“Lintoff of course is not quite like that. But then in these revolutionary circles men and women live the same lives. … It’s like America in the beginning, where women were as valuable as men in the outside life. If the revolution were accomplished they would separate again.” …
She backed to the railings behind her, and leant, with a heel on the low moulding, to steady herself against the tide of thought, leaving Michael planted in the middle of the pavement. A policeman strolled up, narrowly observing them, and passed on.
“No one on earth knows whether these Russian revolutionaries are right or wrong. But they have a thing that none of their sort of people over here have—an effortless sense of humanity as one group. The men have it and are careless about everything else. I believe they think it worth realising if everybody in the world died at the moment of realisation. The women know that humanity is two groups. And they go into revolutions for the freedom from the pressure of this knowledge.”
“Revolution is by no means the sole way of having a complete sense of humanity. But what has all this to do with us?”
“It is not that the women are heartless; that is an appearance. It is that they know that there are no tragedies. …”
“Listen, Mira. You have taught me much. I am also perhaps not so indiscriminating as are some men.”
“In family life, all your Jewish feelings would overtake you. You would slip into dressing-gown and slippers. You have said so yourself. But I am now quite convinced that I shall never marry.” She walked on.
He ran round in front of her, bringing her to a standstill.
“You think you will never marry … with this”—his ungloved hands moved gently over the outlines of her shoulders. “Ah—it is most—musical; you do not know.” She thrilled to the impersonal acclamation; yet another of his many defiant tributes to her forgotten material self; always lapsing from her mind, never coming to her aid when she was lost in envious admiration of women she could not like. Yet they contained an impossible idea; the idea of a man being consciously attracted and won by universal physiological facts, rather than by individuals themselves. …
If Michael only knew, it was this perpetual continental science of his that had helped to kill their relationship. With him there could never be any shared discovery. … She grudged the formal enlightenment he had brought her; filching it from the future. There could never now be a single harmonious development in relation to one person. Unless in relation to him. … For an instant marriage, with him, suggested itself as an accomplished fact. She saw herself married and free of him; set definitely in the bright resounding daylight of marriage … free of desires … free to rest and give away to the tides of cheerfulness ringing in confinement within her. She saw the world transformed to its old likeness; and walked alone with it, in her old London, as if awakened from a dream. But her vision was disturbed by the sense and sound of his presence and she knew that her response was not to him. …
The necessity of breaking with him invaded her from without, a conviction, coming from the radiance on which her eyes were set, and expanding painlessly within her mind. She recognised with a flush of shame at the continued association of these two separated people, that there was less reality between them now than there had been when they first met. There was none. … She was no longer passionately attached to him, but treacherously since she was hiding it, to someone hidden in the past, or waiting in the future … or anyone; any chance man might be made to apprehend … so that when his man’s limitations appeared, that past would be there to retreat to. …
He had never for a moment shared her sense of endlessness. … More sociably minded than she … but not more sociable … more quickly impatient of the cessations made by social occasions, he had no visions of waiting people. … His personal life was centred on her completely. But the things she threw out to screen her incommunicable blissfulnesses, or to shelter her vacuous intervals from the unendurable sound of his perpetual circling round his set of ideas, no longer reached him. She could silence and awaken him only in those rare moments when she was lifted out of her growing fatigues to where she could grasp and state in all its parts any view of life that was different from his own. Since she could not hold him to these shifting visions, nor drop them and accept his world, they had no longer anything to exchange. …
At the best they were like long-married people, living, alone, side by side; meeting only in relation to outside things. Any breaking of the silence into which she retreated while keeping him talking, every pause in her outbursts of irrepressible cheerfulness, immediately brought her beating up against the bars of his vision of life as uniform experience, and gave her a fresh access of longing to cut out of her consciousness the years she had spent in conflict with it.
Always until tonight her longing to escape the unmanageable burden of his Jewishness had been quenched
