the spell of the ink-stained table had survived the night. moving about, preparing for to-day, she turned continually towards the window-space, as to an actual presence, and was answered by the rising within her of a tide of serenity, driving her forward in a stupor of confidence, impervious to strain and pain. it was as if she had entered a companionship that now spread like a shield between her and the life she had so far dealt with unaided ...
the week of working days, standing between her and next sunday’s opportunity, was a small space that would pass in a dream; the scattered variously-developing interests of life outside wimpole street changed, under her eyes, from separate bewildering competitively attractive scraps of life, to pleasantly related resources, permitted distractions from an engrossment so secure that she could, without fear of loss, move away and forget it.
she felt eager to jest. ranged with her friends she saw their view of her own perpetually halting scrupulousness and marvelled at their patient loyalty. she shared the exasperated intolerance of people who disliked her.... it could be disarmed .... by fresh, surprising handling.... because, she asked herself scornfully as she opened
the door to go downstairs, she had corrected mr. lahitte’s unspeakable lecture? no. sitting over there, forgetting, she had let go ..... and found something ... and waking again had seen distant things in their right proportions. but leaving go, not going through life clenched, would mean losing oneself, passing through, not driving in, ceasing to affect and be affected. but the forgetfulness was itself a more real life, if it made life disappear and then show only as a manageable space and at last only as an indifferent distance ..... a game to be played, or even not played..... it meant putting life and people second; only entering life to come back again, always. this new joy of going into life, the new beauty, on everything, was the certainty of coming back....
she was forgetting something important to the day; the little volume of stories for her coat pocket. anxiety at her probable lateness tried to invade her as she made her hurried search. she beat it back and departed indifferently, shutting the door of a seedy room in a cheap boarding-house, neither hers nor another’s, a lodger’s passing abode, but holding a little table that was herself, alive with her life, and whose image sprang, set for the day, centrally into the background of her thoughts as she ran wondering if there were time for breakfast, down to the dining-room. st. pancras clock struck nine as she poured out her tea. mr. shatov followed up his greeting with an immediate plunge into unfamiliar speech which she realized, in the midst of her wonderment over mr. lahitte’s presence at early breakfast, was addressed to herself.
she responded absently, standing at the tea-tray with her toast.
“you do not take your fish? ah, it is a pity. it is true it has stood since half-nine.”
“asseyez-vous, mademoiselle. i find; the breakfast hour; charming. at this hour one always is, or should be; gay.”
“mps; if there is time; yes, sunday breakfast.”
“still you are gay. that is good. we will not allow philosophy; to darken; these most happy few moments.”
“there are certain limits to cheerfulness,” bellowed mr. shatov. they had had some mighty collision. she glanced round.
“none; within the purview of my modest intelligence; none. always would i rather be; a cheerful coal-heaver; than a philosopher who is learned, dull, and more depressing than the bise du nord.”
that was meant for mr. shatov! the pale sensitive features were quivering in control .... her fury changed to joy as she leapt between them murmuring reflectively out across the table that she agreed, but had met many depressing coal-heavers and knew nothing about philosophers dull or otherwise. in the ensuing comfortable dead silence she wandered away marvelling at her eloquence..... cats said that sort of thing, with disarming smiles. was that what was called sarcasm? how fearfully funny. she had been sarcastic. to a frenchman. perhaps she had learned it from him. mr. shatov overtook her as she was getting on to a ’bus at the corner.
“you do not go walkingly?” he bellowed from the pavement. poor little man; left there with his day and his loneliness till six o’clock.
