has not existed before.
A free edge. . . . Contemplation is freedom.
The way you contemplate is your temperament.
Then action is slavery ?
There is something always plucking you
back into your own life. After the first pain
there is relief, a sense of being once more in a
truth. Then why is it so difficult to remember
that things deliberately done, with a direct
movement of the will, always have a falseness }
Never meet the desire that prompted the action.
The will is really meant to prevent deliberate
action ? That is the hard work of life ? The
Catholics know that desire can never be satis-
fied. You must not desire God. You must
love. I can't do that. I can't get clear enough
about what he wants. Yet even without God
I am not lonely ; or ever completely miserable.
Always in being thrown . back from outside
happiness, there seem to be two. A waiting
self to welcome me.
It can't be wrong to exist. In those moments
before disaster existence is perfect. Being quite
REVOLVING LIGHTS 83
still. Sounds come presently from the outside
world. Your mind moving about in it with-
out envy or desire, realises the whole world.
The future and the past are all one same stuff,
changing and unreal. The sense of your own
unchanging reality comes with an amazement
and sweetness too great to be borne alone ;
bringing you to your feet. There must be
someone there, because there is a shyness.
You rush forward, to share the wonder. And
find somebody engrossed with a cold in the
head. And are so emphatic and sympathetic
that they think you are a new friend and begin
to expand. And it is wonderful until you dis-
cover that they do not think life at all wonderful.
. . . That afternoon it had been a stray knock
at the front door and a sudden impulse to save
Mrs. Bailey coming upstairs. And Mrs.
Bailey, after all she had said, also surprised
into a welcome, greeting Eleanor as an old
friend, taking her in at once. And then the
old story of detained luggage, and plans prevented
from taking shape. The dreadful slide back,
everything disappearing but her and her diffi-
culties, and presently everything forgotten but
the fact of her back in the house. Afterwards
when the truth came out, it made no difference
but the relief of ceasing to be responsible for
her. But this time there had been no responsi-
bility. She had made no confidences, asked
for no help. Was it blindness, or flattered
vanity, not to have found out what she was
going through }
84 REVOLVING LIGHTS
Yet if the facts had been stated, Eleanor
would not have been able to forget them. In
those evenings and week-ends she had forgotten,
and been happy. The time had been full of
reality ; memorable. It stood out now, all
the going about together, drawn into a series
of moments when they had both seen with the
same eyes. Experiencing identity as they
laughed together. Her recalling of their read-
ings in the little Marylebone room, before the
curate came, had not been a pretence. Mr.
Taunton was the pretence. There had been
no space even for curiosity as to the end of
his part of the story. Eleanor, too, had not
wished to break the charm by letting things
in. She had been taking a holiday, between
the desperate past and the uncertain future.
In the midst of overwhelming things she had
stood firm, her power of creating an endless
present at its height. A great artist.
To Michael, a poor pitiful thing ; Rodkin's
victim. She^ of course, had given Michael
that version. Little Michael, stealing to her
room night by night, towards the end, to sleep
at her side and say consoling things ; never
guessing that her threat of madness was an
appeal to his Jewish kindness, a way of securing
him. What a story for proper English people
. . . the best revelation in the whole of her
adventure. And Mrs. Bailey too ; true as
steel. Serenely warding off the women boarders
. . . gastric distension.
Rodkin . . . poor little Rod kin with his
REVOLVING LIGHTS 8^
weak dreadful little life. Weekdays ; the un-
ceasing charm of Anglo-Russian speculation,
Sundays ; boredom and newspapers. Then
the week again, business and a City man's
cheap adventures. He had behaved well, in
spite of Michael's scoldings. It was wonderful,
the way the original Jewish spirit came out
in him, at every step. His loose life was not
Jewish. And it was really comic that he should
have been trapped by a girl pretending to be
an adventuress. Poor Eleanor, with all her
English dreams ; just Rodkin. But he was a
Jew when he hesitated to marry a consumptive,
and perfectly a Jew when he decided not to see
the child lest he should love it ; and also when
he hurried down into Sussex the moment it
came, to see it, with a huge armful of flowers,
for her. . . . What a scene for the Bible-
woman's Hostel. All Eleanor. Her triumph.
What other woman would have dared to engage
a cubicle and go calmly down without telling
them } And a week later she was in the Super-
intendent's room and all those prim women
sewing for her and hiding her and telling every-
body she had rheumatic fever. And crying
when she came away. . . .
She was right. She justified her actions
and came through. And now she's a young
married woman in a pretty villa, near the church,
and the vicar calls and she won't walk on South-
end pier because " one meets one's butcher
and baker and candlestick maker." But only
because Rodkin is a child-worshipper. And
86 REVOLVING LIGHTS
she tolerates him and the child and he is a brow-
beaten cowed little slave. ... It is tempting
to tell the story. A perfect recognisable story
of a scheming unscrupulous woman ; making
one feel virtuous and superior ; but only if
one simply outlined the facts, leaving out all
the inside things. Knowing a story like that
from the inside, knowing Eleanor, changed all
" scandalous " stories. . . . They were scan-
dalous only when told ? Never when thought
of by individuals alone ? Speech is technical.
Every word. In telling things, technical terms
must be used ; which never quite apply. . . .
To call Eleanor an adventuress does not describe
her. You can only describe her by the original
contents of her mind. Her own images ; what
she sees and thinks. She was an adventuress
by the force of her ideals. Like Louise going
on the street without telling her young man
so that he would not have to pay for her
trousseau. ...
Exeter was another. Keeping the shapes
of civilisation. Charming at tea parties. . . .
Knowing all the worldly things, made of good
style from her perfect brow and nose to the ,
tip of her slender foot . . . made to shine
at Ascot. It was only because she knew so
much about Mrs. Drake's secret drinking, that
Mrs. Drake said suddenly in that midnight
moment when Exeter had swept off to bed
after a tiff, " / don't go to hotels, with strange
men." I was reading that book of Dan Leno's
and thinking that if they would let me read
REVOLVING LIGHTS 87
it aloud their voices would be different ; that
behind their angry voices were real selves
waiting for the unreal sounds to stop. Up and
down the tones of their voices were individual
inflexions, feminine, innocent of harm, incapable
of harm, horrified since their girlhood by what
the world had turned out to be. . . . It was
an awful shock. But Exeter paid her young
man's betting debts and kept him on his feet.
And he was divorced. And so nice. But weak.
Still he had the courage to shoot himself. And
then she took to backing horses. And now
married, in a cathedral, to a vicar ; looking
angelic in the newspaper photograph. He has
only one regret . . . their childlessness. " Er }
Have children ? " Yet Mrs. Drake would be
staunch and kind to her if she were in need.
Women are Jesuits. . . .
From the first, in Eleanor's mind, had shone,
unquestioned, the shape of English life. Church
and State and Family. God above. Her belief
was perfect ; impressive. In all her dealings
she saw the working of a higher power, leading
her to her goal. When her health failed and
her vision receded, she clutched at the nearest
material for making her picture. In all she
had waded through, her courage had never
failed. Nor her charm ; the charm of her
strength and her singleness of vision. Her
God, an English-speaking gentleman, with
English traditions, tactfully ignored all her
contrivances and waited elsewhere, giving her
time, ready to preside with full approval, over
88 REVOLVING LIGHTS
her accomplished aim. . . . Women are Jesuits.
. . . The counterpart of all those Tansley Street
women was little Mrs. Orly, innocently un-
scrupulous to save people from difficulty and
pain.
L • • • •
It was when Eleanor went away that autumn
that I found I had been made a Lycurgan ;
and began going to the meetings ... in that
small room in Anselm's Inn. . . . Ashamed
of pride in belonging to a small exclusive group
containing so many brilliant men. Making
a new world. Concentrated intelligence and
goodwill. Unanimous even in their differences.
Able to joke together. Seeking, selflessly, only
one thing. And because they selflessly sought
it, all the things of fellowship added to them.
. . . From the first I knew I was not a real
Lycurgan. Not wanting their kind of selfless
seeking, yet liking to be within the stronghold
of people who were keeping watch, understand-
ing how social injustice came about, explaining
the working of things, revealing the rest of
the world as naturally unconsciously blind,
urgently requiring the enlightenment that only
the Lycurgans could bring, that could only
be found by endless dry work on facts and
figures. . . . At first it was like going to school.
Eagerly drinking in facts ; a new history.
The history of the world as a social group.
Realising the immensity of the problems cry-
ing aloud all over the world, not insoluble,
but unsolved because people did not realise
REVOLVING LIGHTS 89
themselves as members of one group. The
convincing little Lycurgan tracts, blossoming
out of all their intense labour, were the founda-
tion of a new social order ; gradually spreading
social consciousness. But the hope they brought,
the power of answering all the criticisms and
objections of ordinary people, always seemed
ill-gained. Always unless one took an active
share, like listening at a door. . . . She was
always catching herself dropping away from
the first eager gleaning of material to specula-
tions about the known circumstances of the
lecturer, from them into a trance of oblivion,
hearing nothing, remembering afterwards no-
thing of what had been said, only the quality
of the atmosphere — the interest of boredom
of the audience, the secret preoccupations of
unknown people sitting near. . . .
Everyone was going. The restaurant was
beginning to close. The west-end was driving
her off. She rose to go through the business
of paying her bill, the moment of being told
that money, someone's need of profits, was
her only passport into these central caverns
of oblivion. Forever driven out. Passing
on. To, keep herself in countenance she paid
briskly, with the air of one going purposefully.
The sound of her footsteps on the little stair-
way brought her vividly before her own eyes,
playing truant. She hurried to get out and
away, to be walking along, by right, in the
open, freed, for the remaining time, by the
90 REVOLVING LIGHTS
necessity of getting home, to lose herself once
more. . . .
The treelit golden glow of Shaftesbury Avenue
flowed through her ; the smile of an old friend.
The wealth of swinging along up the bright
ebb-way of the west-end, conscious of being,
of the absence of desire to be elsewhere or other
than herself. A future without prospects, the
many doors she had tried, closed willingly by
her own hand, the growing suspicion that no-
where in the world was a door that would open
wide to receive her, the menace of an increasing
fatigue, crises of withering mental pain, and
then suddenly this incomparable sense of being
plumb at the centre of rejoicing. Something
always left within her that contradicted all the
evidence. It compensated the failure of her
efforts at conformity. . . . Yet to live outside
the world of happenings, always to forget and
escape, to be impatient, even scornful, of the
calamities that moved in and out of it like a
well-worn jest, was certainly wrong. But it
could not be helped. It was forgetful ness,
suddenly overtaking her in the midst of her
busiest efforts . . . memory ... a perpetual
sudden blank . , . and upon it broke forth
this inexhaustible joy. The tappings of her
feet on the beloved pavement were blows struck
hilariously on the shoulder of a friend. To
keep her voice from breaking forth she sang
aloud in her mind, a soaring song unlimited
by sound.
The visit to the revolutionaries seemed already
REVOLVING LIGHTS 91
in the past, added to the long procession of
events that broke up and scattered the moment
she was awake at this lonely centre.
Speech came towards her from within the
echoes of the night ; statements in unfamiliar
shape. Years falling into words, dropping
like fruit. She was full of strength for the
end of the long walk ; armed against the rush
of associations waiting in her room ; going
swift and straight to dreamless sleep and the
joy of another day.
The long wide street was now all even light,
a fused misty gold, broken close at hand by
the opening of a dark byway. Within it was
the figure of an old woman bent over the gutter.
Lamplight fell upon the sheeny slopes of her
shawl and tattered skirt. Familiar. Forgotten.
The last, hidden truth of London, spoiling
the night. She quickened her steps, gazing.
Underneath the forward-falling crushed old
bonnet shone the lower half of a bare scalp
. . . reddish . . . studded with dull, wart-
like knobs . . . Unimaginable horror quietly
there. Revealed. Welcome. The head turned
stealthily as she passed and she met the expected
side-long glance ; naked recognition, leering
from the awful face above the outstretched
bare arm. It was herself, set in her path and
waiting through all the years. Her beloved
hated secret self, known to this old woman.
The street was opening out to a circus. Across
its broken lights moved the forms of people,
confidently, in the approved open pattern of
92 REVOLVING LIGHTS
life, and she must go on, uselessly, unrevealed ;
bearing a semblance that was nothing but a
screen set up, hiding what she was in the depths
of her being.
../^'
CHAPTER II
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 brilHance
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 excite-
ment 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,
93
94 REVOLVING LIGHTS
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 sur-
roundings ; 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
REVOLVING LIGHTS 95
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 isola-
tion. 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, un-
trammelled, 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 some-
thing 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 illu-
sion. It would be too cruel to freeze him in
96 REVOLVING LIGHTS
mid-career, with a definite message. She sat
conforming ; expanding, in spite of herself, in
the role 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 Eng-
lishness. . . .
Across the table, supporting him, were living
examples of his belief in the possibility of mar-
riage 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 deter-
mined 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 under-
stand 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
REVOLVING LIGHTS 97
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 un-
founded 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 relent-
98 REVOLVING LIGHTS
less 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 con-
tinued, 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 back-
ground, 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
REVOLVING LIGHTS 99
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 Jew-
Without breaking the rhythm of her smooth
graceful movement, she turned her head and
glanced across at Miriam ; a faint slight radi-
ance, 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 wehrmutig
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, im-
mediate 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-in-
formed than Englishwomen. She had looked
impersonally, and finding a blankness would not
100 REVOLVING LIGHTS
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 ex-
planations 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 an-
nouncement 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 im-
movable European generalisations ; his clear.
REVOLVING LIGHTS loi
swiftly manoeuvring, encyclopaedic 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 in-
sulting, polite, superfluous English smile, she
knew that it was patent to everyone that the even-
ing 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 m_an 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
I02 REVOLVING LIGHTS
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
REVOLVING LIGHTS 103
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 opposi-
tion. ...
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
I04 REVOLVING LIGHTS
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 ? "
REVOLVING LIGHTS 105
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 con-
centrated 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, help-
less 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.
io6 REVOLVING LIGHTS
" 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 sum-
moning 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, stifle, 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
REVOLVING LIGHTS 107
the upper classes ; clean sepulchres. . . .
How would he take opposition ?
*' Isn't it weird, etrange," 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 drole," she began. How
cynical it sounded ; a cynical French voice
striking jests out of the surface of things ;
neighing them against closed nostrils, with muz-
zles tight-crinkled in Mephistophelian mirth.
She glanced back at him, distracted by the re-
flection 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 pensee.
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
io8 REVOLVING LIGHTS
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 conscious-
ness 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 unobstruc-
tively, 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, stand-
REVOLVING LIGHTS 109
ing 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 untrouble-
some 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 Lin-
toff'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 sofdy moulded beauty, dread-
fully 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.
no REVOLVING LIGHTS
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 tomor-
row.
Lintoff stood flaring in the lamplit porch,
speeding them on their way with, abrupt caress-
ing 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 } "
REVOLVING LIGHTS iii
" 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 every-
thing, 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, imper-
fectly civilised creatures of instinct, sacrificed
112 REVOLVING LIGHTS
to sex. And all the time they have no suspicion
of the individual life going on behind the sur-
face." . . . 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 know-
ing 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 every-
body in the world died at the moment of realisa-
tion. The women know that humanity is two
groups. And they go into revolutions for the
freedom from the pressure of this knowledge."
REVOLVING LIGHTS 113
** 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 con-
vinced 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
i/iis " — 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 impos-
sible idea ; the idea of a man being consciously
attracted and won by universal physiologi-
cal facts, rather than by individuals them-
selves. . . .
If Michael only knew, it was this perpetual
continental science of his that had helped to
H
114 REVOLVING LIGHTS
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 defi-
nitely in the bright resounding daylight of mar-
riage . . . free of desires . . . free to rest and
give away to the tides of cheerfulness ringing
in confinement within her. She saw the v/orld
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 re-
cognised 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 appre-
hend ... so that when his man's limitations
REVOLVING LIGHTS 115
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 break-
ing of the silence into which she retreated while
keeping him talking, every pause in her out-
bursts 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
ii6 REVOLVING LIGHTS
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 unbeliev-
able 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 Wf-iC
speeding towards her ; she felt their breath ;
the lifting of the light with the presence, just
beyond the passing moments, of the old com-
panionship that for so long had been hers only
when she could forget her surrounded state.
