Meantime everything passes. There are always the powerful intervals. Meetings, and then intervals in which other things come up and life speaks directly, to the individual. … Except for married people. Who are all a little absurd, to themselves and to all other married people. That is why they always talk so hard when two couples are together? To cover the din of their thoughts. … Their marriage was a success without being an exception to the rule that all marriages are failures, as he said. Why are they failures? Science, the way of thinking and writing that makes everybody seem small, in all these new books. Biology, Darwin. The way men, who have no inner convictions, no self, fasten upon an idea and let it describe life for them. Always a new idea. Always describing and destroying, filtering down, as time goes on to quite simple people, poisoning their lives, because men must have a formula. Men are gossips. Science is … cosmic scandalmongering.
Science is Cosmic Scandalmongering. Perhaps that might do for the House of Lords. But those old fogies are not particularly scientific. They quote the Classics. The same thing. Club gossip. Centuries of unopposed masculine gossip about the universe.
Years ago he said there will be no more him and her, the novels of the future will be clear of all that. … Poetry nothing. Religion nothing. Women a biological contrivance. And now. Women still a sort of attachment to life, useful, or delightful … the “civilised women of the future” to be either bright obedient assistants or providers of illusion for times of leisure. Two kinds, neatly arranged, each having only one type of experience, while men have both, and their work, into which women can only come as Hindus, obediently carrying out tasks set by men, dressed in uniform, deliberately sexless and deferential. How can anyone feel romantic about him? Alma. But that is the real old-fashioned romance of everyday, from her girlhood. Hidden through loyalty to his shifting man’s ideas? Half convinced by them? How can people be romantic impermanently, just now and again?
Romance is solitary and permanent. Always there. In everybody. That is why the things one hears about people are like stories, not referring to life. Why I always forget them when the people themselves are there. Or believe, when they talk of their experiences, that they misread them. I can’t believe even now in the reality of any of his experiences. But then I don’t believe in the experiences of anyone, except a few people who have left sayings I know are true. … Everything else, all the expressions, history and legend and novels and science and everybody’s talk, seems irrelevant. That’s why I don’t want experience, not to be caught into the ways of doing and being that drive away solitude, the marvellous quiet sense of life at first hand. … But he knows that too. “Life drags one along by the hair shrieking protests at every yard.”
“Hullo! What is she doing all alone?”
The surrounding scene that had gradually faded, leaving her eyes searching in the past for the prospect she could never quite recall, shone forth again.
“I’ve got to do a review.”
“What’s the book?”
“When you are in France, does a French river look different to you; French?”
“No, Miriam. It—doesn’t look different.”
He glanced for a moment shaggily from point to point of the sunlit scene and sat companionably down, turned towards her with a smile at her discomfiture. “What’s the book, Miriam? It’s jolly down here. We’ll have some chairs. Yes? You can’t write on a bench.”
He was gone. Meaning to come back. In the midst of the morning; in the midst of his preoccupations sociably at leisure. She felt herself sink into indifference. The unique opportunity was offering itself in vain. He came back just as she had begun to imagine him caught, up at the house, by a change of impulse. Or perhaps an unexpected guest.
“What’s the review?”
“The House of Lords.”
“Read it?”
“I can’t. It’s all post hoc.”
“Then you’ve read it.”
“I haven’t read it. I’ve only sniffed the first page.”
“That’s enough. Glance at the conclusion. Get your statement, three points; that’ll run you through a thousand words. Look here—shall I write it for you?”
“I’ve got fifty ideas,” she said beginning to write.
“That’s too many, Miriam. That’s the trouble with you. You’ve got too many ideas. You’re messing up your mind, quite a good mind, with too swift a succession of ideas.” She wrote busily on, drinking in his elaboration of his view of the state of her mind. “H’m,” he concluded, stopping suddenly; but she read in the sound no intention of breaking away because she had nothing to say to him. He was watching, in some way interested. He sat back in his chair; sympathetically withheld. Actually deferring to her work. …
She tore off the finished page and transfixed it on the grass with a hatpin. Her pencil flew. The statement was finished and leading to another. Perhaps he was right about three ideas. A good shape. The last must come from the book. She would have to consult it. No. It should be left till later. Her second page joined the first. It was incredible that he should be sitting there inactive, obliterated by her work.
She tore off the third sheet and dropped her pencil on the grass.
“Finished? Three sheets in less than twenty minutes. How do you do it, Miriam?”
“It’ll do. But I shall have to copy it. I’ve resisted the temptation to say what I think about the House of Curmudgeons. Trace it back to the First Curmudgeon. Yet it seems somehow wrong to write in the air, so currently. The first time I did a review, of a bad little book on Whitman, I spent a fortnight of evenings reading.”
“You began at the Creation. Said everything you had to say about the history of mankind.”
“I went nearly mad with responsibility and the awfulness
