And while she admired, she pitied.
And fifty yards away the toilers raged. The sound of them made the two engrossed figures, softly lit by the high presiding candle, a little absurd. Irrelevant and insecure. As if they might topple. Ought to topple. Ought to listen and topple down. …
Gerald and Harriett. Drawn, driven, washed about by tides they do not see. Flung on rocks, washed off and flung forward. Their unaware faces. Strength of unawareness; pushing on. That was my comfort—that they did not know. And because they did not know, I would not. Clung only to the things they saw and got away without realisation. Yet I realised it all. Here it is, tormenting me.
There is no choice of what one shall see on waking by accident. Things are there, set out clearly, stating their essence. What they meant when I passed through them feeling only the movement, from behind closed doors of le sort. Not thinking, because they were long prepared and there was nothing to be done. But there is always when le sort moves, a sense of guilt. Of having brought things about; let things happen that need not have happened. That is why, when they happen, one does not think. The fear of being crippled by condemnation. Yet it is all written in the book of consciousness.
Written indelibly. Because one can look to and fro, from one thing to another and each remains in place, presenting always one face, like a photograph.
Gerald and Harriett and Elspeth starting for Canada. Without goodbye. None of us dared to say goodbye. Outside the gaslit compartment seemed nothing but whirling darkness and cruel laughter. We jested without a gap. Annoying Elspeth, who longed only for the train to start and the relations who kept attention from centring on herself, to be gone. The sound of her childish complaints was one with the laughter of the outer darkness. She stood on the seat, a shining little figure in the harsh gaslight, clutching the doll Sarah had found time, on that awful last day, to dress. Beneath her unconscious feet was the machinery that would carry her into exile.
There they were in the imprisoning carriage. And then gone. It was a death. Something buried alive. I dared not feel. There was relief afterwards in walking down the platform with Gerald’s sister, a stranger just met, in knowing by the hard clutch of her hand that she, too, was not daring to feel. We both knew we had witnessed a crime.
“Can you get home?”
“Yes.” Our voices were rough and shuddering.
“We’ll meet again.”
We unclasped our hands and parted abruptly, our faces distorted with not weeping.
I came home and read the Punch Gerald had left behind.
Michael’s telegram. Once more the presence of him in the early morning, plunging along across the wide shadow of St. Pancras Church, his voice at my side and again the discomfort of hearing unknown people lightly and swiftly described as they appeared to him: delocalised, people in a void. The things he said about her told me nothing but that she was courting him and he had no idea of it. And I let him go in ignorance. Pushed him into the arms of a stranger.
“Take flowers. One always takes flowers to people when they are ill. And stay long enough to tell her all she wants to know about the congress.”
And I knew when he told me of the engagement that he was uneasy, neither happy nor confident. And it was broken. Broken by him. And no one will ever know why, and the obstinate little gentleman can’t see that it casts a greater shadow on her than if he spoke out and that if he can’t speak out he should invent. There she goes, back into her life with a shadow, cast by Michael.
“Methodical culture, my dear young lady, yes. But with plenty of revolution.”
Raymond wanted me to look at the programme and I told him crossly that I wanted the music first and didn’t believe in methodical culture. That was before I noticed the man in the cloak on my right.
“And now it’s over, by way of methodical culture, I’ll look.”
Raymond was genuine and the strange man was genuine. I was more pleased by his manner than by the truth in either of them. I held both their views. But wanted to impress both of them. Partly for the sake of the truth. Men are either-or, all the time. But what I liked best was peacocking out of the hall with both of them talking, one in each ear.
Strangeness of the seaside at Christmas time. Sunlit frost on the morning grass. Green garden in full sunlight. Blaze of blue sea and blue transparent sky. Blue and green and gold of summer, and warmth in the tingling air.
All the things of an old-fashioned Christmas except religion. Deliberate Christmassing without belief.
And she came
