There is something always plucking you back into your own life. After the first pain there is relief, a sense of being once more in a truth. Then why is it so difficult to remember that things deliberately done, with a direct movement of the will, always have a falseness? Never meet the desire that prompted the action. The will is really meant to prevent deliberate action? That is the hard work of life? The Catholics know that desire can never be satisfied. You must not desire God. You must love. I can’t do that. I can’t get clear enough about what he wants. Yet even without God I am not lonely; or ever completely miserable. Always in being thrown back from outside happiness, there seem to be two. A waiting self to welcome me.
It can’t be wrong to exist. In those moments before disaster existence is perfect. Being quite still. Sounds come presently from the outside world. Your mind moving about in it without envy or desire, realises the whole world. The future and the past are all one same stuff, changing and unreal. The sense of your own unchanging reality comes with an amazement and sweetness too great to be borne alone; bringing you to your feet. There must be someone there, because there is a shyness. You rush forward, to share the wonder. And find somebody engrossed with a cold in the head. And are so emphatic and sympathetic that they think you are a new friend and begin to expand. And it is wonderful until you discover that they do not think life at all wonderful. … That afternoon it had been a stray knock at the front door and a sudden impulse to save Mrs. Bailey coming upstairs. And Mrs. Bailey, after all she had said, also surprised into a welcome, greeting Eleanor as an old friend, taking her in at once. And then the old story of detained luggage, and plans prevented from taking shape. The dreadful slide back, everything disappearing but her and her difficulties, and presently everything forgotten but the fact of her back in the house. Afterwards when the truth came out, it made no difference but the relief of ceasing to be responsible for her. But this time there had been no responsibility. She had made no confidences, asked for no help. Was it blindness, or flattered vanity, not to have found out what she was going through?
Yet if the facts had been stated, Eleanor would not have been able to forget them. In those evenings and weekends she had forgotten, and been happy. The time had been full of reality; memorable. It stood out now, all the going about together, drawn into a series of moments when they had both seen with the same eyes. Experiencing identity as they laughed together. Her recalling of their readings in the little Marylebone room, before the curate came, had not been a pretence. Mr. Taunton was the pretence. There had been no space even for curiosity as to the end of his part of the story. Eleanor, too, had not wished to break the charm by letting things in. She had been taking a holiday, between the desperate past and the uncertain future. In the midst of overwhelming things she had stood firm, her power of creating an endless present at its height. A great artist.
To Michael, a poor pitiful thing; Rodkin’s victim. She, of course, had given Michael that version. Little Michael, stealing to her room night by night, towards the end, to sleep at her side and say consoling things; never guessing that her threat of madness was an appeal to his Jewish kindness, a way of securing him. What a story for proper English people … the best revelation in the whole of her adventure. And Mrs. Bailey too; true as steel. Serenely warding off the women boarders … gastric distension.
Rodkin … poor little Rodkin with his weak dreadful little life. Weekdays; the unceasing charm of Anglo-Russian speculation, Sundays; boredom and newspapers. Then the week again, business and a City man’s cheap adventures. He had behaved well, in spite of Michael’s scoldings. It was wonderful, the way the original Jewish spirit came out in him, at every step. His loose life was not Jewish. And it was really comic that he should have been trapped by a girl pretending to be an adventuress. Poor Eleanor, with all her English dreams; just Rodkin. But he was a Jew when he hesitated to marry a consumptive, and perfectly a Jew when he decided not to see the child lest he should love it; and also when he hurried down into Sussex the moment it came, to see it, with a huge armful of flowers, for her. … What a scene for the Bible-woman’s Hostel. All Eleanor. Her triumph. What other woman would have dared to engage a cubicle and go calmly down without telling them? And a week later she was in the Superintendent’s room and all those prim women sewing for her and hiding her and telling everybody she had rheumatic fever. And crying when she came away. …
She was right. She justified her actions and came through. And now she’s a young married woman in a pretty villa, near the church, and the vicar calls and she won’t walk on Southend pier because “one meets one’s butcher and baker and candlestick maker.” But only because Rodkin is a child-worshipper. And she tolerates him and the child and he is a browbeaten cowed little slave. … It is tempting to tell the
