She avoided the house, returning only when the hour justified a swift retreat from the hall to her room; escape from the dimly-lit privacy of the deserted drawing-room. Not again could she suffer his nearness, until the foreigner in him, dipped every day more deeply into the well of English feeling, should be changed. When she was alone, she moved, thoughtless, along a pathway that led backwards towards a single memory. Far away in the distance, coming always nearer, was the summer morning of her infancy, a permanent standing arrested, level with the brilliance of flower-heads motionless in the sunlit air; no movement but the hovering of bees. Beyond this memory towards which she passed every day more surely, a marvellous scene unfolded. And always with the unfolding of its wide prospects, there came a beautifying breath. The surprise of her growing comeliness was tempered by a sudden curious indifference. These new looks of hers were not her own. They brought a strange publicity. She felt, turned upon her, the welcoming, approving eyes of women she had contemptuously neglected, and upon her own face the dawning reflection of their wise, so irritating smile. She recognised them, half fearfully, for they alone were the company gathered about her as she watched the opening marvel. She recognised them for lonely wanderers upon the earth. They, these women, then were the only people who knew. Their smile was the smile of these wide vistas, wrought and shaped, held back by the pity they turned towards the blind life of men; but it was alone in its vision of the spaces opening beyond the world of daily life.
The open scene, that seemed at once without her and within, beckoned and claimed her, extending forever, without horizons, bringing to her contemplating eye a moving expansion of sight ahead and ahead, earth and sky left behind, across flower-spread plains whose light was purer and brighter than the light of day. Here was the path of advance. But pursuing it she must be always alone; supported in the turmoil of life that drove the haunting scene away, hidden beyond the hard visible horizon, by the remembered signs and smiles of these far-off lonely women.
Between them and their second week stood a promised visit to the Brooms; offering itself each time she surveyed it, under a different guise. But when, for their last evening together, he surprised her, so little did he ever seem to plan or reflect, with stall tickets for the opera she was overwhelmed by the swift regardless pressure of events. Opera, forever outside her means and forgotten, descending thus suddenly upon her without space for preparation of mind, would seem to be wasted. Not in such unseemly haste could she approach this crowning ornament of social life. She was speechless, too, before the revelation of his private ponderings. She knew he was indifferent, even to the theatre, and that he could not afford this tremendous outlay. His recklessness was selfless; a great planning for her utmost recreation. In her satisfaction he was to be content. Touched to the heart she tried to express her sense of all these things, much hampered by the dismayed anticipation of failure, on the great evening, to produce any satisfying response. She knew she would dislike opera; fat people, with huge voices, screaming against an orchestra, in the pretence of expressing emotions they had never felt. But he assured her that opera was very beautiful, Faust perhaps the most beautiful and charming of all, and drew her attention to the massed voices. To this idea she clung, in the interval, for enlightenment.
But after spending all her available funds on an evening blouse and borrowing a cloak from Jan she found herself at the large theatre impressed only by the collected mass of the audience. The sense of being small and alone, accentuated by the presence of little Mr. Shatov, neatly in evening dress at her side, persisted, growing, until the curtain rose. So long as they had wandered about London and sat together in small restaurants, the world had seemed grouped about them, the vast ignored spectator of a strange romance. But in this huge enclosure, their small, unnoticed, unquestioned presences seemed challenged to account for themselves. All these unmoved people, making the shut-in air cold with their unconcern, even when they were hushed with the strange appealing music of the overture, were moving with purpose and direction because of their immense unconsciousness. Where were they going? What was it all about? What, she asked herself, with a crowning pang of desolation, as the curtain went relentlessly up, were he and she to be or do in this world? What would they become, committed, identified, two small desolate, helpless figures, with the crowding mass of unconscious life?
“I find something of grandeur in the sober dignity of this apartment. It is medieval Germany at its best.”
“It is very dark.”
“Wait, wait. You shall see life and sunshine, all in the most beautiful music.”
The sombre scene offered the consolation, suddenly insufficient, that she had found in the
