He must read the chapter on silence and then the piece about the old man by his lamp. That would make everything clear … where was he all this time? Dinner was nearly over. Perhaps he was going out. She contemplated her blank evening. His voice sounded in the hall. How inconvenient for people with very long eyelashes to have to wear glasses she thought, engrossing herself in a sudden vision of her neighbour’s profile. He was coming through the hall from seeing somebody out of the front door. If she could be talking to someone she would feel less huge. She tried to catch Mr. Rodkin’s eye to ask him if he had read Tolstoy. Mr. Shatov had come in, bowing his deep-voiced greeting, and begun talking to Mr. Rodkin before he was in his chair, as if they were in the middle of a conversation. Mr. Rodkin answered at once without looking at him, and they went on in abrupt sentences one against the other, the sentences growing longer as they talked.
Sissie did not hear the remark about the weather because she too was attending to the rapid Russian sentences. She was engrossed in them, her pale blue eyes speculative and serene. Miriam watched in swift glances. The brilliant colour that Mr. Shatov had seemed to distribute when he sat down, had shrunk to himself. He sat there warm and rich, with easy movements and easily moving thoughts, his mind far away, his features animated under his raised carelessly singing eyebrows, by his irascible comments on Mr. Rodkin’s rapped-out statements. The room grew cold, every object stiff with lifeless memory, as they sat talking Mr. Rodkin’s business. Everyone sitting round the table was clean-cut, eaten into by the raw edge of the winter night, gathered for a moment in the passing gaslit warmth, to separate presently and face an everlastingly renewed nothingness. … The charm of the Russian words, the fascination of grasping the gist of the theme broke in vain against the prevailing chill. If the two should turn away from each other and bend their glowing faces, their strangely secure foreign independence towards the general bleakness, its dreadful qualities would swell to a more active torment, all meanings lost in empty voices uttering words that no one would watch or explain. There was a lull. Their conversation was changing. Mr. Shatov had sat back in his chair with a Russian word that hung in the air and spread music. His brows had come down and he was glancing thoughtfully about the table. She met Mr. Rodkin’s eyes and smiled and turned again to Sissie with her remark about the weather. Sissie’s face came round surprised. She disagreed, making a perfect comment on the change that left Miriam marvelling at her steady ease of mind. She agreed in an enthusiastic paraphrase, her mind busy on the hidden source of her random emphasis. It could rest, everything could rest for awhile, for a little time to come, for some weeks perhaps. … But he would bring all those books; with special meanings in them that everyone seemed to understand and agree about; real at the beginning and then going off into things and never coming back. Why could she not understand them? Finding things without following the story was like being interested in a lesson without mastering what you were supposed to master and not knowing anything about it afterwards that you could pass on or explain. Yet there was something, or why did school which had left no knowledge and no facts seem so alive? Why did everything seem alive in a way it was impossible to explain? Perhaps part of the wrong of being a lazy idiot was being happy in a way no one else seemed to be happy.
If one was an idiot, people like Mr. Shatov would not. … He looked straight across, a swift observant glance. She turned once more towards Sissie making herself smilingly one with the conversation that was going on between her and her further neighbour and listened eagerly across the table; “Gracieuse” Mr. Shatov was saying at the end of a sentence, dropping from objection to restatement. Mr. Rodkin had asked him if he did not think her pretty. That would be his word. He would have no other word. Mr. Shatov had looked considering the matter for the first time. “Gracieuse.” Surely that was the very last thing she could be. But he thought it.
Grace was a quality, not an appearance. Strong-minded and