His resonant cough brought her again
• • •
REVOLVING LIGHTS 117
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 ; takenof his own freewill the first
step away from the shelter she gave. Perhaps
a better, kinder shelter awaited him. Per-
haps 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 cer-
tainty about her was this mysterious youth ;
the strange everlasting sense of bemg, 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
ii8 REVOLVING LIGHTS
must lead. But letting him go was giving
him up to cynicism, or to the fixed blind senti-
ments 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 modify-
ing 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, how-
ever 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 anticipat-
ing 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, implor-
ing 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
REVOLVING LIGHTS 119
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 imper-
sonal, sounding on through life. With the
breath of this release she touched the realiza-
tion 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 cer-
tainties 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 enlight-
ener 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
I20 REVOLVING LIGHTS
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 inhos-
pitable to leave her with no companion but
the damp motionless air.
REVOLVING LIGHTS 121
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
122 REVOLVING LIGHTS
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 lamp-
light 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 out-
side and indifferent to the occasion, the feeling
that brought again and again, in spite of experi-
ence, 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 whis-
perings 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 tum-
bling into her mmd shrank back in silence before
Madame Lintoff's intellectual oblivion. It was
REVOLVING LIGHTS 123
more oppressive than the oblivion of the intel-
lectual English. Theirs was a small, hard,
bright circle. Within it they were self-con-
scious. Hers was an impersonal spreading dark-
ness. . . .
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 feel-
ing 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 han-
som 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, I'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.
124 REVOLVING LIGHTS
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 every-
day 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
REVOLVING LIGHTS 125
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 beauti-
fully 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 V
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 f/^phant." . . .
126 REVOLVING LIGHTS
The sudden bright English voice reverberated
through her search. . . . Sudermann ? She
saw eager, unconscious faces, well-off English
people, seeing only their English world, trans-
lating 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 impres-
sion 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 side-
ways movement of the head ; two short Russian
words pouching his red lips in a gesture of
denial. But he did not move, as an English-
man would have done after he thought he had
REVOLVING LIGHTS 127
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 safl^ron 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-;«or^."
" That has been so. But employers begin
to understand that it is a sound economic to
care for their workers."
128 REVOLVING LIGHTS
" A few. And that leads only to blue can-
vas."
** What is this ? "
** Wells's hordes of uniformed slaves, living
in security, with all sorts of material enjoy-
ments."
** 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 ques-
tion. His voice was like a cracked bell. Lin-
tofF's gentle, indifferent tones made a docile
response.
" I suggest we have /^<3," bellowed Michael
softly, facing her with a cheerful coun-
tenance. *' 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 .f" " He turned eagerly,
to draw them back at once to the park
gates, shouting gaily as he broke the group.
REVOLVING LIGHTS 129
** 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 some-
thing 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 .f* " In an
instant he would remember the dark little
Italian-Swiss cafe near the Marble Arch, and
its seal would be set on the whole of the after-
noon. 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.
I30 REVOLVING LIGHTS
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 con-
tents.
" 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."
The waiter pushed on, righting his noisy
trayful. Michael subsided with elbows on the
smeary marble table-top, his face propped on
his hands, about to speak. The Lintoffs also ;
their gleaming pale faces set towards the common
centre, while their eyes brooded outwards on
the crowded little scene. Miriam surveyed
them, glad of their engrossment, dizzy with
the sense of having left herself outside in the
park.
** Shall I tell the Lintoffs that you have
dimples ? " Michael asked serenely, shifting
his bunched face round to smile at her.
She checked him as he leaned across to call
their attention. ... It was in this very room
that she had first told him he must choose
REVOLVING LIGHTS 131
between her company and violent scenes with
waiters. He was utterly unconscious ; aware
only of his compatriots sitting opposite, himself
before them in the pride of an international
friendship. Yesterday's compact set aside, quite
likely, later on, to be questioned.
The Lintoffs' voices broke out together,
chalkily smooth and toneless against the cockney
sounds vibrating in the crowded space, all
harsh and strident, all either facetious or wrang-
ling. Their eyes had come back. But they
themselves were absent, set far away, amongst
their generalisations. Of the actual life of
the passing moment they felt no more than
Michael. Itself, its uniqueness, the deep loop
it made, did not exist for them. They looked
only towards the future. He only at a uniform
pattern of humanity.
Yet within the air itself was all the time the
something that belonged to everybody ; that
could be universally recognised ; disappearing
at once with every outbreak of speech that sought
only for distraction, from embarrassment or from
tedium. . . . She sat lifeless, holding for
comfort as she gathered once more, even with
these free Russians, the proof of her perfect
social incompatibility, to the thought that this
endurance was the last. These were the last
hours of wandering out of the course of her
being. . . . She felt herself grow pale and
paler, sink each moment more utterly out of
life. The pain in her brow pressed upon her
eyelids like a kind of sleep. She must be
132 REVOLVING LIGHTS
looking quite horrible. Was there anyone,
anywhere, who suffered quite in this way,
felt always and everywhere so utterly differ-
ent ?
Tea came bringing the end of the trio of
Russian phrases. Michael began to dispense
it, telling the Lintoffs that they had discovered
that the English did not know how to drink
tea. Ardent replies surged at the back of her
mind ; but speech was a faraway mystery.
She clung to Michael's presence, the sight
of his friendly arm handing the cup she could
not drink ; to the remembered perfection of
his acceptance of failures and exhaustions . . .
mechanically she was speaking French . . .
appearing interested and sincere ; caring only
for the way the foreign words gave a quality
to the barest statement by placing it in far-off
surroundings, giving it a life apart from its
meaning, bearing her into a tide of worldly
indifference. . . .
But real impressions living within her own
voice came crowding upon her, overwhelming
the forced words, opening abysses, threatening
complete flouting of her surroundings. She
snatched at them as they passed before her,
smiled her vanishing thread of speech into
inanity, and sat silent, half turned towards
the leaping reproachful shapes of thought, in-
expressible to these people waiting with faces
set only towards swift replies. Madame Lintoff
made a fresh departure in her moaning sv/eetly
querulous voice ... a host of replies belonged
REVOLVING LIGHTS 133
to it, all contradicting each other. But there
was a smooth neat way of replying to a thing
like that, leading quickly on to something
that would presently cancel it . . . quite simple
people. . . . Mrs. Bailey, saying wonderful
things without knowing it.
Answers given knowingly, admitted what they
professed to demolish. . . . She had forfeited
her right to speak ; disappeared before their
eyes, and must yet stay, vulnerable, held by
the sounds she had woven, false threads between
herself and them. Her head throbbed with
pain, a molten globe that seemed to be expanding
to the confines of the room. Michael was in-
accessible, carefully explaining to Madame
LintofF, in his way, why she had said what she
had said ; set with boyish intentness towards
the business of opening his dreadful green
bottle.
Lintoff sat upright with a listening face ; the
lit brooding face of one listening to distant
music. He was all lit, all the time, curiously
giving out light that his thinly coloured eyes
and flaming beard helped to flow forth. She
could imagine him speaking to crowds ; but he
had not the unmistakable speaker's look, that
lifted look and the sense of the audience ; always
there, even in converse with intimate friends. . . .
But of course in Russia there were no crowds,
none of that machinery of speaker and audience,
except for things that were not going to end in
action. . . . When Michael lifted his glass with
a German toast, Lintofl^'s smile came without con-
134 REVOLVING LIGHTS
tracting his face, the Hght that was in him be-
coming a person. He was so far away from
the thoughts provoked by speech that he could
be^ met afresh in each thing that was said ;
coming down into it whole and serious from his
impersonal distances ; but only to go back.
There was no permanent marvel for him in the
present. . . . The room was growing dim.
Only Michael's profile was clear, tilted as he
tossed off his dreadful drink at one draught. His
face came round at last, fresh and glowing with
the effervescence. He exclaimed, in gulps, at
her pallor and ordered hot milk for her, quietly
and courteously from the hovering waiter. The
Lintoffs uttered little condolences most tenderly,
with direct homely simplicity.
Sitting exempted, sipping her milk while the
others talked, lounging, in smooth gentle tones,
three forces . . . curbed to gentleness . . . she
felt the room about her change from gloom to
a strange blurred brightness, as if she were seeing
it through frosted glass. ... A party of young
men were getting up to go, stamping their feet
and jostling each other as they shook themselves
to rights, letting their jeering, jesting voices
reach street level before they ^ got to the door.
They filed past. Their faces, browless under
evilly flattened cloth caps, or too large under
horrible shallow bowlers set too far back, were
all the same, set towards the street with the look,
even while they jested, of empty finality ; choice-
less dead faces. They were not really gay.
They had not been gay as they sat. Only de-
REVOLVING LIGHTS 135
fiantly noisy, collected together to .-banish, with
their awful ritual of jeers and jests, the closed-
in view that was always before their eyes ; giving
them, even when they were at their rowdiest,
that look of lonely awareness of something that
would never change. That was why they jeered ?
Why their voices were always defensive and
defiant ? What else could they do when they
could alter nothing and never get away ? The
last of the file was different ; a dark young man
with a club-footed gait. His face was pursed
a little with the habit of facetiousness, but not
aggressively ; the forehead that had just disap-
peared under his dreadful cap was touched with
a radiance, a reflection of some individual state
of being, permanently independent of his cir-
cumstances ; very familiar, reminding her of
something glad . . . she found it as she brought
her eyes back to the table ; the figure of a boy,
swinging in clumsy boots along the ill-lit tunnel
of that new tube at Finsbury Park on a Saturday
night, playing a concertina ; a frightful wheezing
and jangling of blurred tones, filling the passage,
bearing down upon her, increasing in volume,
detestable. But she had taken in the leaping
unconscious rhythmic swinging of his body and
the joy it was to him to march down the long clear
passage, and forgiven him before he passed ; and
then his eyes as he came, rapt and blissfully grave
above the hideous clamour.
" Listen, Miriam. Here is something for
you." She awoke to scan the three busy
faces. It had not been her fault that she had
136 REVOLVING LIGHTS
failed and dropped away from them. Had it
been her fault ? The time was drawing to an
end. Presently they would separate for good.
The occasion would have slipped away. W^ith
this overwhelming sense of the uniqueness of
occasions, she yet forgot every time, that every
occasion was unique, and limited in time, and
would not recur. . . . She sat up briskly to
listen. There was still time in hand. They
had been ages together. She was at home.
She yawned and caught Lintoff's smiling eye.
There was a brightness in this little place ; all
sorts of things that reflected the light . . .
metal and varnished wood, upright ; flat surfaces ;
the face of the place ; its features certainly
sometimes cleansed, perhaps by whistling waiters
in the jocund morning, for her. She did not
dust . . . she could talk and listen, in prepared
places, knowing nothing of their preparations.
. . . She belonged to the leisure she had
been born in, to the beauty of things. The
margins of her time would always be glori-
ous.
" Lintoff says that he understands not at all
the speech of these young men who were only
now here. I have not listened ; but it was of
course simply cockney. He declares that one
man used repeatedly to the waiter making the
bill, one expression, sounding to him like a mix-
ture of Latin and Chinese — Ava-tse. I confess
that after all these years it means to me absolutely
nothing. Can you recognise it .'' "
She turned the words over in her mind, but
REVOLVING LIGHTS 137
could not translate them until she recalled the
group of men and the probable voice. Then
she recoiled. Lintoff and Michael did not know
the horror they were handling with such light
amusement.
" I know," she said, ** it's appalling ; fearful "
— even to think the words degraded the whole
spectacle of life, set all its objects within reach
of the transforming power of unconscious dis-
tortion. . . .
" Why fearful ? It is just the speech of
London. Certainly this tame boor was not
swearing ? " railed Michael. LintofF's smile
was now all personal curiosity.
'* It's not Cockney. It's the worst there is.
London Essex. He meant I've ; had ; two ;
buns or something. Isn't it -perfectly awful } "
Again the man appeared horribly before her,
his world summarised in speech that must, did
bring everything within it to the level of its
baseness.
** Is it possible } " said Michael with an
amused chuckle. Lintoff was murmuring the
phrase that meant for him an excursion into
the language of the people. He could not see
its terrible menace. The uselessness of opposing
it. . . . Revolutionaries would let all these
people out to spjead over everything. . . . But
the people themselves would change } But it
would be too late to save the language. . . .
" English is being destroyed," she pro-
claimed. " There is a relationship between
sound and things. . . . If you heard a Canadian
138 REVOLVING LIGHTS
reading Tennyson. ... ' Come into the goi-
den, Mahd.' But that's different. And in
parts of America a very beautiful rich free Eng-
lish is going on ; more vivid than ours, and
taking things in all the time. It is only in
England that deformed speech is increasing —
is being taught in schools. It shapes these
people's mouths and contracts their throats and
makes them hard-eyed."
" You have no ground whatever for these wild
statements."
" They are not wild ; they are tame, when
you really think of it." Lintoff was watching
tensely ; deploring wasted emotion . . . prob-
ably.
" Do you think Lintoff ..." They moved
on in their talk, unapprehensive foreigners,
leaving the heart of the problem untouched.
It was difficult to keep attached to a conversa-
tion that was half Michael's, with the Lintoffs
holding back, acquiescing indulgently in his
topics. An encyclopaedia making statements
to people who were moving in a dream ; halting
and smiling and producing gestures and kindly
echoes. . . . Michael like a rock for most
things as they were and had been in the past, yet
knowing them only in one way ; clear as crystal
about ordered knowledge, but never question-
ing its value.
She wanted, now, to talk again alone with
Lintoff" . . . anything would do. The oppo-
sition that was working within her, not to his
vision, but to his theory of it, and of the way
REVOLVING LIGHTS 139
it should be realised, would express itself to him
through any sort of interchange. Something
he brought with him would be challenged by
the very sound on the air of the things that
would be given her to say, if she could be with
him before the mood of forgetful interest should
be worn away. She sat waiting for the home-
ward walk, surrounded by images of the things
that had made her ; not hers, England's, but
which she represented and lived in, through
something that had been born with her. If
there was anyone she had ever met to whom
these things could be conveyed without clear
speech or definite ideas, it was he. But when
they left the restaurant they walked out into
heavy rain and went to the place of parting,
separated and silent in a crowded 'bus.
Michael- was going to keep his word.
Michael alone. With more than the usual
man's helplessness. . . . Getting involved. At
the mercy of his inability to read people.
The torment of missing his near warm pre-
sence would grow less, but the torment of not
knowing what was happening to him would
increase.
This stillness creeping out from the corners
of the room was the opening of a lifetime of
loneliness. It would grow to be far more
dreadful than it was tonight. Tonight it was
alive, between the jolly afternoon with the
Lintoffs — jolly ; the last bit of shared life —
and the agony of tomorrow's break with Michael.
HO REVOLVING LIGHTS
But a day would come when the silence would
be untormented, absolute, for life ; echoing to
all her movements in the room ; waiting to settle
as soon as she was still.
She resisted, pitting against it the sound
of London. But in the distant voice there
was a new note ; careless dismissal. The busy
sound seemed very far away ; like an echo of
itself.
She moved quickly at the first sinking of her
heart, and drew in her eyes from watching her
room, the way its features stood aloof, separate
and individual ; independent of her presence.
In a moment panic would have seized her, leaving
no refuge. She asserted herself, involuntarily
whistling under her breath, a cheerful sound that
called across the night to the mistaken voice of
London and blended at once with its song. . . .
She would tell Michael he must communicate
with her in any dire necessity. . . . Moving
about unseeing she broke up the shape of her
room and blurred its features and waited, holding
on. Attention to these wise outside threats,
would drive away something coming confidently
towards her, just round the corner of this vast,
breathless moment. . . . She paused to wait for
it as for a person about to speak aloud in the
room, and drew a deep breath sending through
her a glov^ Yrom head to foot ... it was there ;
independent, laughing, bubbling up incorrig-
ibly, golden and bright with a radiance that
spread all round her ; her profanity . . . but
if incurable profanity was incurable happiness,
REVOLVING LIGHTS 141
how could she help believing and trusting it
against all other voices ... if the last deepest
level of her being was joy ... a hilarity against
which nothing seemed to be able to prevail . . .
able, in spite of herself, in spite of her many
solemn eager expeditions in opposition to it, to
be always there, not gone ; always waiting behind
the last door. It was simply rum. Her limbs
stirred to a dance . . . how slowly he had played
that wild Norwegian tune ; making it like an
old woman singing to a fretful child to cheat it
into comfort ; a gay quavering.
