She seemed to be looking with a hundred eyes, multitudinously, seeing each thing from several points at once, while through her mind flitted one after another all the descriptions of humanity she had ever culled. There was no goal here. Only the old familiar business of suspended opinions, the endless battling of thoughts. She turned away. She had gone too far. Now there would be lassitude and the precipice that waited. … Her room was clear and hard about her as she moved to take refuge near the friendly gas, the sheeny patch of wall underneath it.
As she stood within the radiance, conscious only of the consoling light, the little strip of mantelshelf and the small cavernous presence of the empty grate, a single scene opened for a moment in the far distance, closing in the empty vista, standing alone, indistinct, at the bottom of her ransacked mind. It was gone. But its disappearance was a gentle touch that lingered, holding her at peace and utterly surprised.
This forgotten thing was the most deeply engraved of all her memories? The most powerful? More than any of the bright remembered things that had seemed so good as they came, suddenly, catching her up and away, each one seeming to be the last her lot would afford?
It was. The strange faint radiance in which it had shone cast a soft grey light within the darkness concealing the future. …
Oldfield. It had come about through Dr. Salem Oldfield. She could not remember his arrival. Only suddenly realising him, one evening at dinner when he had been long enough in the house to chaff Mrs. Bailey about some imaginary man. Sex-chaff; that was his form of humour; giving him away as a nonconformist. But so handsome, sitting large and square, a fine massive head, well shaped hair, thick, and dinted with close cropped waves; talking about himself in the eloquent American way. It was that night he had told the table how he met his fiancée. He was a charlatan, stagey; but there must have been something behind his clever anecdotal American piety. Something remained even after the other doctors’ stories about his sharing their sitting-room and books, without sharing expenses; about his laziness and self-indulgence.
Mr. Chadband. But why shouldn’t people on the way to Heaven enjoy buttered toast? A hypocrite is all the time trying to be something, or he wouldn’t be a hypocrite. … And the story he told was true. … Dr. Winchester knew. It was with his friends at Balham that the girl had been staying. Wonderful. His lonely despair in Uganda; the way he had forced himself in the midst of his darkness to visit the sick convert … and found the answer to his trouble in a leaflet hymn at the bedside; and come to London for his furlough and met the authoress in the very first house he visited. Things like that don’t happen unless people are real in some way. And the way he had admired Michael; and liked him.
It had been Michael he had taken to the Quaker meeting. But there must have been some talk with him about religion, to lead up to that sudden little interview on the stairs, he holding a book in one large hand and thumping it with the other. … “You’ll find the basic realities of religious belief set forth here; in this small volume. Your George Fox was a marvellous man.” There was an appealing truth in him at that moment, and humility. … But before his footsteps had died away she knew she could not read the book. Even the sight of it suggested his sledgehammer sentimental piety. Also she had felt that the religious opinions of a politician could not clear up the problems that had baffled Emerson. It was only after she had given back the book that she remembered the other George Fox and the Quaker in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But she had said she had read it and that it was wonderful, to silence his evangelistic attacks, and also for the comfort of sharing, with anybody, the admission that there was absolute wonderfulness.
After that there was no memory of him until the Sunday morning when Michael had come panting upstairs to ask her to go to this meeting. He was incoherent, and she had dressed and gone out with them, into the high bright Sunday morning stillness; without knowing whither. Finding out, somewhere on the way, that they were going to see Quakers waiting to be moved by the spirit. … A whitewashed room, with people in Quaker dress sitting in a circle? Shocking to break in on them. … Startling not to have remembered them in all these years of hoping to meet someone who understood silence; and now to be going to them as a show; because Dr. Oldfield admired Michael, and being American, found out the unique things in London. …
In amongst the small old shops in St. Martin’s Lane, gloomy, iron-barred gates, a long bleak corridor, folding doors; and suddenly inside a large room with sloping galleries and a platform, like a concert room, a row of dingy modern people sitting on the platform facing a scattered “chapel” congregation; men and women sitting on different sides of the room … being left standing under the dark gallery, while Dr. Oldfield and Michael were escorted to seats amongst the men; slipping into a chair at the back of the women’s side; stranded in an atrocious emphasis of sex. But the men were on the left … and numbers of them; not the few of a church congregation; and young; modern young men in overcoats; really religious, and not thinking the women secondary. … But there were men also on the women’s side; here and there. Married men? Then those across the way were bachelors. … That young man’s profile; very ordinary and with a
