“All sorts of people are staying up to see it; I suppose one ought,” Miriam said cheerfully. She could go upstairs and think about the comet. She went away, smiling back her response to Mrs. Bailey’s awakening smile.
Her starlit window suggested the many watchers. Perhaps he would be watching? But if he had seen no papers on the way from Russia he might not have heard of it. It would be something to mention tomorrow. But then one would have to confess that one had not watched. She opened her window and looked out. It was a warm night; but perhaps this was not the right part of the sky. The sky looked intelligent. She sat in front of the window. Very soon now it would not be too early to light the gas and go to bed.
No one had ever seen a comet rushing through space. There was nothing to look for. Only people who knew the whole map of the sky would recognise the presence of the comet. … But there was a sort of calming joy in watching even a small piece of a sky that others were watching too; it was one’s own sky because one was a human being. Knowing of the sky and even very ignorantly a little of the things that made its effects, gave the most quiet sense of being human; and a sense of other human beings, not as separate disturbing personalities, but as sky-watchers. … “Looking at the stars one feels the infinite pettiness of mundane affairs. I am perpetually astonished by the misapplication of the term infinite. How, for instance, can one thing be said to be infinitely smaller than another?” He had always objected only to the inaccuracy, not to the dreary-weary sentiment. Sic transit. Almost everyone, even people who liked looking at the night-sky seemed to feel that, in the end. How do they get this kind of impression? If the stars are sublime, why should the earth be therefore petty? It is part of a sublime system. If the earth is to be called petty, then the stars must be called petty too. They may not even be inhabited. Perhaps they mean the movement of the vast system going on forever, while men die. The indestructibility of matter. But if matter is indestructible, it is not what the people who use the phrase mean by matter. If matter is not conscious, man is more than matter. If a small, no matter how small, conscious thing is called petty in comparison with big no matter how big unconscious things, everything is made a question of size, which is absurd. But all these people think that consciousness dies. …
The quiet forgotten sky was there again; intelligent, blotting out unanswered questions, silently reaching down into the life that rose faintly in her to meet it, the strange mysterious life, far away below all interference, and always the same.
Teaching, being known as a teacher, had brought about Mrs. Bailey’s confident promise to the Russian student. There was no help for that. If he were cheated, it was part of the general confusion of the outside life. He also was subject to that. It would be a moment in his well-furnished life, caught up whenever his memory touched it, into the strand of contemptible things. He would see her drifting almost submerged in the flood of debris that made up the boardinghouse life, its influence not recognised in the first moments because she stood out from it, still bearing, externally, the manner of another kind of life. The other kind of life was there, but able to realise itself only when she was alone. It had been all round her, a repelling memory, just now in the dining-room … blinding her … making her utterly stupid … and there they were, in another world, living their lives; their smiling patience taking its time, amused that she did not see. Of course that was what he had meant. There was no other possible meaning … behind barred gates, closed against her, they had sat, patiently impatient with her absurdity. … Mrs. Bailey and Mr. Gunner. …
He had had the clearness of vision to discover what she was … behind her half-dyed grey hair and terrible ill-fitting teeth. Glorious. Into the midst of her failing experiment, at the very moment when the shadow of oncoming age was making it visibly tragic, had come this man in his youth, clear-sighted and determined, seeing her as his happiness, his girl. She was a girl, modest and good. … Circumstances could do nothing. There as she stood at bay in the midst of them, the thing she believed in, her one test of everything in life, always sure of her defence and the shelter of her curious little iron strength, had come again to her herself, all her own … it was the unasked reward of her unswerving faith. She stood decorated by a miracle.
Mrs. Bailey had triumphed; justified her everlasting confident smile.
She was enviable; her qualities blazoned by success in a competition whose judges, being blind, never failed in discovery. …
But the miracle gleams only for a moment, and the personal life, no longer threading its way in a wonderful shining mysteriously continuous and decisive pattern freely in and out of the worldwide everything, is henceforth labelled and exposed, repeating until the eye wearies of its fixity, one little lustreless shape; and the outside world is left untouched and unchanged. Is it worth while? A blind end, in which death swiftly increases. … But without it, in the end, there is no shape at all?
The hour had been such a surprising success because of a smattering of knowledge: until the moment when he had said I have always from the first been interested in philosophy. Then knowing that the fascinating thing was philosophy and being