Its expanded gestures carried her slowly and
gently up and down the room, dipping, swaying,
with wooden clogs on her feet, her arms swinging
to balance the slow movements of her body,
the surrounding mountain landscape gleaming in
the joy of the festival, defying the passing of
the years. She could not keep within the slow
rhythm. Her feet flung off the clogs and flew
about the room until she was arrested by the
flying dust and escaped to the window while it
settled behind her on the subdued furniture.
A cab whistle was sounding in the street and the
voices, coming up through the rain-moist air,
of people grouped waiting on a doorstep . . .
come out into the deep night, out again into
endless space, from a room, and still keeping
up the sound of carefully modulated speech
and laughter. The jingling of a hansom sounded
far away in the square. It would be years before
it would get to them. They would have to go
on fitting things into the shape of their care-
142 REVOLVING LIGHTS
fully made tones. She was tempted to call down
to them to stop ; tell them they were not taking
anyone in. . . .
A puff of wind brought the rain against her
face, inviting her to stay with the night and
find again, as she had done in the old days of
solitude, the strange wide spaces within the
darkness. But she was drawn back by a colloquy
set in, behind her, in the room. Warmly the
little shabby enclosure welcomed her, given
back, eager for her to go on keeping her life in
it ; showing her the time ahead, the circling
scenes ; all the undeserved, unsought, extraordin-
ary wealth of going on being alive. She stood
with the rain-drops on her face, tingling from
head to foot to know why ; why ; why life
should exist. . . .
Going back into the room she found that her
movement about it had all its old quality ; she
was once more in that zone of her being where
all the past was with her unobstructed ; not
recalled, but present, so that she could move
into any part and be there as before. She felt
her way to sit on the edge of her bed, but gently
as she let herself down, the bedstead creaked and
gave beneath her, jolting her back into today,
spreading before her the nothingness of the
days she must now pass through, bringing back
into her mind the threats and wise sayings.
She faced them with arguments, flinching as
she recognised this acknowledgment of their
power.
Lifelong loneliness is a phrase. With no
REVOLVING LIGHTS 143
evidence for its meaning, but the things set down
in books. . . . People who record loneliness,
bare their wounds, and ask for pity, are not wholly
wounded. For others, no one has any right to
speak. . . . What is ** a lonely figure " } If
it knows it is lonely it is not altogether lonely.
If it does not know, it is not lonely. Books about
people are lies from beginning to end. However
sincere, they cannot offer any evidence about
life. Even lifelong loneliness is life ; too mar-
vellous to express. Absolutely, of course. But
relatively } Relative things are forgotten when
you are alone. . . .
The thought, at this moment, of the alter-
native of any sort of social life with its trampling
hurry, made her turn to the simple single sense
of her solitude with thankfulness that it was
preserved. Social incompatibility thought of
alone, brought a curious boundless promise, a
sense of something ahead that she must be alone
to meet, or would miss. The condemnation of
social incompatibility coming from the voices
of the world roused an impatience which
could not feel ashamed ; an angry demand for
time, and behind it a sense of companionship for
which there was no name. . . .
Single, detached figures came vividly before
her, all women. Each of them had spoken to
her with sudden intimacy, on the outskirts of
groups from which she had moved away to breathe
and rest. They had all confessed their incompati-
bility ; a chosen or accepted loneliness. But
it was certain they never felt that human forms
144 REVOLVING LIGHTS
about them crushed, with the sets of unconsidered
assumptions behind their talk, the very sense of
existence. They were either cynical, not only
seeing through people, but not caring at all to
be alive, never assuming characters in order to
share the fun ... or they were *' misjudged "
or " resigned." The cynical ones were really
alone. They never had any sense of being
accompanied by themselves. They had a strange
hard strength ; unexpected hobbies and inter-
ests. Those who were resigned were usually
religious. . . . They lived in the company of
their idea of Christ . . . but regretfully . . .
as if it were a second best. ... " And I who
hoped for only God, found thee''' . . . Mrs.
Browning could never have realised how fear-
fully funny that was . . . from a churchwoman.
And Protestant churchwomen believe
that only men are eligible to associate with God.
Thinking of Protestant husbands the idea was
suffocating. It made God intolerable ; and
even Heaven simply abscheulich. . . . Budd-
hism. ..." Buddhism is the only faith that
offers itself to men and women alike on equal
terms ..." and then, " women are not encour-
aged to become priests " . . . Thibet. . . . The
whole world would be Thibet if the people were
evenly distributed. Only the historic centuries
had given men their monstrous illusions ; only
the crowding of the women in towns. But the
Church will go on being a Royal Academy of
Males. . . .
She called back her thoughts from a contem-
REVOLVING LIGHTS 145
plation that would lead only to anger, and was
again aware of herself waiting, on the edge of
her bed, just in time. In spite of her truancy
the gay tumult was still seething in her mind ;
the whole of her past happinesses close about her,
drawing her in and out of the years. Fragments
of forgotten experience detached themselves,
making a bright moving patchwork as she
watched, waiting, while she passed from one to
another and fresh patches were added drawing
her on. Joy piled up within her ; but while
she savoured again the quality all these past
things had held as she lived them through, she
suddenly knew that they were there only because
she was on her way to a goal. Somewhere at
the end of this ramble into the past, was a release
from wrath. She rallied to the coolness far away
within her tingling blood. How astoundingly
good life was ; generous to the smallest effort.
. . . The scenes gathered about her, called
her back, acquired backgrounds that spread and
spread. She watched single figures going on into
lives in which she had no part ; into increas-
ing incidents, leaving them, as they had found
them, unaware. They never stopped, never
dropped their preoccupation with people and
the things that happened, to notice the extra-
ordinariness of the world being there and they
on it . . . and so it was, everywhere. . . .
She seemed to be looking with a hundred eyes,
multitudinously, seeing each thing from several
points at once, while through her mind flitted
one after another all the descriptions of humanity
K
146 REVOLVING LIGHTS
she had ever culled. There was no goal here.
Only the old familiar business of suspended
opinions, the endless battling of thoughts. She
turned away. She had gone too far. Now
there would be lassitude and the precipice that
waited. . . . Her room was clear and hard
about her as she moved to take refuge near the
friendly gas, the sheeny patch of wall underneath
it.
As she stood within the radiance, conscious
only of the consoling light, the little strip of
mantelshelf and the small cavernous presence of
the empty grate, a single scene opened for a
moment in the far distance, closing in the empty
vista, standing alone, indistinct, at the bottom
of her ransacked mind. It was gone. But its
disappearance was a gentle touch that lingered,
holding her at peace and utterly surprised.
This forgotten thing was the most deeply
engraved of all her memories ? The most
powerful ? More than any of the bright remem-
bered things that had seemed so good as they
came, suddenly, catching her up and away, each
one seeming to be the last her lot would afford ?
It was. The strange faint radiance in which
it had shone cast a soft grey light within the
darkness concealing the future. . . .
Oldfield. It had come about through Dr.
Salem Oldfield. She could not remember his
arrival. Only suddenly realising him, one even-
ing at dinner when he had been long enough in
the house to chaff Mrs. Bailey about some imag-
inary man. Sex-chaff" ; that was his form of
REVOLVING LIGHTS 147
humour ; giving him away as a nonconformist.
But so handsome, sitting large and square, a
fine massive head, well shaped hair, thick, and
dinted with close cropped waves ; talking about
himself in the eloquent American way. It was
that night he had told the table how he met his
fiancee. He was a charlatan, stagey ; but there
must have been something behind his clever
anecdotal American piety. Something remained
even after the other doctors' stories about his
sharing their sitting-room and books, without
sharing expenses ; about his laziness and self-
indulgence.
Mr. Chadband. But why shouldn't people
on the way to Heaven enjoy buttered toast ?
A hypocrite is all the time trying to be something,
or he wouldn't be a hypocrite. . . . And the
story he told was frue .... Dr. Winchester
knew. It was with his friends at Balham that
the girl had been staying. Wonderful. His
lonely despair in Uganda ; the way he had forced
himself in the midst of his darkness to visit the
sick convert . . . and found the answer to his
trouble in a leaflet hymn at the bedside ; and
come to London for his furlough and met the
authoress in the very first house he visited.
Things like that don't happen unless people are
real in some way. And the way he had admired
Michael ; and liked him.
It had been Michael he had taken to the
Quaker meeting. But there must have been
some talk with him about religion, to lead up
to that sudden little interview on the stairs.
148 REVOLVING LIGHTS
he holding a book in one large hand and thump-
ing it with the other. ... " You'll find the
basic realities of religious belief set forth here \
in this small volume. Your George Fox was a
marvellous man." There was an appealing
truth in him at that moment, and humility. . . .
But before his footsteps had died away she knew
she could not read the book. Even the sight of it
suggested his sledge-hammer sentimental piety.
Also she had felt that the religious opinions of
a politician could not clear up the problems
that had baffled Emerson. It was only after
she had given back the book that she rem.embered
the other George Fox and the Quaker in Uncle
Toms Cabin. But she had said she had read
it and that it was wonderful, to silence his evan-
gelistic attacks, and also for the comfort of
sharing, with anybody, the admission that there
was absolute wonderfulness.
After that there was no memory of him until
the Sunday morning when Michael had come
panting upstairs to ask her to go to this meeting.
He was incoherent, and she had dressed and
gone out with them, into the high bright Sunday
morning stillness ; without knowing whither.
Finding out, somewhere on the way, that they
were going to see Quakers waiting to be moved
by the spirit. ... a whitewashed roorn,_ with
people in Quaker dress sitting in a circle }
Shocking to' break in on them. . . . Startling
not to have remembered them in all these years of
hoping to meet someone who understood silence ;
and now to be going to them as a show ; because
REVOLVING LIGHTS 149
Dr. Oldfield admired Michael, and being
American, found out the unique things in
London. . . .
In amongst the small old shops in St. Martin's
Lane, gloomy, iron-barred gates, a long bleak
corridor, folding doors ; and suddenly inside a
large room with sloping galleries and a platform,
like a concert room, a row of dingy modern
people sitting on the platform facing a scattered
" chapel " congregation ; men and women sit-
ting on different sides of the room . . . being
left standing under the dark gallery, while Dr.
Oldfield and Michael were escorted to seats
amongst the men ; slipping into a chair at the
back of the women's side ; stranded in an
atrocious emphasis of sex. But the men were
on the left, . . . and numbers of them ; not the
few of a church congregation ; and young ;
modern young men in overcoats ; really religious,
and «(?/" thinking the women secondary. . . . But
there were men also on the women's side ; here
and there. Married men ? Then those across
the way were bachelors. . . . That young
man's profile ; very ordinary and with a walrus
moustache ; but stilled from its maleness, de-
liberately divested and submitted to silence,
redeeming him from his type. . . .
To have been born amongst these people ;
to know at home and in the church a shared
religious life. . . . They were in Heaven al-
ready. Through acting on their belief. Where
two or three are gathered together. Nearer
than thoughts ; nearer than breathing ; nearer
ISO REVOLVING LIGHTS
than hands and feet. The church knew it ;
but put the cart before the horse ; the surface
before the reality. The beautiful surroundings,
the bridge of music and then, the moment the
organ stopped a booming or nasal voice at top
speed, T' th' Lordour God b'long mahcics 'n
f'giveness." . . . Anger and excited discovery
and still more time wasted, in glancing across
to find Michael, small and exposed at the gang-
way end, his head decorously bent, the Jew in
him paying respect, but looking up and keenly
about him from under his bent brows, observing
on the only terms he knew, through eye and
brain. . . .
Michael was a determinist. . . . But to as-
sume the presence of the holy spirit was also
determinism } . . . Beyond him Dr. Oldfield,
huge and eagerly bowed, conforming to Quaker
usages, describing the occasion in his mind as
he went. It was just then, turning to get away
from his version, that the quality of the silence
had made the impression that had come back to
her now.
Dr. McHibbert said pure being was nothing.
But there is no such thing as nothing . . .
being in the silence was being in something
alive and positive ; at the centre of existence ;
being there with others made the sense of it
stronger than when it was experienced alone.
Like lonely silence it drove away the sense of
enclosure. There had been no stuffiness of
congregated humanity ; the air, breathed in,
had held within it a freshness, spreading coolness
REVOLVING LIGHTS 151
and strength through the secret passages of the
nerves.
It had felt like the beginning of a life that
was checked and postponed into the future by
the desire to formulate it ; and by the nudging
of a homesickness for daily life with these people
who lived from the centre, admitted, in public,
that life brims full all the time, away below
thoughts and the loud shapes of things that
happen. . . . And just as she had longed for
the continuance of the admission, the spell had
been broken. Suddenly, not in continuance,
not coming out of the stillness, but interrupting
it, an urbane, ingratiating voice. Standing up
in the corner of the platform, turned towards the
congregation, as if he were a lecturer facing an
audience, a dapper little man in a new spring
suit, with pink cheeks and a pink rose in his
buttonhole. . . . Afterwards it had seemed
certain that he had broken the silence because
the time was running out. Strangers were
present and the spirit must move. . . .
It had been a little address, a thought-out
lecture on natural history, addressed by a special-
ist to people less well informed. He had talked
his subject not with, but at them. . . . While
his voice went on, the gathering seemed to lose
all its religious significance. His informing
air ; his encouraging demonstrator's smiles ; his
obvious relish of the array of facts. They fell
on the air like lies, losing even their own proper
value, astray and intruding in the wrong con-
text. When he sat down the silence was there
152 REVOLVING LIGHTS
again, but within it were the echoes of the urbane,
expounding, professorial voice. Then, just after-
wards, the breaking forth of that old man's
muffled tones ; praying ; quietly, as if he were
alone. No one to be seen ; a humbled life-
worn old voice, coming out of the heart of the
gathering, carrying with it, gently, all the soreness
and groaning that might be there. No whining
or obsequiousness ; no putting on of a special
voice ; patient endurance and longing ; affec-
tion and confidence. And far away within the
indistinct aged tones, a clarion note ; the warm
glow of sunlight ; his own strong certainty
beating up unchanged beneath the heavy weight
of his years. A gentle, clean, clear-eyed old
man, with certainly a Whitman beard. Beauti-
ful. For a moment it had been perfectly beautiful.
If he had stopped abruptly . . . But the
voice cleared and swelled. Life dropped away
from it ; leaving a tiresome old gentleman in
full blast ; thoughts coming in to shape care-
fully the biblical phrases describing God ; to
God. In the end he too was lecturing the con-
gregation, praying at them, expressing his judg-
ment. . . . Bleakness spread through the air.
It was worse than the little pink man, who
partly knew what he was doing and was ashamed.
But this old chap was describing, at awful length,
without knowing it, the secret of his own surface
misery, the fact that he had never got beyond
the angry, jealous, selfish, male God of the
patriarchate.
Almost at once after that, the stirring and
REVOLVING LIGHTS 153
breaking up ; and those glimpses, as people
moved and turned towards each other, shaking
hands, of the faces of some of the women, bringing
back the lost impression. The inner life of the
meeting was more fully with the women ? It
was they who spread the pure, live atmosphere ?
But they were obviously related. They had a
household look, but not narrowly ; none of the
air of isolation that spread from churchwomen ;
the look of being used up by men and propping
up a man's world with unacknowledged, or
simply unpondered, private reservations. Nor
any of the jesting air of those women who ' make
the best of things.* They looked enviably,
deeply, richly alive, on the very edge of the
present, representing their faith in their own
persons, entirely self-centred and self-controlled ;
poised and serene and withdrawn, yet not with-
holding. They had no protesting competing
eagerness, and none of the secret arrogance of
churchwomen. Their dignity was not dignified.
Seen from behind they had none of the absurdity
of churchwomen, devoutly uppish about the
status of an institution which was a standing
insult to their very existence. ... It was they,
the shock of the relief, after the revealed weak-
ness of the men, of their perfect poise, their
personality, so strong and intense that it seemed
to hold the power of reaching forth, impersonally,
in any thinkable direction, that had finally con-
firmed the impression that had been so deep and
that yet had not once come up into her thoughts
since the day it was made. . . .
154 REVOLVING LIGHTS
The poorest, least sincere type of Anglican
priest had a something that was lacking in Dr.
Oldfield and the pink man. The absence of
it had been the most impressive part of seeing
them talking together. He had introduced
Michael first. And the feeling of being affronted
had quickly changed to thankfulness at repre-
senting nothing in the eyes of the suave little
man. He had given only half his attention,
not taking up the fact that Michael was a Zionist ;
his eyes wandering about ; the proprietary eyes
of a churchwarden. . . .
