But when they reached the suburbs, the problem was there again in might, incessant as the houses looming by on either side, driven tyrannously home by the easy flight ahead, as Highgate sloped to London, of the two whose machines were fitted with “free” wheels. … Only a mind turned altogether towards outside things could invent. …
And then London came, opening suddenly before me as I rode out alone from under a dark archway into the noise and glare of a gaslit Saturday night.
Trouble fell away like a cast garment as I swung forward, steering with thoughtless ease, into the southernmost of the four converging streets.
This was the true harvest of the summer’s day; the transfiguration of these northern streets. They were not London proper; but tonight the spirit of London came to meet her on the verge. Nothing in life could be sweeter than this welcoming—a cup held brimming to her lips, and inexhaustible. What lover did she want? No one in the world could oust this mighty lover, always receiving her back without words, engulfing and leaving her untouched, liberated and expanding to the whole range of her being. In the mile or so ahead, there was endless time. She would travel further than the longest journey, swifter than the most rapid flight, down and down into an oblivion deeper than sleep; and drop off at the centre, on to the deserted grey pavements, with the high quiet houses standing all about her in air sweetened by the evening breath of the trees, stealing down the street from either end; the sound of her footsteps awakening her again to the single fact of her incredible presence within the vast surrounding presence. Then, for another unforgettable night of return, she would break into the shuttered house and gain her room and lie, till she suddenly slept, tingling to the spread of London all about her, herself one with it, feeling her life flow outwards, north, south, east and west, to all its margins.
And it had been so. Nothing had intervened, but, for a moment, the question, coming as the wild flowers fell from her unclasped belt, bringing back the long-forgotten day—what of those others, lost, for life, in perpetual association?
The long lane of Bond Street had come to an end, bringing her out into the grey-brown spaciousness of Piccadilly, lit sparsely by infrequent globes of gold. The darkness cast by the massive brown buildings thrilled heavily about the shrouded oblivion of west-end life. She passed elderly men, black coated and mufflered over their evening dress, wrapped in their world, stamped with its stamp, still circulating, like the well preserved coins of a past reign—thinking their sets of thoughts, going home to the small encirclement of clubs and chambers, a little aware of the wide night and the time of year told on the air as they had passed along where the Green Park slept on the far side of the road. This was their moment, between today and tomorrow, of freedom to move amongst the crowding presences gathered through so many years within themselves; slowly, mannishly; old-mannishly, perpetually pulled up, daunted, taking refuge in their sets of thoughts; not going far, never returning to renew a sally, for the way home was short, and their gait showed them going, almost marching, to the summons of their various destinations. Some of their faces betrayed as they went by, unconscious of observation, the preoccupation that closed in on all their solitude; a look of counting, but with liberal evening hand, the days that remained for them to go their rounds. One came prowling with slow, gentlemanly stroll, half-halting to stare at her, dim-eyed, from his mufflings. Here and there a woman, strayed away from the searching light and the rivalry of the Circus, hovered in the shadows. Presently, across the way, the Park moved by, brimming through its railings a midnight freshness into the dry sophisticated air. Through this strange mingling, hansoms from the theatres beyond the Circus, swinging, gold-lamped, one by one, along the centre of the deserted roadway, drew bright threads of younger west-end life, meshed and tangled, men and women from social throngs, for whom no solitude waited.
Piccadilly Circus was almost upon her, the need for thoughtless hurrying across its open spaces; the awakening on the far side with the west-end dropping away behind; and the tide of her own neighbourhood setting towards her down Shaftesbury Avenue; bringing with it the present movement of her London life. … Why hadn’t she a club down here; a neutral territory where she could finish her thoughts undisturbed?
Defying the surrounding influences, she glanced back at the months following the picnic … the shifting of the love-story into the midst of the Wimpole Street household, making her room like a little theatre where at any moment the curtain might go up on a fresh scene … knowing them all so well, being behind the scenes as well as before them, she had watched with a really cruel indifference, and let the light of the new theories play on all she saw. For unconscious unquestioning people were certainly ruled by something. The acting of the play
