“… in the library at half past eight.”
“Oh yes,” she replied casually.
To sit hearing the very best in the intellectual life of London, the very best science there was; the inner circle suddenly open … the curious quiet happy laughter that went through the world with the idea of the breaking up of air and water and rays of light; the strange love that came suddenly to them all in the object lesson classes at Banbury Park. That was to begin again … but now not only books, not the strange heavenly difficult success of showing the children the things that had been found out; but the latest newest things from the men themselves—there would be an audience and a happy man with a lit face talking about things he had just found out. Even if one did not understand there would be that. Fancy Mr. Hancock being a member and always going and not talking about it … at lunch. He must know an enormous number of things besides the wonders of dentistry and pottery and Japanese art.
It was education … a liberal education. It made up for only being able to say one was secretary to a dentist at a pound a week … it sounded strange at the end of twelve years of education and five months in Germany and two teaching posts—to people who could not see how wonderful it was from the inside; and the strange meaning and rightness there was; there had been a meaning in Mr. Hancock from the beginning, a sort of meaning in her privilege of associating with fine rare people, so different to herself and yet coming one after another, like questions into her life, and staying until she understood … somebody struggled all night with the angel … I will not let thee go until thou bless me … and there was some meaning—of course, meanings everywhere … perhaps a person inside a life could always feel meanings … or perhaps only those who had moved from one experience to another could get that curious feeling of a real self that stayed the same through thing after thing.
“This is the library,” said Mr. Hancock leading Miriam along from the landing at the top of the wide red-carpeted staircase. It seemed a vast room—rooms leading one out of the other, lit with soft red lights and giving a general effect of redness, dull crimson velvet in a dull red glow and people, standing in groups and walking about—a quite new kind of people. Miriam glanced at her companion. He looked in place; he was in his right place; these were his people; people with gentle enlightened faces and keen enlightened faces. They were all alike in some way. If the room caught fire there would be no panic. They were gentle, shyly gentle or pompously gentle, but all the same and in agreement because they all knew everything, the real important difficult things. Some of them were discussing and disagreeing; many of the women’s faces had questions and disagreements on them and they were nearly all worn with thought; but they would disagree in a way that was not quarrelsome, because everyone in the room was sure of the importance of the things they were discussing … they were all a part of science. … “Science is always right and the same, religion cannot touch it or be reconciled with it, theories may modify or cancel each other but the methods of science are one and unvarying. To question that fundamental truth is irreligious” … these people were that in the type of their minds—one and unvarying; always looking out at something with gentle intelligence or keen intelligence … this was Alma’s world … it would be something to talk to Alma about. There was something they were not. They were not … jolly. They could not be. They would never stop “looking.” Culture and refinement; with something about it that made them quite different to the worldly people, a touch of rawness, raw school harshness about them that was unconscious of itself and could not come to life. Their shoulders and the backs of their heads could never come to life. It gave them a kind of deadness that was quite unlike the deadness of the worldly people, not nearly so dreadful—rather funny and likable. One could imagine them all washing, very carefully, in an abstracted way still looking and thinking and always with the advancement of science on their minds; never really aware of anything behind or around them because of the wonders of science. Seeing these people changed science a little. They were almost something tremendous; but not quite.
“That’s old Huggins,” murmured Mr. Hancock, giving Miriam’s arm a gentle nudge as a white-haired old man passed close by them with an old woman at his side, with short white hair exactly like him. “The man who invented spectrum analysis—and that’s his wife; they’re both great fishermen.” Miriam gazed. There, was the splendid thing. … In her mind blazed the coloured bars of the spectrum. In the room was the light of the beauty, the startling life these two old people shed from every part of their persons. The room blazed in the light they shed. She stood staring, moving to watch their gentle living movements. They moved as though the air through which they moved was a living medium—as though everything were alive all round them—in a sort of hushed vitality. They were young. She felt she had never seen anyone so young. She longed to confront them just once, to stand for a moment the tide in which they lived.
“Ah Meesturra Hancock—you are a faceful votary.”
That’s a German, thought Miriam, as the flattering deep caressing gutturals rebounded dreadfully from her startled consciousness. What a determined intrusion. How did he come to know such a person? Glancing she met a pair of swiftly calculating eyes fixed full on her face. There was fuzzy black hair lifted back
