The burden of his simplicity. No one in the world could be more simple. …
He thought my silence meant attention and agreement, when I wanted only to watch the transformation going on all round me. That would have gone on; if he had given me time; not destroyed everything by his sudden trick of masterfulness; the silly application of a silly idea. … It’s not only that coercion is wrong; that it’s far better to die than to be coerced. It’s the destructiveness of coercion. How long before men discover that violence drives women utterly away into cold isolation. Never, since the beginning of the world has a woman been mastered. I’m glad I know why. Why violence defeats itself. …
“You don’t desert me completely? We’re still friends? You’ll go on being interested in my work?”
He knew nothing of the life that went on of itself, afterwards. I had driven him away. I felt guilty then. Because I took my decision. And absolved myself. The huge sounding darkness, expanding, turned to a forest of moving green and gold. The feeling of immense deliberate strength going forward, breaking out through life.
If it came again I should absolve myself. But it won’t. It is something in him, and in his being an Englishman and not, like Michael, an alien mind.
“Alma. I want a slice of life!”
“Of course, my very dear! Take one, Miriam. Take a large one. An oat. Not a vote. One woman, one oat. …”
“I want an oat and a vote. … No. I don’t want a vote. I want to have one and not use it. Taking sides simply annihilates me.”
“Don’t be annihilated, old fing. Take an oat.”
“Give me one.”
“I will. I do!”
Alma’s revealed splendour … lighting and warming the surrounding bleakness. In that moment her amazing gift that would move her so far from me seemed nothing. Herself, everything to me. Alma is a star. Her name should be Stella. … But I had already decided that it would not be him. And that marvellous beginning cannot come again.
“Particularly jolly schoolgirls! You’ll like them. They’re free. They mean to be free. Now they, Miriam, are the new woman.” Posing, exploiting, deliberately uncatlike cats. How could he be taken in? Why were all her poses revealed to me? What brought me on the scene just at those moments? Why that strange little series of events placing me, alone, of the whole large party, innocently there just at that moment, to see the origin of his idea of a jolly smile and how he answers it?
“You looked like a Silenus.”
“That sort of thing always looks foolish from the outside. It was nothing. I beg of you, I entreat you to think no more of it.”
Again the little bell. Clean. A steady little summons. He had not gone downstairs.
He was washing his hands; with an air of communicativeness.
“I’ve a piece of news for you. … I have decided to leave Mr. Orly and set up, elsewhere, on my own account.”
“Really?” The beating of her heart shook the things she was holding in her hands.
“Yes. It’s a decision I’ve been approaching for some time. As you know, Mr. Leyton is about to be taken into partnership. I have come to the conclusion that it is best on the whole to move and develop my practice along my own lines.”
So calmly handing out desolation. Here was the counterpart of the glorious weeks. Her carelessly-made living was gone; or horribly reduced. The Orlys alone would not be able to give her a hundred a year.
“When is it to be?”
“Of course, whenever I go, I shall want help.”
“Oh …”
He went very busily on with his handwashing. She knew exactly how he was smiling, and hidden in her corner smiled back, invisibly, and made unnecessary clatterings to hide the glorious embarrassment. Dismay struck across her joy, revealing the future as a grey, laborious working out of this moment’s blind satisfaction. But joy had spoken first and left her no choice. Startling her with the revelation of the way the roots of her being still centred in him. Joy deeper and more powerfully stirring than the joy of the past weeks. They showed now a spread embroidery of sunlit scenes, powerless, fundamentally irrelevant, excursions off the main road of her life. Committed beyond recall, she faced the prospect of unvarying, grinding experience. The truth hidden below the surfaces of life was to yield itself to her slowly, imperceptibly, unpleasurably.
She got through the necessary things at top speed, anyhow, to avoid underlining his need of her, and ran downstairs.
A letter on the hall table, from Hypo. …
Dear Miriam—I’ve headed off that affair. You’ve pulled me out of it. You really have. When can I see you? Just to talk.
Colophon
Revolving Lights
was published in by
Dorothy M. Richardson.
This ebook was produced for
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The cover page is adapted from
The Letter,
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