“all right,” she said, jumping off, “we’ll walk. i’ll be late. i don’t mind.”
they swept quickly along, looking ahead in silence. presently he began to sing. miriam dropped her eyes to the pavement, listening. how unconsciously wise he was. how awful it would have been if she had gone on the omnibus. here he was safe, healing and forgetting. there was some truth in the frenchman’s judgment. it wasn’t that he was a dull philosopher. lahitte was utterly incapable of measuring his big sunlit mind; but there was something, in his manner, or bearing, something that many people would not like, an absence of gaiety; it was true, the frenchman’s quick eye had fastened on it. who wanted gaiety? there was a deep joyfulness in his booming song that was more than gaiety. his rich dark vitality challenged the english air as he plunged along, beard first, without thoughts, his eyebrows raised in the effort of his eager singing. he was quite unaware that there was no room for singing more than below one’s breath, however quickly one walked, in the euston road in the morning.
she disposed herself to walk unconcernedly past the row of lounging overalled figures. sullen hostile staring would not satisfy them this morning. the song would rouse them to some open demonstration. they were endless; muttering motionlessly to each other in their immovable lounging. surely he must feel them. “go ’ome” she heard,
away behind.... “blooming foreigner;” close by, the tall lean swarthy fellow, with the handsome grubby face. that he must have heard. she fancied his song recoiled, and wheeled sharply back, confronting the speaker, who had just spat into the middle of the pavement.
“yes,” she said, “he is a foreigner, and he is my friend. what do you mean?” the man’s gazing face was broken up into embarrassed awkward youth. mr. shatov was safely ahead. she waited, her eyes on the black-rimmed expressionless blue of the eyes staring from above a rising flush. in a moment she would say, it is abominable and simply disgraceful, and sweep away and never come up this side of the road again. a little man was speaking at her side, his cap in his hand. they were all moving and staring. “excuse me miss,” he began again in a quiet, thick, hurrying voice, as she turned to him. “miss, we know the sight of you going up and down. miss he ain’t good enough forya.”
“oh” said miriam, the sky falling about her. she lingered a moment speechless, looking at no one, sweeping over them a general disclaiming smile, hoping she told them how mistaken they all were and how nice she thought them, she hurried away to meet mr. shatov waiting a few yards off. the darlings. in all these years of invisible going up and down...
“well?” he laughed, “what is this?”
“british workmen. i’ve been lecturing them.”
“on what?”
“in general. telling them what i think.”
“excellent. you will yet be a socialist.” they
walked on, to the sound of his resumed singing. presently the turning into wimpole street was in sight. his singing must end. dipping at a venture she stumbled upon material for his arrest.
“it it nay-cessary; deere bruthren;” she intoned dismally in a clear interval “to obtain; the mahstery; o-ver-the vile; bhuddy.”
“what? what?” he gurgled delightedly, slackening his pace. “please say this once more.”
summoning the forgotten figure, straining out over the edge of the pulpit she saw that there was more than the shape and sound of his abruptly ending whine. she saw the incident from mr. shatov’s point of view and stood still to laugh his laugh; but it was not her kind of joke.
“it was in a university church, presided over by a man they all say has a european reputation; it was in lent; this other man was a visitor, for lent. that was the beginning of his sermon. he began at once, with a yell, flinging half out of the pulpit, the ugliest person i have ever seen.”
“hoh,” shouted mr. shatov from the midst of immense gusts of laughter, “that is a most supreme instance of unconscious ironic commentary. but really, please you shall say this to me once more.”
if she said, you know he was quite sincere, the story would be spoiled. this was the kind of story popular people told. to be amusing must mean always to be not quite truthful. but the sound. she was longing to hear it again. turning to face the way they had come she gave herself up to howling the exhortation down the empty park-flanked vista.
