“If one must use these terms, the race is certainly more sacred than the individual.”
“Very well then; I know what I think. If the sacred race plays tricks on conscious human beings, using them for its own sacred purposes and giving them an unreal sense of mattering, I don’t care a button for the race and I’d rather kill myself than serve its purposes. Besides, the instincts of self preservation, and reproduction are not the only human motives … they are not human at all. …”
VII
The picturesque building had been there, just round the corner, all these years, without once attracting her interested notice. The question she directed towards it, crossing the road for a nearer view, went forth, not from herself, but from the presence, close at her side, of Michael Shatov. During the hour spent in her room, facing the empty evening, she had been aware of nothing, outside the startling disturbance of her own movements, but the immense silence he had left. Driven forth to walk away its hours out of doors, she found, accompanying her through the green-lit evening squares, the tones and gestures of his voice, the certainty, that so long as she should frequent the neighbourhood, she would retain the sense of his companionship. The regions within her, of unexpressed thought and feeling, to which he had not reached, were at once all about her as she made her old, familiar, unimpeded escape through the front door, towards the blur of feathery green standing in the bright twilight at the end of the grey street; but beyond these inner zones, restored in a tumult of triumphant assertion of their indestructibility, the outer difficult life of expression and association was changed. If, as she feared, he should finally disappear into the new world towards which, with such urgent irritated determination, she had driven him, she would, for life, have reaped a small fund of his Russian courage and indifference. … It was with his impulse and interest, almost it seemed, actually in his person, that she drew up in front of the placard at the side of the strange low ecclesiastical looking porch. But as she read its contents, he left her, sped into forgetfulness by the swift course of her amazement. She had come, leaving her room at exactly the right moment, directly, by appointment, to this spot. Glancing once more for perfect assurance, at the liberal invitation printed in large letters at the foot of the heavenly announcement, she went boldly into the porch.
At the top of the shallow flight of grey stone steps up which she passed almost directly from the ecclesiastical doorway, a large black-draped figure, surmounted by the sweeping curves of an immense black hat voluminously swathed in a gauze veil of pale grey, stood bent towards a small woman standing on the step below her in dingy indoor black. The large outline, standing generously out below the broad low stone archway curving above the steps, against the further grey stone of what appeared to be part of a low ceiled corridor, was in extraordinary contrast to the graciously bending, surrendered attitude of the figure. Passing close to the group, Miriam caught a glimpse of large plump features, bold eyebrows, and firm dark eyes. The whole face, imagined as unscreened, was rounded, simple and undistinguished; blurred by the veil, it swam, without edges, a misty full moon. Through the veil came a voice that thrilled her as she moved on, led by a card bearing an arrowed instruction, down the grey stone corridor, with the desire for immediate audible mimicry. The behaviour of the voice was a perfect confirmation of deliberate intentional blurring of the large face. The little scanty frugally upstanding woman who had appeared to be of the artisan class, was either a humorous brick, or a toady, or of the old-fashioned respectful servant type, to stand it. The superfluous statement might, at least, even if the voice had become second nature, she might be thirty, have been delivered at an ordinary conversational pace. But to make the unimportant comment in the deliberately refined distressed ladylike voice, with pauses, as if every word were a precious gift. … She was waiting for some occasion, keeping her manner going, and the little woman had to stand out the performance.
On her way down the corridor she met a young man with a long neck above a low collar, walking like an undergraduate, with a rapid lope and a forward hen-like jerk of the head, but with kind religious looking eyes. Underneath his conforming manner and his English book and talk-found thoughts, he was acutely miserable, but never alone long enough to find it out; never even long enough to feel his own impulses. Two girls came swiftly by, bareheaded, in reform dresses, talking eagerly in high-pitched out-turned cultured voices, their uncommunicating selves watchfully entrenched behind the polite Norman idiom. She carried on their manner of speech at lightning speed in her mind, watching its effect upon everything it handled, of damming up, shaping, excluding all but ready-made thought and opinion. Just ahead was an arched doorway and a young man with a sheaf of pamphlets standing within it. “It may,” she announced in character to an imaginary companion, “prove necessary to have some sort of conversational interchange with this individual.” Certainly it left one better prepared for the interview than saying Good Lord shall we have to say something to this creature? She got safely through the doorway, exchanging a slight bow with the young man as he provided her with a syllabus, and entered a large lofty quietly-lit room, where a considerable audience sat facing a raised platform more brightly illuminated, and from which they were confronted by a row of seated forms. She went down the