St. Pancras clock struck two. But there was
no sense of night in the soft wide air ; pouring
in now more strongly at the open casement,
rattling its fastening gently, rhythmically, to
and fro, sounding its two little notes. It was
the west wind. Of course she was not tired and
there was no sense of night. She hurried to
be in bed in the darkness, breathing it in, listen-
ing to the little voice at the window. Here was
part of the explanation of her evening. Again
and again it had happened ; the escape into the
tireless unchanging centre ; when the wind
was in the west. Michael had been hurt when
she had told him that the west wind brought her
perfect happiness and always, like a sort of
message, the certainty that she must remain
alone. But it was through him that she had
discovered that it transformed her. It was an
augury for tomorrow. For the way of the wind
tonight, its breath passing through her, recalled,
seeming exactly to repeat, that wonderful night
REVOLVING LIGHTS 155
of restoration when, for the only time, he had
been away from London. It was useless to
deplore the seeming cruelty. The truth was
forced upon her, wafted through her by this
air that washed away all the circumstances of
her life.
CHAPTER III
SHE was inside the dark little hall, her luggage
being set down in the shadows by the brisk
silent maid. At the sight of the wide green
staircase ascending to the upper world, the
incidents of the journey, translated as she drove
to the house into material for conversation, fell
away and vanished.
The thud of the swing door, the flurry of
summer skirts threshed by flying footsteps ;
Alma hurrying to meet her. ... It was folly ;
madness ; to flout the year's fatigue by coming
here to stay, instead of going away with friends
also tired and seeking holiday. . . .
With the first step on the yielding pile of the
stair-carpet she forgot everything but the escape
from noise and gloom and grime. She was
going up for four endless weeks into the clean
light streaming down from above. This time
there should be no brisk beginning. She would
act out Alma's promise to accept her as an
invalid deaf mute. There was so much time
that fatigue was an asset, the shadow against
which all this brightness shone out.
But Alma was not welcoming an invalid.
There she stood, at the end of her rush, daintily
jigging from foot to foot, in a delicate frilly
little dress ; heading the perspective of pure
156
REVOLVING LIGHTS 157
white and green, surfaces and angles sharp in
the east light coming through the long case-
ment. She checked the bright perspective with
the thought in her dress, the careful arrangement
of her softly woven pile of bright hair, the
afternoon's excitement, from which she had
rushed forth, shining through her always newly
charming little pointed square face.
" Shall I labour up the rest of the stairs, or
sit down here and burst into tears ? "
" Oh, come up, dear ole fing," she cried with
tender irony ; but irony. " Paw fing. Is it
very tired ? " But her gentle arms and hands
were perfectly, wonderfully understanding ;
though her face withdrawn from her gentle
kiss still mocked ; always within the limpid
brown eyes that belabouring, rallying, mocking
spirit. She held her smile radiantly, against
a long troubled stare, and then it broke into her
abrupt gurgle of laughter.
** Come along," she cried and carried a guest
at a run along the passage and through the swing
door.
It was the downstairs spare room. . . .
Miriam had expected the winding stair, the
room upstairs, where all her shorter visits were
stored up. She was to be down here at the
centre of the house, just behind low casements,
right on the garden, touched by the sound of
the sea. And within the curtain-shaded sound-
bathed green-lit space there was a deeper re-
moteness than even in the far high room,
so weirdly shaped by the burning roof ; its
158 REVOLVING LIGHTS
orange light always full of a strange listening
silence. . . .
" Alma. How perfectly glorious." She stood
still, turned away, as Alma closed the door,
contemplating the screened light falling every-
where on spaces of pure fresh colour, against
which the deep tones of single objects shone
brightly.
Alma neighed gently and with little gurgles
of laughter put her hands about her and gently
shook her. " It is rather a duck of a room.
It is rather a duck of a room." Another little
affectionate, clutching shake. Her face was
crinkled, her eyes twinkling with mirth ; as if
she gave the room a little sportive push that
left it bashed amusingly sideways. In just this
way had she jested when they walked, wearing
long pigtails, down the Upper Richmond Road.
If she could have echoed the words and joined
in Alma's laughter, she would have been, in
Alma's eyes, suitably launched on her visit.
But she couldn't. Amused approval was an out-
rage on something. Yet the kind of woman
who would be gravely pleased and presently
depart to her own quarters proud and possessive,
would also leave everything unexpressed. But
that kind of person would not have achieved this
kind of room . . . and to Alma the wonder
of it was of course inseparable from the adven-
ture of getting it together. It was something
in the independent effect of things that was
violated by regarding them merely as successful
larks. . . . Yet Alma's sense of beauty, her
REVOLVING LIGHTS 159
recognition of its unfamiliar forms was keener,
more experienced, more highly-wrought than
her own.
" I shall spend the whole of my time in here,
doing absolutely nothing."
" You shall !' You shall ! Dear old Mira."
She was laughing again. " But you'll come out
and have tea. Sometimes. Won't you, for
instance, come out and have tea now } In a
few minutes } There'll be tea ; in ever such a
few minutes. Wouldn't that be a bright idea } "
How dainty she was ; how pretty. A Dresden
china shepherdess, without the simper ; a sturdi-
ness behind her sparkling mirth. If only she
would stop trying to liven her up. It seemed
always when they were alone, as if she were still
brightly in the midst of people keeping things
going. . . .
" Tea ! Bright idea 1 Tea ! " A little part-
ing shake and a brisk whirling turn and she
was sitting away on the side of the bed, medita-
tively, with both hands, using a small filmy
handkerchief, having given up hope of galvan-
ising ; saying gravely, " Take off your things
and tell me really how you are."
" I'm at my last gasp," said Miriam sinking
into a chair. It was clear now that she would
not be alone with the first expressiveness of the
room. Returning later on she would find it
changed. The first, already fading, wonderful
moment would return, painfully, only when she
was packing up to go. After all it was Alma's
home. But it was no use trying to fight this
i6o REVOLVING LIGHTS
monstrous conviction that the things she liked
of other people, were more hers than their own.
The door opened again upon a servant with her
pilgrim baskets.
" I nearly always am at my last gasp nowadays."
Clean, strong neatly cuffed hands setting the
dusty London baskets down to rest in the quiet
freshness.
Alma spoke formally ; her voice a comment
on expressiveness in the presence of the maid ;
and an obliteration of the expressiveness of the
room ; making it just a square enclosure set
about with independent things, each telling, one
against the other, a separate history. . . . When
the maid was gone the air was parched with
silence. Miriam felt suspended ; impatient ;
eager to be out in whatever grouping Alma had
come from, to recover there in the open the
sense of life that had departed from the shelter-
ing room.
" How is Sarah } " Alma felt the strain.
But for her it was the difficulty of finding common
ground for interchange with anyone whose life
was lacking in brilliant features. She was
behaving, kindly trying for topics ; but also,
partly, underlining the featurelessness, as a
punishment for bad behaviour.
*' Oh — flourishing — I think." She rose, un-
pinning her stifling veil. She would have to
brace herself to reach out to something with
which to break into the questions Alma's kind
patience would one by one produce. A cate-
chism leading her thoughts down into a wilder-
REVOLVING LIGHTS i6i
ness of unexamined detail that would unfit her
for the coming emergence.
"And Harriett?"
" Harriett's simply splendid. You know, if
she only had a little capital she could take
another house. She's sending people away all
the time."
** Oh yes ? " Alma did not want to spend
time over Harriett's apartment house, unless
it was brightly described. It was too soon
for bright descriptions. The item had been
dragged in and wasted, out of place. A single
distasteful fact. The servants, hidden away
beyond the velvet staircase, seemed to be hearing
the unsuitable disclosure. She sought about
in her mind for something that would hold its
own ; one of the points of conflict that had
cleared, since she was last here, to single unan-
swerable statements. But Alma forestalled her,
attacking the silence with her gayest voice. " Oh
Miriam, what do you think. I saw a Speck ;
yesterday ; on the Grand Esplanade. Do you
remember the Specks ? "
Miriam beamed and agreed, breathing in
reminiscences. But they would be endless ;
and would not satisfy them, or bring them to-
gether. She could not, with Alma alone, pre-
tend that those memories were merely amusing.
It was a treachery. The mere mention of a
name sent her back to the unbearable happiness
of that last school summer, a sunlit flower-filled
world opening before her, the feeling of being
herself a flower, expanding in the sunlight.
L
i62 REVOLVING LIGHTS
She could not regard it as a past. All that
had happened since was a momentary straying
aside, to be forgotten. To that other world she
was still going forward. One day she would
suddenly come upon it, as she did in her dreams.
The flower-scented air of it was in her nostrils
as she sat reluctantly rousing herself to take
Alma's cue. " There were millions of them."
It had never occurred to her that they were
funny. Alma, even then, outside her set of
grave romantic friendships, had seen almost
everything as a comic spectacle and had no
desire to go back. " Yes, werent they in-
numerable ! And so large ! It was a large one
I saw. The very biggest Speck of all I think
it must have been."
" I expect it was Belinda."
*' Oh, my dear ! Could you tell them
apart ? "
" Belinda was one of the middle ones. Ab-
solutely square. I liked her for. that and her
deep bass voice; ^nd her silence."
" Oh, but M^iam, such a heavy silence."
" That was why. Perhaps because she made
me feel sylph like and elegant. Me, Susan. . . .
Or it might have been Mehetabel ; the eldest
of the younger ones. I once heard her answer
in class. . . ."
" My dear ! Could a Speck really speak } "
" Hetta did. In a boo ; like the voice of
the wind."
She contemplated her thoughtless simile. It
was exactly true. First a sound, breathy and
REVOLVING LIGHTS 163
resonant, and then words blown on it. . . .
Alma's amused laughter was tailing off into
little snickers ; repeated while she looked for
something else. But the revived Specks mar-
shalled themselves more and more clearly, play-
ing their parts in the crowded scene.
" And you know the eldest, Alathea, was
quite willowy. Darker than the others. They
were all mid-brown."
" Oh Miriam ; doesn't that express them .'' "
*' I wonder what they are all doing } "
" Nothing, my dear. Oh nothing. Now can
you imagine a Speck doing anything what-
ever ? "
" All sitting about in the big house ; going
mad ; on their father's money."
" Yes," said Alma simply, gathering her face
into gravity. ** It's rather terrible, you know."
A black shadow bearing slowly down upon the
golden picture. . . . But they were so deter-
mined to see women's lives in that way . . . yet
there was Miss Lane, and Mildred Gaunt and
Eunice Bradley . . . three of their own small
group ; all gone mad.
"Well," said Alma rising, her hands moving
up to her bright hair, adjusting it, with delicate
wreathing movements, " I'm so glad you've come,
old fing." She hummed herself to the door with
a little tune to which Miriam listened standing in
the middle of the room in a numb suspension.
The door was opened. Alma would be glid-
ing gracefully out. Her song ceased, and she
cleared her throat with that little sound that
i64 REVOLVING LIGHTS
was the sound of her voice in quiet comment.
" Wow. Old brown-study." She turned to
look. Ahna's pretty head was thrust back into
the room. To shake things off, to make one
shake things off. . . . She smiled, groaning in
spirit at her accentuated fatigue. One more
little amused gurgle, and Alma was gone.
She went into her own room. Next door.
Opposite to it was Hypo's room. Opposite to
her own door, the door of the bathroom, and just
beyond, the swing door leading to the landing
and the rooms grouped about it. Outside the
low curtained windows was the midst of the
garden. She was set down at the heart of the
house. Sounds circled about her instead of
coming faintly up. . . . She drew back the
endmost curtain an inch or two. Bright light
fell on her reflection in the long mirror. She was
transformed already. It would be impossible to
convince anyone that she was a tired Londoner.
Here was already the self that no one in London
knew. The removal of pressure had relaxed
the nerves of her face, restoring its contours.
Her mushroom hat had crushed the mass of her
hair into a good shape. The sharp light called
out its bright golds, deepened the colour of her
eyes and the clear tints of her skin. The little
old washed out muslin blouse flatly defining her
shoulders and arms, pouched softly above the pale
grey skirt. ... I do understand colour . . .
that tinge of lavender in such a pale, pale grey ;
just warming it . . . and belonging perfectly
to Grannie's spidery old Honiton collar. . . ,
REVOLVING LIGHTS 165
The whole little toilet was quite good ; could be
forgotten, and would keep fresh, bleached by the
dry bright air to paler grey and whiter white,
while the notes of bright living colour in her face
and hair intensified from day to day. She hunted
out her handglass and consulted her unknown
eyes. It was true. They were brown ; not
grey. In the bright light there was a web, thorny
golden brown, round the iris. She gazed into its
tangled depths. So strange. So warm and
bright ; her unknown self. The self she was
meant to be, living in that bright, goldy brown
filbert tint, irradiating the grey into which it
merged. It was a discovery. She was a goldy
brown person, not cold grey. With half a
chance, goldy brown and rose. And the whites
of her eyes were pearly grey-blue. What a
number of strange live colours, warmly asserting
themselves ; independently. But only at close
quarters.
She followed Alma back through the swing
door. Alma hummed a little song ; an overture ;
its low tones filled the enclosed space, opened
all the doors, showed her the whole of the interior
in one moment and the coming month in an
endless bright panorama passing unbroken from
room to room, each scene enriched by those
accumulated behind it, and those waiting ahead ;
the whole, for her, perpetually returning upon
its own perfection. Alma paused before a
scatter of letters on the table below the long
lattice. Links with their other world ; with
i66 REVOLVING LIGHTS
things she would hear of, stated and shaped in
their way, revealing a world to which they alone
seemed to have an interpreting key ; making it
hold together ; but inacceptable . . . but the
j/^/<?;;2^;// was forever fascinating. . . . Through
the leaded panes she caught a glimpse of the
upper slope of the little town. A row of grey
seaside boarding-houses slanting up-hill. A
ramshackle little omnibus rumbling down the
steep road.
" Edna Prout's with us for the week-end."
Alma's social tone, deliberately clear and level.
It made a little scene, the beginning of a novel,
the opening ofa play, warning the players to stand
off and make a good shape, smoothly moving
without pause or hitch, playing and saying their
parts, always with an eye to the good shape, con-
scious of a critical audience. There would be
no expansive bright beginning, alone with Alma
and Hypo, the centre of their attention.
" Who is Edna Prout ? " she demanded
jealously.
Alma turned with a little bundle of the letters
in her hand, speaking thoughtfully away through
the window. " She writes ; rather wonderful
stuff."
Away outside the window stood the wonderful
stuff, being written, rolled off ; the vague figure
of a woman, cleverly dressed, rising pen in hand
from her work to be socially brilliant. Popular.
Divided between mysteriously clever work and
successful femineity. Alma glanced, pausing,
and looked away again.
REVOLVING LIGHTS 167
" She has a most amazing sense of the past,"
reflectively. As if it had just occurred to her.
But it must be the current description. His
description.
" The Stone Age ? "
" Oh no^ my dear ! " She shrieked gently ;
wheeling round to share her mirth. " The
Past. 'Zf/ry. The Mediterranean past."
" Her stones are precious stones." From
this beginning, to go on looking only at things,
ignoring surroundings. . . .
" That's it ! Come along 1 " Alma went
blithely forward, again humming her tune.
But there was a faint change in her confident
manner. She too, was conscious of going to
meet an ordeal.
Through the still, open-windowed brightness
of the brown-green room, out into the naked
blaze. Rocky dryness and sea freshness mingled
in the huge air. The little baked pathway
ribboning the level grass, disappearing round
the angle of the enclosing edge, the perfect
sharp edge, irises feathering along it, sharp
green spikes and deep blue hoods of filmy
blossom patterned against the paler misty blue-
ness of the sea. Perfect. Hidden beyond the
sharp edge, the pathway winding down the
terraced slope of the cliff to the little gate open-
ing from the tangled bottom on to the tamarisk-
trimmed sea road. Seats set at the angles of
the winding path. The sea glinting at your
side between the leaf patterns of the creeper
covered pergola. The little roughstone shelter.
i68 REVOLVING LIGHTS
trapping the sunblaze. The plain bench along
the centre of a piece of pathway, looking straight
out to the midmost sea ; sun-baked gravel
under your feet, clumps of flowers in sight.
Somewhere the rockery, its face catching the
full blaze of the light, green bosses clumped
upon it, with small pure-toned flowers, mauvy
pink and tender eastern blue. On the level
just below it, a sudden little flat of grass,
small flowered shrubs at its edge towards the
sea.
