The spectacle of their escape from the shadows lessened the pain of being left behind. Perhaps even a moment’s contemplation of the future helped to bring it about? Every thought vibrates through the universe. Then there was absolution in thought, even from the anger of everlastingly talking people, contemptuous of silence and aloofness. And there was unity with the future.
The surrounding light glowed with a richer intensity. Flooded through her, thrilling her feet to swiftness.
If the revolutionaries could be with her now, they would find in her something of the state towards which they were violently straining? They would pause and hover for a moment, with half envious indulgence. But sooner or later they would say things about robust English health; its unconsciousness of its surroundings.
The mystery of being English. Mocked at for stupidity and envied for having something that concerned the mocking people of the two continents and challenged them to discover its secret.
But by tomorrow night she would have nothing but the little set of remembered facts, dulled by the fatigue of her day’s work. These would save her, for the one evening, from appearing as the unintelligent Englishwoman of foreigner’s experience. But they would also keep out the possibility of expressing anything.
Even the bare outlines of socialism, presented suddenly to unprepared English people, were unfailing as a contribution to social occasions. They forced everyone to look at the things they had taken for granted in a new light, and to remember, together with the startling picture, the person who first drew it for them. But to appear before these Russians talking English socialism was to be nothing more than a useful person in uniform.
What was the immediate truth that shone, independent of speculation, all about her in the English light; the only thing worth telling to enquiring foreigners?
It was there at once when she was alone, or watching other people as an audience, or as an uncommitted guest, expressing in a great variety of places different sets of opinions. It was there radiant, obliterating her sense of existence, whenever she was in the midst of things kept going by other people. It could be given her by a beggar, purposefully crossing a street … not “pitiful,” as he was so carelessly called—but something that shook her with gratitude to the roots of her being. But the instant she was called upon there came the startled realisation of being in the world, and the sense of nothingness, preceding and accompanying every remark she might make.
One opinion self-consciously stated made the light go down. Immediate substitution of the contrary, produced a chill followed by darkness. … Men called out these contradictory statements, each one with his way of having only one set of opinions.
How powerful these Russians were, in advance, making her count herself up. If she saw much of them she would fail and fade into nothing under the Russian test. If there were only one short interview she might escape unknown, and knowing all the things about Russian revolutionaries that Michael Shatov had left incomplete.
Their scornful revolutionary eyes watched her glance about amongst her hoard of contradictory ideas. Statements about different ways of looking at things were irrelevancies that perhaps with Russians might be abandoned altogether. Yet to appear before them empty-handed, hidden in her earlier uninfluenced personality, would be not to meet them at all. Personal life to them was nothing, could be summed up in a few words, the same for everybody. They lived for an idea.
She offered them a comprehensive glimpse of the many pools of thought in which she had plunged, rising from each in turn, to recover the bank and repudiate; unless a channel could be driven, that would make all their waters meet. They laughed when she cried out at the hopelessness of uniting them. “All these things are nothing.”
But a revolutionary is a man who throws himself into space. In Russia there is nowhere else to throw himself? That would do as an answer to their criticisms of English socialism. She could say also that conservatives are the best socialists; being liberal-minded. Most socialists were narrow and illiberal, holding on to liberal ideas. The aim of the Lycurgans, alone amongst the world’s socialists, was to show the English aristocracy and middle classes that they were, still, socialists.
There were things in England. But they struggled at cross purposes, refusing to get into a shape that would draw one, whole, along with it. But there were things in England with truth shining behind them. English people did not shine. But something shone behind them. Russians shone. But there was nothing behind them. There were things in England. She offered them the contents of books. They were as real as the pools of experience. Yet they, too, were irreconcilable.
A little blue-lit street; lamps with large round globes, shedding moonlight; shadows, grey and black. She had somehow got into the west-end—a little west-end street, giving out its character. She went softly along the middle of the blue-lit glimmering roadway, narrow between the narrow pavements skirting the high façades, flat and grey, broken by shadowy pillared porticoes; permanent exits and entrances on the stage of the London scene; solid lines and arches of pure grey shaping the flow of the pageant, and emerging, when it ebbed away, to stand in their own beauty, conjuring back the vivid tumult to flow in silence, a continuous ghostly garland of moving shapes and colours, haunting their self-sufficient calm.
Within the stillness she heard the jingling of hansoms, swinging in morning sunlight along the wide thoroughfares of the west-end; saw the wide leisurely shopfronts displaying in a restrained profusion, comfortably within the experienced eye half turned to glance from
