Miriam began singing again when she felt herself in her own street, clear and empty in the moonlight. The north wind blew down it unobstructed and she was shivering and singing … “spring is co‑ming a‑and the swa‑llows—have come back to te‑ell me so.” Spring could not be far off. At this moment in the dark twilight behind the thick north wind the squares were green.
Her song, restrained on the doorstep and while she felt her already well-known way in almost insupportable happiness through the unlit hall and through the moonlight up the seventy-five stairs, broke out again when her room was reached and her door shut; the two other doors had stood open showing empty moonlit spaces. She was still alone and unheard on the top floor. Her room was almost warm after the outside cold. The row of attic and fourth floor windows visible from her open lattice were in darkness, or burnished blue with moonlight. Warm blue moonlight gleamed along the leads sloping down to her ink-black parapet. The room was white and blue lit, with a sweet morning of moonlight. She had a momentary impulse towards prayer and glanced at the bed. To get so far and cast herself on her knees and hide her face in her hands against the counterpane, the bones behind the softness of her hands meeting the funny familiar round shape of her face, the dusty smell of the counterpane coming up, her face praying to her hands, her hands praying to her face, both throbbing separately with their secret, would drive something away. Something that was so close in everything in the room, so pouring in at the window that she could scarcely move from where she stood. She flung herself more deeply into her song and passed through the fresh buoyant singing air to light the gas. The room turned to its bright evening brown. Prayer. Being so weighed down and free with happiness was the time … sacrifice … the evening sacrifice of praise and prayer. That is what that means. To toss all the joys and happiness away and know that you are happy and free without anything. That you cannot escape being happy and free. It always comes.
Why am I so happy and free? she wondered with tears in her eyes. Why? Why do lovely things and people go on happening? To own that something in you had no right. But not crouching on your knees … standing and singing till everything split with your joy and let you through into the white white brightness.
To see the earth whirling slowly round, coloured, its waters catching the light. She stood in the middle of the floor hurriedly discarding her clothes. They were old and worn, friendly and alive with the fresh strength of her body. Other clothes would be got somehow; just by going on and working … there’s so much—eternally. It’s stupendous. I’ve no right to be in it; but I’m in. Someone means me to be in. I can’t help it. Fancy people being alive. You would think everyone would go mad. She found herself in bed, sitting up in her flannellette dressing jacket. The stagnant air beneath the sharp downward slope of the ceiling was warmed by the gas. The gaslight glared beautifully over her shoulder down on to the page. …
All that has been said and known in the world is in language, in words; all we know of Christ is in Jewish words; all the dogmas of religion are words; the meanings of words change with people’s thoughts. Then no one knows anything for certain. Everything depends upon the way a thing is put, and that is a question of some particular civilisation. Culture comes through literature, which is a half-truth. People who are not cultured are isolated in barbaric darkness. The Greeks were cultured; but they are barbarians … why? Whether you agree or not, language is the only way of expressing anything and it dims everything. So the Bible is not true; it is a culture. Religion is wrong in making word-dogmas out of it. Christ was something. But Christianity which calls Him divine and so on is false. It clings to words which get more and more wrong … then there’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be quite sure of rejoicing about. The Christians are irritating and frightened. The man with side-whiskers understands something. But.
V
Then all these years they might have been going sometimes to those lectures. Pater talking about them—telling about old Rayleigh and old Kelvin as if they were his intimates—flinging out remarks as if he wanted to talk and his audience were incapable of appreciation … light, heat, electricity, sound-waves; and never saying that members could take friends or that there were special lectures for children … Sir Robert Ball … “a fascinating Irish fellow with the gift of the gab who made a volcano an amusing reality,” Krakatoa … that year of wonderful sunsets and afterglows … the air half round the world, full of fine dust … it seemed cruel … deprivation … all those years; all that wonderful knowledge just at hand. And now it was coming, the Royal Institution … this evening. She must find out whether one had to dress and exactly how one got in. Albemarle Street. … It all went on in Albemarle Street.
“We might meet,” said Mr. Hancock, busily washing his hands and lifting them in the air to shake back his coat sleeves. Miriam listened from her corner behind the instrument cabinet, stupid with incredulity; he could not be speaking of the lecture … he