All waiting for tomorrow, endless tomorrows,
in the morning, when the sunlight poured from
the other side of the sky and the face of the
cliflF was cool and coloured. For tonight when
the blaze had deepened into sunset and after-
glow, making a little Naples of the glimpse
of white town, winding street and curve of
blue bay visible in the distance beyond the
shoulder of the sidemost clump of shrubs along
the end of the sunk lawn.
Alma had halted, just behind, letting her
gaze her fill. There was no one to be seen.
No sound. Nothing to break the perfect
expressiveness.
" We've taken refuge at the back," suggested
Alma into her arm-stretching groan of content-
ment. Down across the lawn into the little
pathway between the shrubs. There they were,
in the cool shadows under the small trees.
Large bamboo chairs, a cushioned hammock,
tea going on. Hypo rising in the middle of a
sentence. Miss Prout sitting opposite, upright,
REVOLVING LIGHTS 169
posed, knee over knee, feet shod in peacock
blue, one pointing downwards in the air, exactly
above the other pointing on to the gravel. A
wide silky gown, loose ; held flat above the
chest by brilliant bold embroidery ; a broad
dark head ; short wide tanned face.
The eyes were not brown but wide starry
blue ; unseeing ; contradictng her matronly
shape. Now that the arrival was over and
Hypo had begun again, she still had the look
of waiting, apart. As if she were sitting alone.
Yet her clever clothes and all her outlines dif-
fused companionship.
The lizards must have looked perfect, dart-
ing and basking on the rockery. But why
have his heart won only by the one that quickly
wriggled out of the box .''... Paying atten-
tion only to the people who were strong enough
to fuss all the time. Not seeing that half their
animation was assumed. ..." Do you still,"
the bells of the blue flowers in the deepest
shadow were like lanterns hung on little trees
crowded upon the brown earth. The sound
of grass and flowers in blissful shade poured
into the voices, making agreement, giving them
all the quality of blossoming in the surround-
ing coolness, aware of it, aware of the outer
huge splintering sunlight that made it perfect,
fled away from, left to itself to prepare another
perfection . . . ** divide people into those who
like * The Reading Girl ' and those who prefer
the Dresden teapot ? "
" Sudden Miriam. Miriam, Edna, is . . .
lyo REVOLVING LIGHTS
is terrifying. ..." He turned full round to
hand the buns, both firm neatly moulded hands
holding the dish ironically-carefully. The wide
blue eyes looked across. Where was she all
the time ; so calm and starry. ... " She
comes down from London, into our rustic
solitude, primed. ..."
** She's a fighter," said Miss Prout roundly,
as if she had not spoken.
** Fighting is too mild for Miriam. She
crushes. She demolishes. When words fail
her," the lifting, descriptive, outlining laughter
coming into the husky voice, filling out its
insistence, *' she uses her fists. Then she
departs ; back to London ; fires off not so
much letters as reinforcements of the prostrat-
ing blow." Kind Hypo. Doing his best for
her. Launching her on her holiday with ap-
proval ; knowing how little was to be expected
of her. . . . Ages already she had been here
blissful. Getting every moment more blissful.
And this was only the first tea. The four
weeks of long days, each day in four long bright
separate pieces, spread out ahead, enclosed ;
a long unbroken magic. Poor Miss Prout
with her short week-end. . . . But she went
from country-house to country-house. Certainly.
Her garments, even on this languid afternoon,
were electric with social life. Then hostesses
were a necessary part of her equipment. . . .
She must fear them, like a man. She herself
could not be imagined as a hostess. There
was no look of strain about her. Only that
REVOLVING LIGHTS 171
look of insulated waiting. Boredom if her
eyes had been the thing-filled eyes of a man,
bored in the intervals between meals and talk
and events.
" Yes, but do you ? " Lame. But Hypo
turned, accepting, not departing afresh to tone
up the talk. The ringed, lightning-quick grey
eyes glanced again, as when she had arrived,
taking in the detail and the whole of her effect,
but this time directly messaging approval. The
luminous clouded grey, clear ringed, the voice
husky and clear, the strange repellent mouth
below the scraggly moustache, kept from weak-
ness only by the perpetually hovering disclaim-
ing ironic smile . , . fascination that could
not be defined ; that drove its way through
all the evidence against it. . . . Married, yet
always seeming nearer and more sympathetic
than other men. . . . Her cup brimmed over.
She saw herself as she had been this morning,
in dingy black, pallid, tired to death, hurriedly
finishing off at Wimpole Street. And now
an accepted harmonious part of this so different
scene. But this power of blossoming in response
to surroundings was misleading. Beneath it
she was utterly weary. Tomorrow she would
feel wrecked, longing for silence.
" Any more tea, anybody } More tea^
Miriam." Alma waved the teapot. The little
scene gleamed to the sound of her voice, a
bright, intense grouping in the green shade,
with the earth thrilling beneath and the sky
arching down over its completeness.
172 REVOLVING LIGHTS
"Yes," said Hypo, on his feet. "She'll
have, just one more cup. Let me see," he went
on, from the tea-table, " you liked ; the Girl.
Yes. . . . No. The teapot. I accuse you of
the teapot."
" I liked both." Not true. But the answer
to the wrongness of the division.
** Catholic Miriam. That's quite a feat.
Even for you, Miriam, that is, I think . . ."
" But she didn't ! She called my teapot
messy 1 "
" It's true. I do think Dresden china messy.
But I mean that it's possible " She spoke
her argument through his answer, volleyed
over his shoulder as he brought back her cup,
to a remark from Miss Prout. The next
moment he was away in the hammock near
Miss Prout's low chair, throwing cushions
out on to the grass, gathering up a sheaf of
prmted leaves ; leaving her classed with the
teapot people. ...
"Buoyed up by tea^ Edna," he -chuckled,
flinging away the end of a cigarette ;^ propping
the pages against his knee. " By the way
who is Olga } "
" The eldest Featherstonhaugh." She spoke
carelessly ; sat half turned away from him
serenely smoking ; a small buff cigarette
in a long amber tube ; but her voice vi-
brated.
He was readings in her presence, a book
she had written. . . . Those pages were proofs.
, . . My arrival was an interruption in a com-
REVOLVING LIGHTS 173
panionship that made conversation superfluous.
. . . What need for her to talk when she could
put into his hands, alive and finished, some-
thing that she had made ; that could bring
into his face that look of attention and curiosity.
How not sit suspended, and dreaming, through
the small break in her tremendous afternoon ?
Yet he was getting the characters mixed
up. . . .'
" And Cyril. Do I know Cyril ? "
She had put people in. . . . People he knew
of. They joked about it. Horrible. , . . She
gazed, revolted and fascinated, at the bundle
of pages. Someone ought to prevent, destroy.
. . . This peaceful beauty. . . . Life going so
wonderfully on. And people being helplessly
picked out and put into books.
*' This is the episode of the greenhouse ! '*
His voice broke on the word into its utmost wail
of amusement.
That was * writing ' ; from behind the scenes.
People and things from life, a little altered,
and described from the author's point of view.
Easy ; if your life was amongst a great many
people and things and you were hard enough
to be sceptical and superior. But an impossibly
mean advantage ... a cheap easy way. Cold
clever way of making people look seen-through
and foolish ; to be laughed at, while the authors
remained admired, special people, independent,
leading easy airy sunlit lives, supposed, by
readers who did not know where they got their
material, to be creators.^ He was reading on
174 REVOLVING LIGHTS
steadily now, the look of amused curiosity
gone.
Alma came over with a box of cigarettes
and a remark ; kindly thinking she might
be feeling left ; offering distraction. Or wish-
ing to make her behave, launch out, with pre-
tended interest upon a separate conversation,
instead of hanging upon theirs. Of course
she was sitting staring, without knowing it.
. . . And already she had taken a cigarette
and murmured an answer obliviously, and Alma
had gone, accepting her engrossment, hum-
ming herself about amongst the trees, missing
his remarks. Deliberately asserting a separate
existence .'' Really loving her garden and enjoy-
ing the chance of being alone .'' Or because
she knew all he had to say about everything.
She came back and subsided in a low chair
near Miss Prout just as he dropped his pages
and looked out on to the air with a grave
unconscious face. Lost in contemplation. This
woman, so feminine and crafty, was a great
writer. Extraordinary. Impossible. In a second
he had turned to her.
" How do you do it, Edna ? You do it.
It's shattering^ that chapter-end."
Miss Prout was speechless, not smiling.
Crushed with joy. . . . Alma, at her side,
smiled in delight, genuine sympathetic apprecia-
tion.
" I'm done in, Edna," he wailed, taking
up the leaves to go on, ** shan't write another
line. And the worst of it is I know you'll
REVOLVING LIGHTS 175
keep it up. That I've got to make ; before
dinner ; my — my via dolorosa ; through your
abominably good penultimate and final chap-
ters."
" Am I allowed to read } " Miriam said
rising and going with hands outstretched for
the magic leaves.
" Yes," he chuckled, gathering up and hand-
ing. " Let's try it on Miriam. I warn you
she's deadly. And of a voracity. She reads
at a gulp ; spots everything ; more than every-
thing ; turns on you and lays you out."
Miriam stood considering him. Happy. He
had really noticed and remembered the things
she had said from time to time. But they
were expecting a response.
" I shan't understand. I know I shan't.
May I really take them away .'' "
" Now don't, Miriam . . ." taking his time,
keeping her arrested before them, with his
held-up minatory finger and mocking friendly
smile, " don't under-rate your intelligence."
" May I really take them," she flounced,
ignoring him ; holding herself apart with
Miss Prout. The air danced between them
sunlit from between branches. A fresh per-
spective opened. She was to meet her. See
her unfold before her eyes in the pages of the
book.
" Yes, <^o," she smiled, a swift nice look, not
scrutinising.
*' How alive they look ; much more alive
than a book in its suit of neat binding."
176 REVOLVING LIGHTS
" Are we all literary ? "
" We're all literary," joined his quick voice.
She blushed with pleasure. Included ; with
only those ghastly little reviews. Not mock-
ing. Quite gravely. She beamed her gratitude
and turned away blissful.
** Is Miriam going ? "
'* I've got to unpack." He wanted an audi-
ence, an outsider, for the scene of the reading.
Alma had disappeared.
" Won't they do all that for you ? "
" Still I think I'll go. . . . Addio." She
backed along the little pathway watching him
seek and find his words, crying each one forth
in a thoughtful falsetto, while he turned con-
versationally towards Miss Prout. The scene
was cut off by the bushes, but she could still
hear his voice, after the break-down of his
Italian into an ironic squeal, going on in charge
of it. She sped across the lawn and up on
to the open above the unexplored terraces.
They could wait. For the moment, unpeopled,
they were nothing. They would be the back-
ground of further scenes, all threaded by the
sound of Hypo's voice, lit by the innumerable
things she would hear him say, obliterating
the surroundings, making far-off things seem
more real. . . . Mental liveliness did obliterate
surroundings, stop their expressiveness. Already
the first expressiveness had gone from the
garden. She did not want to create it afresh.
There was hurry and pressure now in the glances
she threw. A wrongness. Something left out.
REVOLVING LIGHTS 177
There was something left out, left behind, in
his scheme of things. She wandered as far
as the horizon row of irises to look out over
the sea, chased and pulled back as she went.
Until the distant prospect opened and part of
the slope of the garden lay at her feet. The
light had ripened. The sun no longer towered,
but blazed across at her from above the right-
most edge of the picture. Short shadows jutted
from the feet of every standing thing. The
light was deepening in perfect stillness. Wind
and rain had left the world for good. This
was her holiday. Everything behind her broke
down into irrelevance. . . . How go back
to it. . . . How not stay and live through
the changing of the light in this perfect
stillness. . . .
There was no feeling of Sunday in the house.
But when Miriam wandered into her room
during the after breakfast lull, she found it
waiting for her ; pouring into the room from
afar, from all over the world, breaking her
march, breaking up the lines of the past and
of the future, isolating her with itself. The
openings of the long lattice framed wide strips
of morning brilliance between short close-drawn
folds of flowered chintz. Everything outside
was sharp and near, but changed since yester-
day. The flowers stood vivid in the sunlight ;
very still. The humming of the bees sounded
careful and secret ; not wishing to disturb.
The sea sparkled to itself, refusing to call the
178 REVOLVING LIGHTS
eye. Yet outside there, as in the room, some-
thing called. She leaned out. Into the enlarged
picture the sky poured down. The pure blue
moved within itself as you looked, letting you
through and up. An unbroken fabric of light,
yet opening all over, taking you up into endless
light. . . .
Sunday is in the sky. . . .
Hypo, coming round the corner from the
terrace, his arms threshing the air to the beat
of his swift walk ; knitting up the moment,
casting kind radiance as he came. Married,
but casting radiance. He was making for the
house. Then Miss Prout was somewhere down
there alone. . . . She hurried to be out,
seeking her. On the landing she ran into
Hypo.
" Hullo, Miriametta. Going out ? "
" I think so. Where's everj^body ? "
*' Everybody, and chairs, is down on the
terrace. But you'll want a /lat,"
" I shan't." He had often admired her
ability to go without. He had beefc^ talking
to Miss Prout for the last half hour and was
now abstractedly making a shapely thing of a
chance meeting with a stranger. . . . His words
had carried him to the study door. He began
inventing his retort, the unfelt shape of words
that would carry him on undisturbed, facing
the door with his back to her, hand on the door-
knob. The end of it would find him within.
She cried out at random into the making of his
phrase and escaped into the dining-room to
REVOLVING LIGHTS 179
the sound of his voice. In the empty dining-
room she found again the listening presence
of Sunday and hurried to be through it and
away at whatever centre had formed down there
in the open. Going down the steps and along
the paths she entered the movement of the
day, the beginning of the sense of tomorrow,
that would strengthen with the slow shifting
of the sabbath light. Miss Prout came into
view round the first bend, a sunlit figure in
a tub chair on the grassy level at the end of
the terrace. She had no hat. Her dark head
was bent over the peak made in her flowing
draperies by her crossed knees. She was sew-
ing. Here. In public, serenely, the first thing
in the morning.
Strolling to join her Miriam saw her as she
had been last night, set like a flower, unaccented
and harmonious, in her pleated gown of old
rose silk, towards the oval of dinner-table,
an island of softly bright silk-shaded radiance
in the midst of the twilit room ; under the
brightest of the central light, filmy flowers
massed low in a wide shallow bowl ... a
gentleness about her, touching the easy begin-
nings of talk, each phrase pearly, catching
the light, expanding ; expressing a secret joy.
Then the gathering and settling of the flow
of talk between him and her, lifting, shaking
itself out, flashing into sharp clear light ; the
fabric of words pierced by his wails of amuse-
ment as he looked, still talking, at the pictures
they drew. . . . People they knew passing to
i8o REVOLVING LIGHTS
and fro ; all laughable, all brought to their
strange shared judgment. The charm of the
scene destroyed by the surrounding vision of a
wit-wrecked world.
After dinner that moment when she had
drawn herself up before him, suddenly young,
with radiant eyes ; looking like a flower in
her petaled gown. He had responded stand-
ing very upright, smiling back at her, admiring
her deliberate effect. . . .
The break away across the landing, white
and green night brightness under the switched-
on lights, into the dusk of the study, ready
peopled with its own stillness ; the last of the
twilight glimmering outside the open windows.
Each figure changed by the gloom into an invis-
ible, memorable presence. Hypo moving in
and out of the cone of soft light amongst the
shadows at the far end.
" We'll try the contralto laugh on the lady
in the window-seat."
The tear of missing the music in looking
for his discovery. And then into the waiting
stillness Bach. Of all people. He found a
contralto laugh in Bach. There were no people,
no women, in Bach. Looking for the phrase.
Forgetting to look for it. The feeling of the
twilight expanding within itself, too small. The
on-coming vast of night held back, swirling,
swept away by broad bright morning light running
through forest tracery. Shining into a house.
The clean cool poise of everyday morning.
The sounds of work and voices, separate, united
REVOLVING LIGHTS i8i
by surroundings greeted by everyone from
within. The secret joy in everyone pouring
through the close pattern of life, going on for-
ever, the end in the first small phrase, every
phrase a fresh end and a beginning. Going
on when the last chord stood still on the air.
. . . And if he liked Bach, how not believe
in people ? How not be certain of God ? . . .
And then remarks, breaking thinly against
the vast nearness.
" What does the lady in the window
think ? "
" She's asleep." Miss Prout had really
thought that. ...
