The visit to the revolutionaries seemed already in the past, added to the long procession of events that broke up and scattered the moment she was awake at this lonely centre.
Speech came towards her from within the echoes of the night; statements in unfamiliar shape. Years falling into words, dropping like fruit. She was full of strength for the end of the long walk; armed against the rush of associations waiting in her room; going swift and straight to dreamless sleep and the joy of another day.
The long wide street was now all even light, a fused misty gold, broken close at hand by the opening of a dark byway. Within it was the figure of an old woman bent over the gutter. Lamplight fell upon the sheeny slopes of her shawl and tattered skirt. Familiar. Forgotten. The last, hidden truth of London, spoiling the night. She quickened her steps, gazing. Underneath the forward-falling crushed old bonnet shone the lower half of a bare scalp … reddish … studded with dull, wartlike knobs. … Unimaginable horror quietly there. Revealed. Welcome. The head turned stealthily as she passed and she met the expected sidelong glance; naked recognition, leering from the awful face above the outstretched bare arm. It was herself, set in her path and waiting through all the years. Her beloved hated secret self, known to this old woman. The street was opening out to a circus. Across its broken lights moved the forms of people, confidently, in the approved open pattern of life, and she must go on, uselessly, unrevealed; bearing a semblance that was nothing but a screen set up, hiding what she was in the depths of her being.
II
At the beginning of the journey to the east-end the Lintoffs were as far away as people in another town. When the east-end was reached they were too near. Their brilliance lit up the dingy neighbourhood and sent out a pathway of light across London. Their eyes were set on the far distance. It seemed an impertinence to rise suddenly in their path and claim attention.
But Michael lost his way and the Lintoffs were hidden, erupting just out of sight. The excitement of going to meet them filtered away in the din and swelter of the east-end streets.
They came upon the hotel at last, suddenly. A stately building with a wide pillared porch. As they went up its steps and into the carpeted hall, cool and clean and pillared, giving on to arched doorways and the distances of large rooms, she wished the Russians could be spirited away, that there were nothing but the strange escape from the midst of squalor into this cool hushed interior.
But they appeared at once, dim figures blocking the path, closing up all the distances but the one towards which they were immediately obliged to move and that quickly ended in a bleak harshly lit room. And now here they were, set down, meekly herded at the table with other hotel people.
No strange new force radiated from them across the chilly expanse of coarse white tablecloth. They were able to be obliterated by their surroundings; lost in the onward-driving tide of hotel-life; responding murmuringly to Michael’s Russian phrases, like people trying to throw off sleep.
Her private converse with them the day before, made it impossible even to observe them now that they were exposed before her. And a faint hope, refusing to be quenched, prevented her casting even one glance across at them. If the hope remained unwitnessed there might yet be, before they separated, something that would satisfy her anticipations. If she could just see what he was like. There was, even now, an unfamiliar force keeping her eyes averted from all but the vague sense of the two figures. Perhaps it came from him. Or it was the harvest growing from the moment in the hotel entrance.
A dispiriting conviction was gathering behind her blind attention. If she looked across, she would see a man self-conscious, drearily living out the occasion, with an assumed manner. After all, he was now just a married man, sitting there with his wife, a man tamed and small and the prey of known circumstances, meeting an old college friend. This drop on to London was the end of their wonderful adventure. A few weeks ago she had still been his fellow student, his remembered companion, in a Russian prison for her daring work, ill with the beginnings of her pregnancy. Now, he was with her for good, inseparably married, no longer able to be himself in relation to anyone else. … She felt herself lapsing further and further into isolation. Something outside herself was drowning her in isolation.
Something in Michael. … That, at least, she could escape now that she was aware of it. She leaned upon his voice. At present there was no sign of his swift weariness. He was radiant, sitting host-like at the head of the table between her and his friends, untroubled
