“Well, as I say, that depends entirely on yourself. You must clearly understand that I expect you to fulfil all reasonable requests whether referring to the practice or no, and moreover to fulfil them cheerfully.”
“Well, of course I have no choice. But I can’t promise to be cheerful; that’s impossible.” An obstinate tightening of the grave face.
“I think perhaps I might manage to be serene; generally. I can’t pretend to be cheerful.” “Assume an air of cheerfulness, and presently you will be cheerful, in spite of yourself.” Awful. To live like that would be to miss suddenly finding the hidden something that would make you cheerful forever.
“Well as I say.”
“You see there’s always the awful question of right and wrong mixed up with everything; all sorts of rights and wrongs, in the simplest things. I can’t think how people can go on so calmly. It sometimes seems to me as if everyone ought to stop and do quite other things. It’s a nightmare, the way things go on. I want to stay here, and yet I often wonder whether I ought; whether I ought to go on doing this kind of work.”
“Well as I say, I know quite well the work here leaves many of your capabilities unoccupied.”
“It’s not that. I mean everything in general.”
“Well—if it is a question of right and wrong, I suppose the life here like any other, offers opportunities for the exercise of the Christian virtues.”
Resignation; virtues deliberately set forth every day like the wares in a little shop; and the world going on outside just the same. A sort of sale of mean little virtues for respectability and a living; the living coming by amiable cooperation with a world where everything was wrong, turning the little virtues into absurdity; respectable absurdity. He did not think the practice of the Christian virtues in a vacuum was enough. But he had made a joke, and smiled his smile. … There was no answer anywhere in the world to the question he had raised. Did he remember saying why shouldn’t you take up dentistry? Soon it would be too late to make any change; there was nothing to do now but to stay and justify things … it would be impossible to be running about in a surgery with grey hair; it would make the practice seem dowdy. All dental secretaries were young. … The work … nothing but the life all round it; the existence of a shadow amidst shadows unaware of their shadowiness, keeping going a world where there were things, more than people. The people moved sunlit and prosperous, but not enviable, their secrets revealed at every turn, unaware themselves, they made and left a space in which to be aware. …
“I want to say that I think it is kind of you to let me air my grievances so thoroughly.”
“Well, as I say, I feel extremely uncertain as to the advisability of this step.”
“You needn’t,” she said rising as he rose, and going buoyantly to move about in the neighbourhood of the scattered results of his last operation, the symbols of her narrowly rescued continuity. She was not yet free to touch them. He was still, wandering about the other part of the room, lingering with thoughtful bent head in the mazes of her outrageous halting statements. But a good deal of his resentment had gone. It was something outside herself, something in the world at large, that had forced him to act against his “better judgment.” He was still angry and feeling a little shorn, faced, in the very presence of the offender, with the necessity of disposing of the fact that he had been driven into inconsistency.
Miriam drew a deep sigh, clearing her personal air of the burden of conflict. Was it an affront? It had sounded to her like a song. His thoughts must be saying, well, there you are, it’s all very well to throw it all off like that. His pose stiffened into a suggested animation with regard to work delayed. If only now there could be an opportunity for one of his humorous remarks so that she could laugh herself back into their indestructible impersonal relationship. It was, she thought, prophetically watching his gloriously inevitable recovery, partly his unconscious resentment of the blow she had struck at their good understanding that had made him so repeatedly declare that if they started again it must be on a new footing; that all possibility of spontaneity between them had been destroyed.
How could it be, with the events of daily life perpetually building it afresh?
IX
The power of London to obliterate personal affairs depended upon unlimited freedom to be still. The worst suffering in the days of uncertainty had been the thought of movements that would make time move. … Now that the stillness had returned, life was going on, dancing, flowing, looping out in all directions able to bear its periods of torment in the strength of its certainty of recovery, so long as time stayed still. Life ceased when time moved on. Out in the world life was ceasing all the time. All the time people were helplessly doing things that made time move; growing up, old people growing onwards, with death suddenly in sight, rushing here and there with words that had lost their meaning, dodging and crouching no matter how ridiculously, to avoid facing it. Young men died in advance; it was visible in their