" Oh no she isnt.''
Miss Prout looked up as she approached
but kept on with her sewing and held her easy
silence as she dropped into one of the low chairs.
She was working a pattern of bright threads
on a small strip of saffron-coloured silk . . .
looking much older in the blaze of hard light.
But far-off, not minding, sitting there as if
enthroned, for the morning, placid and matronly
and indifferent. The heavenly morning fresh-
ness was still here. But the remarks about
the day had all been made on the lawn after
breakfast. . . . She admired the clo<^e bright
work. Miss Prout's voice came at once, a
little eagerly, explaining. She was really keen
about her lovely work.
She was saying something about Paris.
Miriam attended swiftly, not having grasped
the beginning, only the fact that she was talk-
i82 REVOLVING LIGHTS
ing and the curious dry level of her voice. Begin-
ning on something as everyone did, ignoring
the present, leaving herself sitting there out-
side life. . . . She made a vague response,
hoping to hear about Paris. Only to be startled
by the tone and colour of her own voice. Miss
Prout would imagine that her life had been
full. In any case could not imagine . . .
" How long are you staying ? " The ques-
tion shot across at her. She did not know
as she answered whether she had seen the swift
hot glance of the blue eyes, or heard it in the
voice. But she had found the woman who
wrote the searing scenes, the strange abrupt
phrases that lashed out from the page.
" Tomorrow I shall be grilling in my flat,"
went on Miss Prout. Alma's laughter tinkled
from above. She was coming this way. Miss
Prout's voice hurried on incisive, splitting the
air, ending with a rush of low words as Alma
appeared round the corner. Miriam watched
their little scene, smooth, unbroken by a single
pause or hesitation, saw them go away together,
still talking.
" My hat," she murmured to the thrilled
surroundings, and again ** My hat.'* She
clutched at the fading reverberations, marvelling
at her own imperviousness, at the way the
drama had turned, even while it touched her,
to a painted scene, leaving her unmoved. Miss
Prout's little London eyrie. A distasteful refuge
between visits. . . . Had it been a flattering
appeal, or an insult ?
REVOLVING LIGHTS 183
She is like the characters in her book, direct,
swift, ruthless, using any means. . . . She saw
me as a fool, offered me the role of one of the
negligible minor characters, there to be used
by the successful ones. She is one with her
work, with her picture of life. . . . But it
is not a true picture. The glinting sea, all
the influences pouring in from the garden
denied its existence. It was just a fuss, the
biggest drama in the world was a fuss in which
people competed, gambling, everyone losing
in the end. Dead, empty loss, on the whole,
because there was always the commission to
be paid. Life in the world is a vice ; to which
those who take it up gradually became accus-
tomed. . . . Her eyes clung to the splinters
of gold on the rippling blue sea. Dropped
them, and she was confined in the hot little
rooms of a London flat. If Miss Prout was
not enviable, so feared her lonely independence,
then no one was enviable.
*' Hullo, Miriametta ! All alone ? "
" They've gone to look at an enormous
book ; too big to lift."
" Yes. And what's Miriam doing ? "
" Isn't it a perfect morning ? "
*' It's a good day. It'll be a corker later on.
Very pleasant here till about lunch time. You
camping here for the morning } " She looked
up.
He was standing in profile, listening, with
his head inclined ; like a person suffering
from deafness ; and pointing towards her his
i84 REVOLVING LIGHTS
upheld questioning finger ; a German class-
master.
" I don't know."
" Then you will. That's settled ? " She
murmured a speculative promise, lazily, a com-
ment on his taut, strung-up bearing. What,
to him, if she did or didn't .''
" That's agreed then. You camp here,"
he dropped neatly into the chair between hers
and Miss Prout's, his face hidden behind the
frill of its canopy, " for the morning." He
looked out and round at her, flushed and grin-
ning. ** I want you to," he murmured, *' now
don't you go and forget."
'* All right," she beamed . . . the hours he
was wasting spinning out his mysterious drama
..." wild horses shan't move me." He
did not want her society. But it was miles
more than wildly interesting enough that he
wished to avoid being alone with Miss Prout.
But then why not dump her as he always did
guests he had run through, on to Alma } He
left her a moment for reflections, wound them
up with a husky chuckle and began on one
of his improvisations ; paying her in advance
. . . putting in time. . . . She listened with-
held, drawing the weft of his words through
the surrounding picture, watching it enlivened,
with fresher colours and stronger outlines . . .
a pause, the familiar lifting tone and the drop,
into a single italic phrase ; one of his destruc-
tive conclusions. His voice went on, but she
had seized the hard glittering thread, rending
REVOLVING LIGHTS 185
it, and watched the developing bright pattern
coldly, her opposition ready phrased for the
next break. She could stay forever like this,
watching his thought ; thrusting in remarks,
making him reconsider. But Miss Prout was
coming. There would be a morning of impro-
visations with no chance of arresting him. It
was only when they were alone that he would
take opposition seriously, not turning it into
materials for spirals of wit, where nobody could
stand against him. The whole morning, hear-
ing him and Miss Prout chant their duet about
people . . . helped out no doubt by the pres-
ence of an apparently uncritical audience. . . .
I'm hanged if I will. . . .
" I must have a book or something. I'll
get a book," she said, rising. He peeped out,
as if weighing her suggestion.
" All right. . . . Get a book. . . . But
come back ? "
" Eurasians are different," she said. ** Have
you ever known any ; really we//.''
" Never known anybody., Miriam. Take back
everything I ever said. Get your book and
come out with it."
On her way back she heard his voice, high ;
words broken and carried along by a squeal of
laughter. They were at it already, reducing
everything to absurdity. Turning the corner
she found them engrossed, sitting close at right
angles. Miss Prout leaning forward, her embroi-
dery neglected on her knee. It was monstrous
to break in. . . , She wandered up and down
i86 REVOLVING LIGHTS
the terrace, staring at the various views, catch-
ing his eye upon her as she went to and fro ;
almost deciding to depart and leave him to
his fate. If he was engrossed he was engrossed.
If not, he shouldn't pretend to be. When
she was at a distance their voices fell, low short
sentences, sounding set and colourless ; but
intimate.
" Found your book, Miriam ? " he cried,
as she came near.
" No. I couldn't see anything. So I
shut my eyes and whirled round and
pointed." f
" Your shameless superstitions, Miriam."
'* I am. I've got a lovely one I hadn't
seen."
•'A lovely one. A "
" I'm not going to tell you what it is."
" You're just going to sit down and munch
it up. Miriam's a paradox. She's the omni-
vorous gourmet.''
** Can I have a cigarette ? "
" Her authors — we'll get you a cigarette,
Miriam, no, alright, here they are — her authors,
the only aathors she allows, can be counted
rather more than twice, on the fingers of one
hand."
She took two cigarettes, lighting one from
his neatly struck match and retired to a distant
chair.
'* You'll have the sun in your eyes there."
" I like it." Their voices began again, his
social and expansive, hers clipped and solitary
REVOLVING LIGHTS 187
. . . the bank of blazing snapdragon grew
prominent, told of nothing but the passing
of time. What was the time ? How much
of the morning had gone ? There was a moment
of clear silence. . . .
" Is Miriam there ? "
" She is indeed ; very much there." Again
silence, filled with the echo of his comprehen-
sive little chuckle. Miss Prout knew now
that it was not the stupidity of a fool that had
spoiled her morning. But, if she could go
so far, why not carry him off to talk unembar-
rassed, or talk, here, freely, as she wanted to,
like those women in her book }
A servant, coming briskly through the sun-
light, stopping half way along the terrace.
" Mr. Simpson."
" Yes. What have you done with him } "
" He's in the study."
" Fetch him out of the study. Bring him
here. And bring, lemonade and things." But
he rose as the maid wheeled round and de-
parted. " I'd better get him, I think. He's
Nemesis."
Miriam rose to escape. '* Now don't you
go, Miriam. You stay and see it out. You
haven't met Simpson, Edna. I haven't. No
one has."
" What is he .? "
" He's — he's a postscript. The letter came
this morning. Now don't either of you desert."
He disappeared, leaving the terrace stricken.
The rest of the morning, lunch, perhaps the
i88 REVOLVING LIGHTS
whole day . . . Simpson. His voice returned
a moment later, encouraging, as if shepherding
an invalid, across the garden and round the
angle. A very tall young man, in a blue serge
suit, a pink collar and a face sunburnt all over,
an even red.
He was sitting upright in a headlong silence,
holding on to the thoughts with which he had
come. But they were being scattered. He
had held them through the introductions and
Hypo's witty distribution of drinks. But now
the bright air rang with the rapid questions,
volleyed swiftly upon the beginnings of the
young man's meditative answers, and he was
sitting alone in the circle in a puzzled embarrass-
ment, listening, but not won by Hypo's picture
of Norwich, not joining in the expansion and
the laughter, aware only of the scattering of
his precious handful of thoughts. Towards
lunch-time Hypo carried him off to the
study.
" Exit the postscript," said Miss Prout.
Charmingly . . . dropping back into her pose,
but talkatively, a kindliness in the blue eyes
gazing out to sea. Again she bemoaned her
return to London, but added at once a little
picture of her old servant ; the woman's glad-
ness at getting her back again.
" Only until the end of the week," said
Miriam seeing the old servant, perpetually
left alone, getting older. Sad. Left out. But
what an awful way of living in London ; alone
with one old servant. A brilliant light came
REVOLVING LIGHTS 189
into Miss Prout's eyes. She was looking fixedly
along the terrace.
" He wouldn't stay to lunch." Hypo, alone
and gay. " He's done with me. Given me
up. Gone away a wise young man."
" He was appalling^
" You didn't hear him, Miriam."
" I saw him."
" You didn't hear him on the subject of his
guild."
"He's founded a guild}''
" It's much worse than that. He's gone
about, poor dear, in sublime, in the most sublime
faith, collecting all the young men in Norfolk,
under my banner. I have heard this morn-
ing all I might become if I could contrive to
be ... as wooden as he is. Come along.
Let's have lunch. You know, Edna, there's
a great work to be done on you. Touve got
to be turned into a socialist." He turned
as they walked, to watch her face. She was
looking down, smiling, withdrawn, revealing
nothing. Seething with anticipation. She
would be willing. For the sake of the long
conversations. They would sit apart talking,
for the rest of her time. There would be long
argumentative letters. No. She would not
argue. She would be another of those women
in the Lycurgan, posing and dressing and
consciously shining at soirees. Making havoc
and complications. Worse than they. How
could he imagine her a socialist with her view
of humanity and human motives.
I90 REVOLVING LIGHTS
" No. We won't make you a socialist, Edna.
You're too good as you are." Beautiful, dif-
ferent ; too good for socialism ? Then he
really thought her wonderful. In some way
beyond himself. . . .
Turning just in time to be caught by the
sun dipping behind the cliff. Perfect sudden
moment. No sunset effects. No radiance.
Clean dull colours. Mealy grey-blue sky, dull
gold ball, half hidden, tilted by the slope of the
green cliff. Feeling him arrested, compelled
to receptive watching ; watching a sunset,
like anyone else. . . . The last third of the
disc, going, bent intently, asserting the moment,
asserting uniqueness ; unanswerable mystery of
beauty.
" God, reading a newspaper.'*
" The way to see a sunset is to be in-
doors. Oblivious. Then . . . just a ruddy
glow, reflected from a bright surface. . . .
The indirect method's the method. Old Con-
rad."
" Madeleine has no use for this storm-rent
sky. She wants untroubled blue, one small
pink cloud, and presently, a single star." Then
he must have wanted these things himself once.
Why did he try to jest young people into his
disillusionment .''
Yet tonight the sun had set without com-
ment. With his approval. He was openly
sharing the unspoken response to the scene
of its magnificent departure.
REVOLVING LIGHTS 191
The reproachful, watching eye of Sunday
disappeared, drawn down over the horizon
with the setting sun. Leaving a blissful refresh-
ment, the strange unearned sense falling always
somewhere in the space between Sunday and
Monday, of a test survived, leaving one free
to go forward to the cheerful cluster of oncoming
days.
The afterglow faded to a bright twilight,
deepening in the garden to _a violet dusk.
The sea glimmered in the remaining light that
glared along its further rim like a yawn, hold-
ing up the lid of the sky. The figures in the
chairs had grown dim, each face a pale disc
set towards the falling light. The talk died
down to small shreds, simple and slow, steeped
in the beauty of the evening, deferring to it,
as to a host.
They were still the guests of the evening
while they sat grouped round the lamplit veran-
dah supper-table that turned the dusk into
night. But the end was coming. The voices
in the lamplight were growing excited and
forgetful. Indoors and separation were close
at hand.
He was oblivious. Given up to his jesting
. . . she watched his jesting face, shiny now
and a little loose, the pouching of his lips as
he spoke, the animal glimmer of teeth below
the scraggy moustache, repellent, yet part of
the fascination of his smile, and perpetually
redeemed by the charm of his talk, the intense
charm of the glancing eyes, seeing and under-
192 REVOLVING LIGHTS
standing, comforting even when they mistook,
and yet all the time withheld, preoccupied
behind their clean rings and filmy sightless
grey — fixed always on the shifting changing
mass of obstructive mannish knowledge, always
on science, the only thing in the world that
could get his full attention. . . . She felt her
voice pour out suddenly, violently quenching
a flicker of speech. He glanced, attentive,
healing her despair with his quick interest.
The women awoke from their conspiring trance,
alert towards her, watching.
" Yes." His voice followed hers without
a break, cool, a comment on her violence. He
turned, looking into the night. His shaggy
intelligent gaze, the reflective slight lift of his
eyebrows gave him the look of an old man lost.
The rosy scene was chilled. Cold light and
harsh black shadow, his averted form in profile,
helpless, making empty the deeps of the thing
that was called a summer night. Her desire
beat no longer towards the open scene. She
hated it. For its sake she had pulled him up,
brought down this desolation.
** It's a good night. It's about the human
optime in nights. We ought to sleep out."
He turned back to the table, gathering up
expressions, radiating his amusement at the
disarray caused by his absence.
" Let's sleep out. Miriam will. Unless we
lock her in." He was on his feet, eagerly
halted, gathering opinions. His eyes came to
rest on Alma. " Let's be dogs. Be driven.
REVOLVING LIGHTS 193
by Miriam, into fresh fields of experience."
Would it happen ? Would she agree ? He
was impatient, but deferring. Alma sat con-
sidering, in the attitude Mr. Stoner had called
a pretty snap, her elbows meeting on the table,
her chin on her slender hands ; just its point,
resting on the bridge they made laid flatly
one upon the other. It was natural in her.
But by now she knew that men admired natural
poses. He was admiring, even through his
impatience.
" I didn't suggest it. I've never slept out
in my life."
** You suggested it, Miriam. My death, all
our little deaths from exposure, will lie at your
door." The swift personal glance he dealt
her from the midst of his watching swept round
to Miss Prout and flashed into admiration as
he turned, still sideways surveying her, to bend
his voice on Alma.
" It's quite manageable, eh, Susan } " Miriam
followed his eyes. Miss Prout had risen and
was standing away from the table posed like
a Gainsborough ; challenging head, skirts that
draped and spread of themselves, gracefully,
from the slenderness of her body. She was
waiting, indifl^erent, interpreting the scene in
her way, interpreting the other women for
him, united with him in interpreting them.
• • •
Alma relaxed and looked up, holding the
matter poised, deliberately locating the casting
vote before breaking into enthusiasm. He paid
N
194 REVOLVING LIGHTS
tribute, coming round the table companionably
to her side, but still looking from face to face,
claiming audience.
" We'll break out. Each bring its little
mattress and things. After they've retired.
Yes, I think, after they've retired." Why the
conspirator's smile } The look of daring }
What of the servants } They were bound,
anyhow, to know in the morning.
It was glorious to rush about in the lit house,
shouting unnecessary remarks. People shouting
back. Nobody attending. Shouting and laugh-
ing for the sake of the jolly noise. Saying more
than could be said in talk. Admitting.
And then just to lie extinguished in the dark-
ness 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 adven-
ture 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."
REVOLVING LIGHTS 195
" 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, (^'o;/'/ 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 conversa-
_ »>
zione.
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
196 REVOLVING LIGHTS
clear. She lay watching for the night to turn to
night.
But the light seemed to grow clearer as the still-
ness 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,
REVOLVING LIGHTS 197
more. W^hat 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 re-
main the same however much things are changed.
