“Passage, passage—”
“The real truth is that you don’t feel that pathos to yourself, or not in that way and in those words … there are one or two earlier passages that stopped me, the same sort of thing.”
“Right. We’ll have’m all out.”
“Without them the book will convince everybody.”
“No sane person can read it and keep out of socialism.”
“No.” But how fearful that sounds said by the author. As if he knew something else as well.
“Y’know you ought to be a Lycurgan, Miriam.” And then had come the sense of the door closing on all past loneliness, the rich sense of being carried forward to some new accompanied moulding change; but without any desire to go. Even with him, a moment of expression, seeming, while it lasted, enough in itself; the whole of life, when it happened not alone, but in an understanding presence; led to results, the destructive demand for the pinning of it down to some small shape of specialised action. Could he not see that the thing so surprising her and coming to him also as a surprise, was enough in itself … would disappear if she rushed forward into activities, masquerading, with empty hands, as one who had something to give. Yet he was going forward into activities. … She ought, having learned from him a clear theory of the working of the whole of human life, to be willing to follow, only too glad of the opportunity of any sort of share, even as an onlooker in the making of the new world.
But if she responded, she would be supporting his wrong estimate of her, his way of endowing everyone with his own gifts, seeing people only as capability, waiting for opportunities for action. She wanted only further opportunities with him, of forgetfulness, and the strange following moments of expression.
“Everyone will be socialists soon; there’s no need to join societies.”
“There’s mountains, my dear Miriam, mountains of work ahead, that only an organised society can compass. And you’d like the Lycurgans. We’ll make you a Lycurgan.”
“What could I do?”
“You can talk. You might write. Edit. You’ve got a deadly critical eye. Yes, you are a Lycurgan. That’s settled.”
“How can you say I can talk?”
“You’ve got a tenacity. I’d back you against anyone in argument, when you’re roused.”
“Argument is no good to anybody, world without end, amen.”
“Don’t be frivolous, Miriam. Real argument’s a fine clean weapon.”
“Cutting both ways; proving anything.”
“Quarrelsome Miriam.”
“And you know what you think about my writing. That I, or anybody could learn to write, passably.”
“If you have written anything, I’ve not seen it. You shall learn to write, passably, in the interests of socialism.”
What an awful fate. To sit in a dusty corner, loyally doing odd jobs, considered by him “quite a useful intelligent creature” among other much more clever, and to him, more attractive creatures, all working submissively in the interests of a theory that he understood so well that he must already be believing in something else. But she was already a useful fiercely loyal creature, that was how he described her, at Wimpole Street—But that was for the sake of freedom. Working with him there would be no freedom at all. Only a series of loyal posings.
Standing upon the footstool to get out, back, away from the wrong turning into the sense of essential expression. The return into the room of the sound of the sea, empty and harsh, in a void.
“That’s admirable. You could carry off any number of inches, Miriam. You only want the helmet and the trident. You’re Britannia, you know. The British Constitution. You’re infinitely more British than I am.”
“Foreigners always tell me I am the only English person who understands them.”
“Flattery. You’ve no idea how British you are. A mass of British prejudice and intelligent obstinacy. I shall put you in a book.”
“Then how can you want me to be a socialist. I am a Tory and an anarchist by turns.”
“You’re certainly an anarchist. You’re an individualist you know, that’s what’s wrong with you.”
“And what’s wrong with you?”
“And now you shall experiment in being a socialist.”
“Tories are the best socialists.”
“You shall be a Tory socialist. My dear Miriam, there will be socialists in the House of Lords.”
The same group of days had contained the relief of the beginning of generalisations; the end, on her part, of stories about people, told with an eye upon his own way of observing and stating. These stories had, during the earlier time, kept him so amused and, with his profane comments and paraphrases, so perpetually entertaining, that a large part of her private councils during the visits were spent in reviewing the long procession of Tansley Street boarders, the patients at Wimpole Street, and people ranged far away in her earlier lives, as material for anecdote. But throughout the delight of his interest and his surprising reiterated envy of the variety of her contacts, there had been a haunting sense of misrepresentation, and even of treachery to him, in contributing to his puzzling almost unvarying vision of people as pitifully absurd, from the small store of experiences she had dropped and forgotten, until he drew them forth and called them wealth.
His refusal to believe in a Russian’s individuality because no one had heard of him had set a term to these communications, leaving an abrupt pain. It was so strange that he should fail to recognise the distinction of the Russian being, the quality of the Russian attitude towards life. He had followed with interest, gentle and patient at first before her overwhelming conviction, allowing her to add stroke after stroke to her picture, seeming for a moment to see what she saw and then—What has he done? Either it was that his prearranged picture of European life had no place for these so different, inactive Russians, or her attempts to represent people in themselves, without borrowed methods of portrayal, were useless because they fell between