“it is a chef d’?uvre,” he sighed.
he ought not to be here she irritably told herself, emerging as they turned and took the few steps to her street, tired and scattered and hopelessly late, into the forgotten chill of her day. it was all very well for him with his freedom and leisure to begin the first thing in the morning with things that belonged to the end of the day.... she took swift distracted leave of him at the corner and hurried along the length of the few houses to her destination. turning remorsefully at the doorstep to smile her farewell, she saw the hurrying form of mr. hancock crossing the road with grave appraising glance upon the strange figure bowing towards her bareheaded in the wind from the top of the street. he had seen her loitering, standing still, had heard her howls. mercifully the door opened behind her, and she fled within .... the corner of the very street that made him, more than any other street, look foreign, and, in the distance, disgraceful......
for days she read the first two stories in the little book, carrying it about with her, uneasy amongst her letters and ledgers unless it were in sight. the project of translation vanished in an entranced consideration at close quarters of some strange quality coming each time from the printed page. she could not seize or name it. both stories were sad, with an unmitigated relentless sadness, casting a shadow over the spectacle of life. but some spell in their weaving, something abrupt and strangely alive, remaining alive, in the text, made a beauty that outlived the sadness. they were beautiful.
english people would not think so. they would only see tragedy of a kind that did not occur in the society they knew. they would consider andrayeff a morbid foreigner, and a liking for the stories an unhealthy pose. very well. it was an unhealthy pose. the strange beauty in the well known sentences that yet were every time fresh and surprising, was an unshareable secret. meanwhile the presence of the little book exorcised the everyday sense of the winding off of days in an elaborate unchanging circle of toil.
to michael shatov she poured out incoherent enthusiasm. translate, translate, he cried; and when she assured him that no one would want to read, he said, each time, no matter; this work will be good for you. but when at last suddenly in the middle of a busy morning, she began turning into rounded english words the thorny german text, she eluded his enquiries and hid the book and all signs of her work even from herself. writing she forgot, and did not see the pages. the moment she saw them, there was a sort of half-shame in their exposure, even to the light of day. and always in transcribing them a sense of guilt. not, she was sure, a conviction of mis-spending her employer’s time. had not they agreed in response to her graceless demands in the course of that first realisation of the undeveloping nature of her employments, that she should use chance intervals of leisure on work of her own? but even abusing this privilege, writing sudden long absorbing letters in the best part of the morning with urgent business waiting all round her, had brought no feeling of
guilt; only a bright enclosing sense of dissipation; a sort of spreading, to be justified by the shortness of her leisure, of its wild free quality over a part of the too-long day. it was in some way from the work itself that this strange gnawing accusation came, and as strangely, each time she had fairly begun, there came, driving out the sense of guilt, an overwhelming urgency; as if she were running a race.
presently everything in her life existed only for the sake of the increasing bunch of pencilled half-sheets distributed between the leaves of her roomy blotter. she thanked her circumstances, into whose shape this secret adventure had stolen unobserved and sunk, leaving the surface unchanged, and finding, ready for its sustaining, an energy her daily work had never tapped, from the depth of her heart. in the evenings she put away the thought of her pages lest she could find herself speaking of them to mr. shatov.
but they would arrive suddenly in her mind, thrilling her into animation, lighting up some remote part of her consciousness from which would come pell-mell, emphatic and incoherently eloquent, statements to which she listened eagerly, mr. shatov, too, reduced to a strangely silenced listener, and dropping presently off along some single side issue, she would be driven back by the sheer pain of the effort of contraction, and would impatiently bring the sitting to an end and seek solitude. it was as if she were confronted by some deeper convinced self who did, unknown to her, take sides on things, both sides, with equal emphasis, impartially,
but with a passion that left her in an enhancement of longing to discover the secret of its nature. for the rest of the evening this strange self seemed to hover about her, holding her in a serenity undisturbed by reflection.
sometimes the memory of her work would leap out when a conversation was flagging, and lift her as she sat inert, to a distance whence the dulled expiring thread showed suddenly glowing, looping forward into an endless bright pattern interminably animated by the changing lights of fresh inflowing thoughts. during the engrossing incidents of her day’s work she forgot them completely, but in every interval they were there; or not there; she had dreamed them....
