Michael, half risen, bowing towards the centre of the group, had something to say. One of his generalisations. The party was united at last.
“These speculations,” he announced to the group Miriam rejoiced to see not only arrested by the inevitable topic but charmed by his gentleness, feeling the pull of him in their midst, “are most-interesting. There are it is sure in these matters no absolute certainties, but what is sure is, that the realisation of this idea would be, not advance, but retrogression.”
“Hear, hear,” said Densley, in his smoothest girlish falsetto.
As they all went down Fleet Street on their way to the Lycurgan meeting, Miriam wondered whether she would be asked to resign from the club. But much more pressing than this question was the feeling that her party had, in bringing together three of her worlds, shown her more clearly than she had known it before, that there was no place for her in either one of them. So clearly that she now wished it could end and leave her to go to the meeting alone.
There was in Lycurgan meetings some sort of reality, either coming from the platform or more often from irrelevant things rising in her own mind as she sat surrounded by so many speculative minds.
But tonight she would not reach unconsciousness of her surroundings. And the ideas coming from the platform would be severely tested by these alien presences. Already in advance, these ideas looked like a mere caprice of her leisure hours, a more or less congenial background of thought upon which presently might emerge a sudden enlargement of her own life. More and more lately they had been growing to mean things shared with Hypo, bright with life because they were his, and for the same reason suspect, suspect because of his unrivalled expressiveness, a faculty that might be turned with equal conviction in a quite opposite direction.
And once they were in the hall and she was sitting with the serene worlds of Michael and Densley and the Taylors close to her, the urgency of all the Lycurgans stood for grew immediately less. This world of clear ideas summoning mankind to follow like an army, seemed again, as when she had first met it, to contain a trick, to be too clear, too hard, too logical to embrace the rich fabric of life. She experimented in unthinking it; and a silence fell on many of the flagrant cruelties of civilisation. They lost their voice. Their only educated, instructed voice. The Lycurgans were a league to arrest cruelties. But a cold, cynical, jesting league, cold and hard as thought, cynical as paganism and cultivating a wit that left mankind small and bleak, in a darkness where there was no hope but in intelligent scheming. Even the women. The Lycurgan women were all either as hopelessly logical as men, or methodically pink. And the men; the everlasting prizefight, the perfect unsociability underlying their cold ideas. Except for one or two. And they were idealists, blind with the illusion that humanity moves with one accord.
Each one moves singly. To join the movements of others is harmful until you have moved yourself. Movement is with the whole of you. Ideas come afterwards.
How much time had passed? Only a moment or two. The chairman was still bleating. And they had not noticed her inattention.
They were sitting in a row at the back of the hall. The proceedings seemed very far away. Held off by their nearness to each other, by the way after one short hour and in spite of their incompatibilities, they were, when placed amongst strangers, in touch with each other.
It was worth while. Worth while to miss the intensities. To be happily surrounded. And this way, the social and domestic way of meeting things, the cool easy way of normal people, was perhaps the best way. It robbed things of all but their obvious surfaces, the practical data of life. Reduced them to the terms of what could be said about them and handed round from one to the other. Small wonder that reformers tended to become tub-thumpers, so immense must be the resistance offered by people living as nearly everyone did, in groups, closely related and drawn this way and that by perpetual single instances.
Less wonder that most people assumed the fact of life, took it without amazement, for granted, so thinly of necessity was spread their awareness of anything whatever. Homeopathic.
She gave herself up to joy in her party, in being linked with them in profane, mirthful detachment from all that was going forward, shockingly accompanied by the crackling of Michael’s disgraceful bag of hardbake. Was it her fault that they were so detached? The result of some demoralising influence at work behind her imagined interest in socialism? She felt it was not. They were all on a moral holiday, not only from their own worlds, but from any world whatsoever. Happy in being together, passing through an uncalculated interval, a strange small time that they would remember with pleasure.
Going homewards through the spring evening with Densley she felt the world even further off; thin, irrelevant. That was his influence. For him the world was something against which everyone was fighting with weapons feeble or stout. Single people, the individual battle, that was the centre of his preoccupation. His interest in Mrs. Wheeler was his sense that she was making a good fight, sturdily, perhaps unscrupulously … that she was what he would call a real woman. Herself he regarded as so far unreal, good material for reality, holding back.
His wide, varied experience of humanity seemed all about them, as they wandered at truce arm-in-arm through the darkened