Interest in the stars is like interest in your neigh-
bours 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
198 REVOLVING LIGHTS
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 an-
swer 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, disap-
pearing into the house. The tumbled empty
bed on the lawn, white in the open stare of the
morning. . . .
REVOLVING LIGHTS 199
" 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. Dis-
mantled voices. His simplicity. His sharp turn
and toga'd march towards the house. A memory
of dav/n ; 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 morn-
ing.
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
200 REVOLVING LIGHTS
common consent, prevented from getting far
enough to interfere with the set shape of spec-
tacle and spectators ; yet easy, its quahty height-
ened by the common recognition of an indeli-
ble 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. Every-
thing 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 ; in-
visible, 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 av/are of the reality
REVOLVING LIGHTS 201
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
202 REVOLVING LIGHTS
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 con-
versation 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 re-
turning 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
REVOLVING LIGHTS 203
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 remem-
ber 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
204 REVOLVING LIGHTS
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
REVOLVING LIGHTS 205
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 accomplish-
ment, 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 Switzer-
land. It was the protuberance of the back of his
head that made him oppose. And his repudia-
tion 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 w^s besieged by things to communicate,
going on and on, wondering all the time where
the interest lay, in remote people, most of them
2o6 REVOLVING LIGHTS
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 essen-
tial 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 sit-
ting there cursing me ? "
" Not been cursing, Miriam. You've been
interesting, no end. But there's a thing,
Miriam, an awful thing called tomorrow morn-
ing."
" 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 appe-
tite, your disgraceful young appetite for late
hours."
" Things always end just as they're begin-
ning." _
" Things end, Miriam, so that other things
may begin."
She roused herself to give battle. But Alma
drifted between, crying gaily that there was to-
morrow. 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 }
REVOLVING LIGHTS 207
" 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. Beet-
hoven's perfect expression of the perfection of
2o8 REVOLVING LIGHTS
life, first thing in the morning. Morning still-
ness ; 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
throu^h'VHich presently a song leapt forth, the
single opening notes brought back, caught up
and swept into soaig 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-oo^/(?-oodle, Bang toodle-oodle-oodle-
00. A lumpish phrase ; a Clementi finger exer-
cise 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 pianis-
simos. . . .
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.
REVOLVING LIGHTS 209
, . . People who care only for form think them-
selves 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^^.gor. The
music now pouring busily through from the next
room urged her forward. But once outside she
would have become a party to bright reasonable-
ness, 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 distaste-
ful reminder of the wheels of dull work perpetu-
ally 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
2IO REVOLVING LIGHTS
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 them-
selves 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 think-
ing 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 de-
scribing 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 scandal-
mongering.
REVOLVING LIGHTS 211
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 no-
thing. 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 hav-
ing 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 refer-
ring 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
212 REVOLVING LIGHTS
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, his-
tory and legend and novels and science and every-
body'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 her-
self sink into indifference. The unique oppor-
tunity was offering itself in vain. He came back
REVOLVING LIGHTS 213
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 r "
" 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 Jifiy 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.
214 REVOLVING LIGHTS
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 / 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 read-
" You began at the Creation. Said everything
you had to say about the history of man-
kind."
" 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 } "
REVOLVING LIGHTS 215
" 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 any-
thing, 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 writings 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 dis-
turbing 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."
2i6 REVOLVING LIGHTS
" 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 dis-
cover 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 calcu-
lable 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."
REVOLVING LIGHTS 217
" 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 some-
thing in the air that lets you down and down.
Partly the thought of these streets increasing,
all the time, all over London. Yet when some-
one said walking home after a good evening
at the Taylofs' 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, slop-
ing 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."
2i8 REVOLVING LIGHTS
" 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 dark-
ness 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 starv-
ing."
" What do you talk about ? "
" Everything. We find ourselves sitting in
the bathroom, engrossed — long speeches — they
talk to each other, like strangers talking intim-
ately 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."
REVOLVING LIGHTS 219
*' 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 imagina-
tion. 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 morn-
ing, a rush for the train, a last sight of the Taylors
220 REVOLVING LIGHTS
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 Tol-
stoyans. 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 every-
thing, going on till George gently asked him
to keep to the subject. He raved then about
some self-help book he had read. Quite inco-
herent ; and convincing. Then the young
man at the piano made a long speech about
hitching your waggon to a star and at the end
REVOLVING LIGHTS 221
of it a tall woman, so old that she could hardly
stand, stood up and chanted, in a deep laugh-
ing 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-shoul-
dered 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 meta-
physicians, artists and pious people are sen-
sualists. 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 rtands in
the way .'' The pious people, the artists and
the metaphysicians. . . . Then a gentleman,
in spectacles at the back, quietly said that Tol-
stoy'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
222 REVOLVING LIGHTS
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 argu-
ments floor him, look such a feathery, passing
thing."
'* You stand firm, Miriam. Socialism isn't
feathery. TouWe 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. Hear-
ing 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."
REVOLVING LIGHTS 223
" 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."
" Tm 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 uni-
versal ideals. Which were passed on. Through
two channels. Law-giving Rome. And the
Roman church ; Paul, who had made Christi-
anity a universal working scheme. So Europe
has been Hellenised. And the Hellenisation
of the rest of the world will be through its Euro-
peanisation. 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
224 REVOLVING LIGHTS
in race, which doesn't exist — a blindfold humani-
tarian 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 adven-
turous 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 become foreigners in England were no-
thing. 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 with-
out 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
REVOLVING LIGHTS 225
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 1 "
" Nonsense, Miriam."
" Do you really think the war can be written
away } There are so many opinions, and read-
ing 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 opportuni-
ties for odd experience. Write it up. Don't
forget."
226 REVOLVING LIGHTS
" 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 r
'* It's no good, you know^ that idea of hers.
REVOLVING LIGHTS 227
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 com-
fort."
" 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
228 REVOLVING LIGHTS
suppress conclusions. Lunch, grinning like a
Jack-in-the-box, in a bleak emptiness. People
ought not to meet at lunch time. If the bleak-
ness 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 every-
thing 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 English-
man 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. . . . Con-
REVOLVING LIGHTS 229
sciousness is increasing. The battle of uncon-
scious 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 con-
template the increasing awfulness of life for
women and yet wish it to go on } The awful-
ness 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 st^-ide from
the hips, weight forward on toes pointing straight,
like Orientals. Squatting, like a savage, keep-
ing the pelvis ventilated and elastic instead of
sitting, knees politely together, stuffy and com-
pressed and unventilated. All the rules of
ladylike deportment ruin the pelvis. . . . Lauies
230 REVOLVING LIGHTS
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 1 "
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 wrang-
REVOLVING LIGHTS 231
ling rush to the net after the first set, rushing
forward at once, wrangling, without hearing.
Hypo coming too, squealing incoherent con-
tributions. 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 dif-
ferent. They had learned their tennis ; could
remember a time when they did not play. Play-
ing 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.
232 REVOLVING LIGHTS
He talked through the evening ; keeping
his hold of the simplest thread of speech with
his still voice and bearing. Leaving a large,
peaceful space when he paused, into which
it was easy to drop any sort of reflection that
might have arisen in one's mind. Hypo scarcely
spoke except to question him and the smooth
young man dramatically posed, smoked, in
silence. The huge form was a central spectacle,
until the light faded and the talk began to die
down. Then Alma asked him to play. He
rose gigantic in the half light and went to the
piano murmuring that he would be pleased to
improvise a little. Amazing. With all his
foreign experience and his serene mind, his
musical reflections would be wonderful. But
they were not. His gentle playing was colour-
less. Vague and woolly. And it brought a
silence in which his own silence stood out.
He seemed to have retired, politely and gently,
but definitely, into himself. The darkness sur-
rounding the one small shaded light began to
state the joy of the day. Everyone was beam-
ing quietly with the sense of a glorious day.
The tall man was at ease in stillness. In his
large quiet atmosphere communication flowed,
following serenely on the cessation of sound.
Nun danket alle Gott. . . . How far was he
a believer in the old things ? His conscious-
ness was the widest in the room ; seemed to
hold the balance between the old and the new,
sympathetically, broad shouldered and rather
weary with his burden. Speaking always in
REVOLVING LIGHTS 233
a frayed tired voice that would not give in to
any single brisk idea. There was room and
space and kind shelter in his mind for a woman
to state herself, completely, unopposed. But
he would not accept conclusions. . . . His mild
smooth shape of words would survive anything ;
persisting. It was his style. With it he carried
himself through everything, making his way
of talking a thing in itself. . . . No ideas,
no convictions ; but something in him that
made a perfect manner. A blow between the
eyes, flattening him out, would not break it.
There was nothing there to break, nothing
hard in him. A made mould, chosen, during
his growing, filling itself up from life, but not
living ... a gentleman, of course, that was
it. Then there was an abyss beneath. Un-
stated things that lived in darkness.
But the silence lasted only an instant. Before
its test could reveal anything further than the
sudden sharp division of the sitters into men
and women. Alma made movements to break
up the party. Hypo's voice came, enchanting,
familiar and new, its qualities renewed by the
fresh contacts. The thing to do he said rising,
coming forward into the central light, not in
farewell, into a self-made arena, w'th needless
challenging sturdiness from one of the distances
of his crowded mind. It would be one of
his unanswerable fascinating misapprehensions.
The thing to do was to go out into the world ; leave
everything behind, wife, and child and things ;
go all over the world and come back ; experienced.
234 REVOLVING LIGHTS
" And what about the wives ? "
" The wives, Miriam, will go to heaven
when they die." He turned on his laugh to
the men in the background ; and gathered
their amused agreement in a swift glance. They
had both risen and were standing, exposed
by the frankness of their spokesman, silent
in polite embarrassment. They really thought,
these two nice men, that something had been
said. The spell of the evening was broken
up. The show had been given. Dream picture
of moving life. Entertainment and warm forget-
fulness. Everyone enchanted and alive. Now
was the time for talk, exchange ; beginning
with the shattering of Hypo's silly idea. How
could men have experience ? Nothing would
make them discover themselves. Either of them.
Perhaps the tall man . . .
" Men as they are," she began, trusting
to the travelling power of her mental picture
of him as an exception, " might go "
But her words were lost. Alma had come
forward and was saying her good nights, hurriedly.
They were to go, just as everything was begin-
ning. All chance of truth was caught, in a
social trap. The men were to be left, with
their illusions, to talk their monstrous lies,
unchecked. Imagining they were really talk-
ing, because there was no one to contradict.
Unfair.
She rose perforce and got through her part.
It was idiotic, a shameful farce. Evening dress
and the set scene, so beautifully arranged, were
REVOLVING LIGHTS 235
suddenly shameful and useless. Taken to bits ;
silly. She seemed to be taking leave of herself,
three separate selves, united in the blessed relief
of getting rid of the women. In the person
of the tall man she strode gracefully across
the room to open the door for Alma and herself,
breaking out, with the two other men, at once,
before the door was closed, with immeasurable
relief, into the abrupt chummy phrases of old
friends newly met.
CHAPTERIV I
THE tiger stepping down his blue plaque.
The one thing in the room that nothing
could influence. All the other single beauti-
ful things change. They are beautiful, for
a moment, again and again ; giving out
their expression, and presently frozen stiff,
having no expression. The blue plaque, intense
fathomless eastern blue, the thick spiky
grey-green sharply shaped leaves, going up
forever, the heavy striped beast forever curv-
ing through, his great paw always newly set
on the base of the plaque ; inexhaustible,
never looked at enough ; always bringing
the same joy. ... If ever the memory
of this room fades away, the blue plaque will
remain.
Mr. Hancock was coming upstairs. In a
moment she would know whether any price
had been paid ; any invisible appointment
irrevocably missed.
" Good morning." The everyday tone. Not
the tone of welcome after a holiday.
" Good morning. I'm so sorry I could
not get back yesterday."
" Yes ... I suppose it could not be helped."
He was annoyed. Perhaps even a little sus-
picious. . . .
236
REVOLVING LIGHTS 237
" You see, my brother-in-law thought I was
still on holiday and free to take my sister
home."
" I trust it is not anything serious."
" It was just one of her attacks." Suppose
Sarah should have one, at this moment ? Sup-
pose it was Sarah who was paying for her
escapade .? She summoned her despairingly,
explaining . . . saw her instant approval and
her private astonishment at the reason for the
deceit.
Supported by Sarah she rounded off her
story.
" I see," said Mr. Hancock pleasantly ;
weighing, accepting. She stood before him
seeing the incident as he would imagine it.
It was growing true in her mind. Presently
she would be looking back on it. This
was how criminals got themselves mixed up.
• • •
"I'm glad it was not anything serious,"
said Mr. Hancock gravely, turning to the
scatter of letters on his table. He was
glad. And his kind sympathy was not being
fooled. Sarah was always being ill. It was
worth a lie to drag her out into the light of his
sympathy. A breath of true life, born from
a lie.
The incident was at an end, safely through.
He was satisfied and believing, gone on into
his day. She gathered up his appointment
book from under his nose. He was using
it, making entries. But he knew this small
238 REVOLVING LIGHTS
tryanny was her real apology, a curse for the
trouble she had been obliged to give him. While
he sat bereft as she took in the items of his
day, their silent everyday conversation was
knitted up once more. She was there, not
failing him. He knew she would always be
there as long as he should really need her. She
restored the book to its place and stood at his
side affectionately watching him tackle his task,
detached, aware of her affection, secure in its
independence.
They were so utterly far apart, foreigners
in each other's worlds. Irreconcilable. . . .
But for all these years she had had daily before
her eyes the spectacle of his life work ; the
way and the cost of his undeviating, unsparing
work. It must surely be a small comfort
to him that there had been an understand-
ing witness to the shapely building of his
life. ...
Understanding speech she could never have,
with anyone . . . except the Taylors, and she
was as incompletely in their world as in his.
The joy of being with him was the absence
of the need for speech. She whisked her-
self to the door and went out shutting it
behind her with a little slam, a last fling
of holiday freedom, her communication to
him of the store of joy she had brought
back, the ease with which she was shoulder-
ing her more and more methodical, irrelevant
work. . . .
There was nothing to pay. Then the moment
I
REVOLVING LIGHTS 239
over the telegram had been a revelation. . . .
*' You ought to see the Grahams. Stay
another day and see the Grahams."
I might have wired asking for another day.
Impossible. The day would have been spoilt
by the discomfort of knowing him thinking me
ungrateful and insatiable. . . . Only being able
to say when I came back that I waited to see
a man dying of cancer. He would have thought
that morbid. The minute the telegram was
sent the feeling of guilt passed away. Whilst
Hypo was chuckling over it at the top of the
stairs there was nothing and no one. Only
the feeling of having broken through and stepped
forward into space. Strong happiness. All the
next day was in space ; a day taken out of life ;
standing by itself.
Mr. Graham was old-fashioned . . . and
modern too. He seemed to have come from
so far back, to see backwards, understanding,
and to see ahead the things he had always known.
Serene and interested, in absolutely everything.
As much in the tiny story of the threepenny-
bit as in anything else, making it seem worth
telling, making me able to tell it. Seeing every-
thing as real. Really finding life marvellous
in the way no one else seemed to do. ... Ill
as he was he looked up my trains, carefully
and thoughtfully. . . . The horror and fear
of death was taken away from me while I watched
him. . . . Perhaps - he had always felt that
the marvellousness of there being such a thing
240 REVOLVING LIGHTS
as life was the answer to everything. . . .
And now that he was dying knew it more com-
pletely ?
They were both so serene. Everybody was
lifted by being with them into that part of life
that goes on behind the life that seems to be
being lived. . . .
All the time it was as if they had witnessed
that past fortnight and made it immaterial . . .
a part of the immaterial story of life. . . .
That fortnight had the shape of an arranged
story, something playing itself out, with scenes
set and timed to come in in the right place.
Upset by that one little scene that had come
in of itself. . . .
The clear days after the two men had gone
back to town. The long talks kept undis-
turbed. . . . All the long history of Gissing.
• » *
Gissing's ideal women over-cultivated, self-
important creatures, with low-pressure vitality
and too little animal. ..." You're rather like
that you know." . . .
** Men would always rather be made love to
than talked at."
** Your life is a complex system of evasions.
You are a mass of healthy unused. You're not
doing anything with yourself. ..." "... Two
kinds of women, the kind that come it over
one, tremendously, and nurses."
" Most good men are something like chim-
panzees. The best man in those relationships
REVOLVING LIGHTS 241
is the accomplished rake . . . that's the secret
of old Grooge. . . . Yes ; you'd hate him.
