“Ach-ma,” he sighed, with shining eyes, looking happily replete, “he is a great p‑sycho-physiologiste,” and passed on to eager narration of the events of his week in Paris. Listening to the strange inflections of his voice, the curiously woven argumentative singsong tone, as if he were talking to himself, broken here and there by words thrown out with explosive vehemence, breaking defiantly short as if to crush opposition in anticipation, and then again the soft almost plaintive singsong beginning of another sentence, Miriam presently heard him mention Max Nordau and learned that he was something more than the author of Degeneration. He had written Die Conventionellen Lügen der Kulturmenschheit, which she immediately must read. He had been to see him and found a truly marvellous white-haired old man, with eyes, alive; so young and vigorous in his enthusiasm that he made Mr. Shatov at twenty-two feel old.
After that she watched him from afar, set apart from his boyhood, alone with her twenty-five years on the borders of middle-age. There was the secret of the youthful untested look that showed in certain poses of his mature studious head. His beard and his courtly manner and the grave balanced intelligence of his eyes might have belonged to a man of forty. Perhaps the Paris visit had been some time ago. No; he had come through France for the first time on his way to England. … She followed him, growing weary with envy, through his excursions in Paris with his father; went at last to the Louvre, mysterious grey building, heavy above a row of shops, shutting in works of “art,” in some extraordinary way understood, and known to be “good”; and woke to astonishment to find him sitting alone, his father impatiently gone back to the hotel, for an hour in motionless contemplation of the Venus, having wept at the first sight of her in the distance. The impression of the Frenchman’s lecture was driven away. All the things she had heard of on these two evenings were in the past.
He was in England now, through all the wonders of his continental life, England had beckoned him. Paris had been just a stage on his confident journey; and the first event of his London life would be Saturday’s visit to the British Museum. His eager foreign interest would carry the visit off … and she remembered, growing in the thought suddenly animated towards his continued discourse, that she could show him the Elgin Marbles.
The next evening, going down to the drawing-room at the appointed time, Miriam found it empty and lit only by the reflection from the street. Standing in the dim blue light she knew so well, she passed through a moment of wondering whether she had ever really sat talking in this room with Mr. Shatov. It seemed so long ago. His mere presence there had been strange enough; youth and knowledge and prosperity where for so long there had been nothing but the occasional presence of people who were in mysterious disgraceful difficulties, and no speech but the so quickly acrimonious interchange of those who are trying to carry things off. Perhaps he was only late. She lit the gas and leaving the door wide sat down to the piano. The loose flatly vibrating shallow tones restored her conviction that once more the house was as before, its usual intermittent set of boarders, coming punctually to meals, enduring each other downstairs in the warmth until bedtime, disappearing one by one up the unlighted stairs, having tea up here on Sundays, and for her, the freedom of the great dark house, the daily oblivion of moving about in it, the approach up the quiet endlessly dreaming old grey street in the afternoon, late at night, under all the changes of season and of weather; the empty drawing-room that was hers every Sunday morning with its piano, and always there at night within its open door, inviting her into its blue-lit stillness; her room upstairs, alive now and again under some chance spell of the weather, or some book which made her feel that any life in London would be endurable forever that secured her room with its evening solitude, now and again the sense of strange fresh invisibly founded beginnings; often a cell of torturing mocking memories and apprehensions, driving her down into the house to hear the dreadful voices, giving out in unchanged accents, their unchanging words and phrases.
Someone had come into the room, bringing a glow of life. She clung to her playing; he need not know that she had been waiting for him. A figure was standing almost at her side; with that voice he would certainly be musical … the sturdiness and the plaintiveness were like the Russian symphonies; he could go to the Queen’s Hall; his being late for the lesson had introduced music. … She broke off and turned to see Sissie Bailey, waiting with sullen politeness to speak. Mr. Shatov was out. He had gone out early in the afternoon and had not been seen since. In Sissie’s sullenly worried expression Miriam read the Baileys’ fear that they had already lost hold of their helpless new boarder. She smiled her acceptance and suggested that he had met friends. Sissie remained grimly responseless and presently turned to go. Resuming her playing, Miriam wondered bitterly where he could have lingered, so easily dropping his lesson. What did it matter? Sooner or later he was bound to find interests; the sooner the better. But she could not go on playing; the room was cold and black; horribly empty and still. … Mrs. Bailey would know where he had set out to go this afternoon; she would have directed him. She played on zealously for a decent interval, closed the piano and went downstairs. In the dining-room was Sissie, alone, mending a tablecloth.
To account for