He's one of the old school ; expert knowledge
about women. That's nonsense of course.
There is no expert knowledge about women.
Men and women are very much alike. But
there's the honest clean red-blooded people
and the posers and rotters and anaemic people.
And there are for your comfort a few genuine
monogamists. Very few."
" You're stuck, you know. Stuffed with
romantic ignorance. You're a great chap. A
gentleman. That's an insult, isn't it. You
don't exploit yourself. . . ."
" I'm not sure about you. You've got an
awfully good life up in town, jolly groups ;
various and interesting. One hesitates to dis-
turb it. . . . But we're old friends. And there's
this silly barrier between us. There always
is between people who evade what is after all
only the development of the friendly hand-
shake."
" She's a very fine artist. Well, she, my
dear Miriam, has lovers. They keep her go-
ing. Keep her creative. She's a woman one
can talk to. . . . There's no tiresome bar-
rier. ..."
" Your women are a sort of omnibus load."
** There's always the box seat."
" They all grin. Your one idea of women
is a grin."
" There's a great deal to be said for the
cheerful grin. You know, a woman who has
Q
242 REVOLVING LIGHTS
the grit to take things into her own hands,
take the initiative, is no end of a relief. Women
want to. They ought to. They're inhibited
by false ideas. They want, nearly all women
want all their corners taken for them."
*' This book'll be our brat. You've pulled
it together no end. You ought to chuck your
work, have a flat in town. Be general adviser
to authors. . . ."
Queer old professor Bolly, pink and white
and loud checks, standing outside the summer
house in the brilliant sun.
" Is this the factory ? "
" This is the factory."
" Does he dictate to you ? "
" My dear Bolly. . . . Have five minutes ;
have ha/f a minute's conversation with Miss
Henderson and then, if you dare, try to imagine
anyone dictating to her."
Pink and white. Two old flamingoes. Pull-
ing the other way. Bringing all the old con-
servative world into the study . . . sending
it forward with their way of looking at the new
things. Such a deep life in them that old age
and artificial teeth and veined hands did not
obscure their youth. Worldly happy religious
musical Englishpeople.
*' The Barrie question turns solely upon the
question of romance. You cannot, dear young
lady, hesitate over Barrie. You must either adore,
or detest. With equal virulence. I am one of
the adorers. Romance^ for me, is the ultimate
reality. . . , Seen through a glass darkly. . . ."
REVOLVING LIGHTS 243
On the other side of the room Mrs. Bolly
was telling her tales of Bayreuth. They were
both untouched by the Wilson atmosphere.
Not clever. They brought a glow like fire-
light ; as if the cold summer hearth were alight,
as the scenes from their stories came into the
room and stood clear.
The second afternoon Hypo stretched out
on the study lounge, asleep, compact and calm
in the sunlight like a crusader on a tomb, till
just before they went.
" There's something unconquerable in them."
" Yes, Miriam. Silliness is unconquerable.
Poor old Gourlay ; went to Greenland to
get away from it. Died to get away from
It.
" Don't go away. Camp in here. I'm all
to bits. You know you're no end of a comfort
to me."
" I can't be. You're hampered all the time
I'm here by the silly things I say ; the way
I spoil your talk."
" You've no idea how much I like having
you about. Like the sound of your voice ;
the way your colour takes the sun, your laughter.
I envy you your sudden laughter, Miriam ;
the way you lift your chin, and laugh. You're
wasted on yourself, Miriam. You don't know
the fine individual things in yourself. You've
got all sorts of illusions, but you've no idea
where you really score."
" Can't get on with anybody."
** You get on with me all right. But you
244 REVOLVING LIGHTS
never tell me nice things about myself. You
only laugh at my jokes."
" I've never told you a hundredth part.
There's never any time. But I'll tell you one
nice thing. There's a way in which ever since
I've known you, you obliterate other men.
Yes. For me. It's most tiresome."
" Oh, my dear ! Is that true, Miriam ? "
'* Oh yes. From the first time I saw you.
There you were. I can't bear your ideas.
But I always find myself testing other men,
better men, by the way, by you."
•*' I haven't any ideas, Miriam., and I'm
a reformed character. There's heaps of time.
You're here another ten days yet. You shall
camp in here. We'll talk, devastatingly."
" If I once began "
** Begin. We're going to explore each other's
minds."
*' I should bore you to death."
" You never bore me. Really. It does me
good to quarrel with Miriam. But we're not
going to quarrel. We're going to explore
each other and stop nowhere. Agreed } "
" I've seen you /// with boredom. You
hate silence and you hate opposition. You
always think people's minds are blank when
they are silent. It's just the other way round.
Only of course there are so many kinds of silence.
But the test of absolutely everything in life is
the quality of the in-between silences. It's
only in silence that you can judge of your relation-
ship to a person."
REVOLVING LIGHTS 245
" You shall be silent. You shall deploy a
whole regiment of silences . . . but you'll fire
off an occasional volley of speech ? "
" Real speech can only come from complete
silence. Incomplete silence is as fussy as de-
liberate conversation."
" One has to begin somewhere. Deliberate
conversation leads to real conversation. You
can talk, you know, Miriam. You're not a
woman of the world. You don't come off all
the time. But when you do, you come off no
end."
If his mind could be tackled even though there
were no words to answer him with, then anyone's
mind could be tackled. . . .
Finding him simple and sad, able to be uncer-
tain, took away the spell from the surroundings ;
leaving only him. . . . Seeing life as he saw
it, being forced to admit some of his truths, hard
and cruel even if rearranged or differently stated,
made the world a nightmare, a hard solid day-
light nightmare, the only refuge to be, and stay,
with him. Yet the giving up of perpetual
opposition brought a falseness. . . . Smiling
agreement, with unstated differences and reser-
vations piling up all the time. . . . Drifting
on into a false relationship.
The joy of being with him, the thing that made
it worth while to flatter by seeming to agree was
more than half the sense of triumphing over other
women. Of being able to believe myself as
interesting and charming and mysteriously won-
246 REVOLVING LIGHTS
derful as all these women we talked about, who
lost their wonder as he stated their formula.
By the time the Grimshaws came everything
was sad. . . . That is why I was so successful
with them. Gay with sadness, easy to talk to,
practised in conversation. Without that they
would not have sought me out and carried
me off by themselves and shown me their
world. . . .
" I've been through a terrific catechism."
" You've impressed them, Miriam. I'm
jealous. They come here ; to see me ; and go
off with Miriam."
" Bosh. They thought I was intelligent.
They don't think so now. Besides they really
were trying to interview you through me."
" That's subtle of you, Miriam. Old James.
You've no idea how you're coming on. Or
coming out. Yes. I think there's always been
a subtle leap in Miriam. Without words. A
song without words. Good formula for Miriam.
What did they interview me about ? "
" I refused to be drawn. Suddenly, in the
middle of lunch she asked me in her Cheltenham
voice ' What do you do with your leishah } '
I think she really wanted statistics ; gutter-snipe
statistics."
" She's an enchantress. No end of a lark,
really. She runs old Grimshaw. Runs every-
body. You're rather like her you know. You've
got the elements, with your wrist-watch. What
did you say } "
" Nothing. I haven't the faintest idea what I
REVOLVING LIGHTS 247
do with my leisure. Besides I can't talk about
real things to a bayonet. She is fascinating,
though."
" She's a gypsy. When she looks at one . . .
with that brown smile . . . one could do any-
thing for her."
" There you are. Your smiles . . . But
he's the most perfect darling. Absolutely sin-
cere. A Breton peasant. I talked to him about
some of your definitions. Not as yours. As
mine."
" Never mind. He knew where they came
from."
" Not at all. Only those I thought I agreed
with. And he's given me quite a fresh view of
the Lycurgans."
" Now don't you go and desert."
" Well he must be either right or wrong."
" What a damned silly thing to say. Oh
what a damned silly thing to say."
Chill windy afternoon, grey tamarisks waving
in a bleak wind, tea indoors and a fire bringing
into the summery daylight the sudden message
that summer was at an end. The changed scene
chiming together with the plain outspoken anger.
Again the enlivening power of anger, the relief of
the clean cut, of everything brought to an end,
of being once more single and clear, free of every-
one, homesick for London. . . .
Mr. Hancock's showing-out bell sounded In
the hall. The long sitting had turned into a
short one. No need to go up yet. He'll come
downstairs, pad-pad, flexible hand-made shoes
248 REVOLVING LIGHTS
on the thick stair carpet, the sharp turn at the
stair-end, the quick little walk along the passage
and soft neat clatter of leather heels down the
stone stairs to the workshop. Always the same.
The same occasion. Which occasion ? That
used to be so clear and so tremendous. Confused
now, but living on in every sound of his foot-
steps.
Homesick for London. For those people
whose lives are set in a pattern with mine, leaving
its inner edge free to range.
Perhaps the set pattern is enough. The daily
association. The mass of work. Its results
unseen. At the end it might show as a com-
plete whole, crowded with life. Life comes in ;
strikes through. Everything comes in if you are
set in a pattern and always in one place. Changed
circumstances bring quickly, but imperfectly,
without a background, the things that would be
discovered slowly and perfectly, on a background,
in calm daily air. All lives are the same
life. Only one discovery, coming to every-
body.
The little bell on the wall burred gently.
Room free. No hurry.
I'll wait till he's gone downstairs.
" Nice Miriam. You really are a dear, you
know. You've a ruddy, blazing temper. You
can sulk too, abominably. Then one discovers
an unsuspected streak of sweetness. You forget.
You have a rare talent for forgetfulness and
recovery. You're suddenly pillowy. You've no
j(^ea, Miriam, what a blessing that is to the crea-
REVOLVING LIGHTS 249
ture called man. It's womanly you are. Now
don't resent that. It's a fine thing to be. It
makes one want you, quite desperately. The
essential deeps of you. Like an absolution.
I'm admitting your deeps, Miriam."
** It's most inconvenient suddenly to be for-
getting you are having a row with a person.
It's really a weakness. Suddenly getting inter-
ested."
" Your real weakness is your lack of direction,
the instability of your controls. If I had you
on my hands for six months you'd be no end of
a fine chap. Now don't resent that. It's a
little crude, I admit. Perhaps I ought to beg
your pardon. I beg your pardon, Miriam."
" I never think about myself. I remember once
being told that I was too excitable. It made me
stare, for a few minutes. And now you. I
believe it. But I shall forget again. And you
are all wrong about * controls.' I don t mean
mine. I mean your silly idea of women having
feebler controls than men."
" Not my idea. Tested fact."
** Damn facts. Those arranged tests and their
facts are utterly nothing at all. Women's con-
trols appear to be feebler because they have so
much more to control. I don't mean physically.
Mentally. By seeing everything simultaneously.
Unless they are the kind of woman who has been
warped into seeing only one thing at a time.
Scientifically. They are freaks. Women see
in terms of life. Men in terms of things, because
their lives are passed amongst scraps."
250 REVOLVING LIGHTS
" Nice Miriam."
"... Now we can begin to talk. It's easier,
you know, to talk hand in hand."
The touch of his hand bringing a perfect separa- j
tion. Everything sudden y darkened. Two
little people side by side in a darkness. Exactly
alike. Hypo gone. His charm, quite gone.
Alma crossing the end of the lawn. There was
not any feeling of guilt. Only the sense of her
isolation. Companionship with her isolation.
Then the shock of his gay voice ringing out to
her across the lawn.
" Susan, if you have that day in town, awful
things will happen." Her little pink-clad figure
turning for a moment to wave a hand.
" Of course they will 1 Rather 1 "
" We're licensed ! "
" Susan doesn't like me."
" She does. She likes you no end. Likes
you currently. The way your hair goes back over
your ears." ;
. . . He misses nothing. That is his charm, !
his supremacy in charm over all other men. And j
misinterprets everything. That is his tragedy. ■ |
The secret of his perpetual disappointments. He '
spoiled everything by the perpetual shock of his
deliberate guilt and deliberate daring. That was
driving me off all the time. The extraordinari-
ness of his idea of frankness ! His * stark talk '
is nothing compared to the untroubled out-
spokenness of the Taylors. . . .
The burden of his simplicity. No one in the
world could be more simple. . . .
REVOLVING LIGHTS 251
He thought my silence meant attention and
agreement, when I wanted only to watch the
transformation going on all round me. That
would have gone on ; if he had given me time ;
not destroyed everything by his sudden trick of
masterfulness ; the silly application of a silly
idea. . . . It's not only that coercion is wrong ;
that it's far better to die than to be coerced. It's
the destructiveness of coercion. How long be-
fore men discover that violence drives women
utterly away into cold isolation. Never, since
the beginning of the world has a woman been
mastered. I'm glad I know why. Why violence
defeats itself. . . .
** You don't desert me completely ? We're
still friends .? You'll go on being interested in my
work .'' "
He knew nothing of the life that went on of
itself, afterwards. I had driven him away. I
felt guilty then. Because I took my decision.
And absolved myself. The huge sounding dark-
ness, expanding, turned to a forest of moving
green and gold. The feeling of immense de-
liberate strength going forward, breaking out
through life.
If it came again I should absolve myself. But
it won't. It is something in him, and in his
being an Englishman and not, like Michael, an
alien mind.
" Alma. I want a slice of life ! "
" Of course, my very dear ! Take one, Miriam.
Take a large one. An oat. Not a vote. One
woman, one oat. ..."
252 REVOLVING LIGHTS
'* I want an oat and a vote. . . . No. I
don't want a vote. I want to have one and
not use it. Taking sides simply annihilates
me."
** Don't be annihilated, old fing. Take an
oat."
" Give me one."
" I will. I do\'' _ _ ?: I
Alma's revealed splendour . . . lighting and [
warming the surrounding bleakness. In that j
moment her amazing gift that would move her so i
far from me seemed nothing. Herself, every-
thing to me. Alma is a star. Her name should '
be Stella. . . . But I had already decided that j
it would not be him. And that marvellous ;
beginning cannot come again.
** Particularly jolly schoolgirls ! You'll like
them. They're free. They mean to be free.
Now they, Miriam, are the new woman." Pos- |
ing, exploiting, deliberately uncatlike cats. How
could he be taken in } Why were all her poses
revealed to me .'' What brought me on the scene
just at those moments .'' Why that strange
little series of events placing me, alone, of the
whole large party, innocently there just at that
moment, to see the origin of his idea of a jolly
smile and how he answers it ?
" You looked like a Silenus."
" That sort of thing always looks foolish
from the outside. It was nothing. I beg
of you, I entreat you to think no more of
it."
/ REVOLVING LIGHTS 253
Again the little bell. Clean. A steady little
summons. He had not gone downstairs.
He was washing his hands ; with an air of
communicativeness.
" I've a piece of news for you. ... I have
decided to leave Mr. Orly and set up, elsewhere,
on my own account."
** Really .'' " The beating of her heart shook
the things she was holding in her hands.
*' Yes. It's a decision I've been approaching
for some time. As you know, Mr. Leyton is
about to be taken into partnership. I have come
to the conclusion that it is best on the whole to
move and develop my practice along my ov/n
lines."
So calmly handing out desolation. Here was
the counterpart of the glorious weeks. Her
carelessly-made living was gone ; or horribly
reduced. The Orlys alone would not be able
to give her a hundred a year.
" When is it to be ? "
** Of course, whenever I go, I shall want help."
" O/^ . . . "
He went very busily on with his handwashing.
She knew exactly how he was smiling, and hidden
in her corner smiled back, invisibly, and made
unnecessary clatterings to hide the glorious em-
barrassment. Dismay struck across her joy,
revealing the future as a grey, laborious working
out of this moment's blind satisfaction. But
joy had spoken first and left her no choice.
Startling her with the revelation of the way the
roots of her being still centred in him. Joy
254 REVOLVING LIGHTS
deeper and more powerfully stirring than the
joy of the past weeks. They showed now a
spread embroidery of sunlit scenes, powerless,
fundamentally irrelevant, excursions off the main
road of her life. Committed beyond recall, she
faced the prospect of unvarying, grinding experi-
ence. The truth hidden below the surfaces of
life was to yield itself to her slowly, imperceptibly,
unpleasurably.
She got through the necessary things at top
speed, anyhow, to avoid underlining his need of
her, and ran downstairs.
A letter on the hall table, from Hypo. . . .
Dear Miriam — Fve headed off that affair. Touve
pulled me out of it. You really have. When can
I see you ? Just to talk.
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