with each fresh attack on the text, the sense of guilt grew stronger; falling upon her the moment, having read the page of german, she set to work to apply the discoveries she had made. it was as if these discoveries were the winning, through some inborn trick of intelligence not her own by right of any process of application or of discipline, of an unfair advantage. she sought within her for a memory that might explain the acquisition of the right of escape into this life within, outside, securely away from, the life of everyday. the school memories that revived in her dealings with her sentences were the best, the most secret and the happiest, the strands where the struggle to acquire had been all a painless interested adventuring. the use of this strange faculty, so swift in discovery, so relentless in criticism, giving birth, as one by one the motley of truths urging its blind movements, came
recognizably into view, to such a fascinating game of acceptance and fresh trial, produced in the long run when the full balance was struck, an overweight of joy bought without price.
there was no longer unalleviated pain in the first attack on a fresh stretch of the text. the knowledge that it could by three stages, laborious but unchanging and certain in their operation, reach a life of its own, the same in its whole effect, and yet in each detail so different to the original, radiated joy through the whole slow process. it was such a glad adventure, to get down on the page with a blunt stump of pencil in quivering swift thrilled fingers the whole unwieldy literal presentation, to contemplate, plunging thus roughshod from language, to language, the strange lights shed in turn upon each, the revelation of mutually enclosed inexpandible meanings, insoluble antagonisms of thought and experience, flowing upon the surface of a stream where both were one; to see, through the shapeless mass the approaching miracle of shape and meaning.
the vast entertainment of this first headlong ramble down the page left an enlivenment with which to face the dark length of the second journey, its separate single efforts of concentration, the recurring conviction of the insuperability of barriers, the increasing list of discarded attempts, the intervals of hours of interruption, teased by problems that dissolved into meaninglessness, and emerged more than ever densely obstructive, the sudden almost ironically cheerful simultaneous arrival of several passable solutions; the temptation to use them, driven off by the wretchedness
accompanying the experiment of placing them even in imagination upon the page, and at last the snap of relinquishment, the plunge down into oblivion of everything but the object of contemplation, perhaps ill-sustained and fruitful only of a fury of irritated exhaustion, postponing further effort, or through the entertaining distraction of a sudden irrelevant play of light, turned to an outbranching series of mental escapades, leading, on emergence, to a hurried scribbling, on fresh pages, of statements which proved when read later with clues and links forgotten, unintelligible; but leading always, whether directly in one swift movement of seizure, or only at the end of protracted divings, to the return, with the shining fragment, whose safe placing within the text made the pages, gathered up in an energy flowing forward transformingly through the interval, towards the next opportunity of attack, electric within her hands.
the serene third passage, the original banished in the comforting certainty that the whole of it was represented, the freedom to handle until the jagged parts were wrought into a pliable whole, relieved the pressure of the haunting sense of trespass, and when all was complete it vanished into peace and a strange unimpatient curiosity and interest. she read from an immense distance. the story was turned away from her towards people who were waiting to read and share what she felt as she read. it was no longer even partly hers; yet the thing that held it together in its english dress was herself, it had her expression, as a portrait would have, so that by no one in her sight or within range of any
chance meeting with herself might it ever be contemplated. and for herself it was changed. coming between her and the immediate grasp of the text were stirring memories; the history of her labour was written between the lines; and strangely, moving within the whole, was the record of the months since christmas. on every page a day or group of days. it was a diary.... within it were incidents that for a while had dimmed the whole fabric to indifference. and passages stood out, recalling, together with the memory of overcoming their difficulty, the dissolution of annoyances, the surprised arrival on the far side of overwhelming angers....
the second story lay untouched, wrapt in its magic. contemplating the way, with its difference, it enhanced the first and was enhanced by it, she longed to see the two side by side and found, while she hesitated before the slow scattering process of translation, a third that set her headlong at work towards the perfect finished group. there was no weariness in this second stretch of labour. behind her lay the first story, a rampart, of achievement and promise, and ahead, calling her on, the one that was yet to be attempted, difficult and strange, a little thread of story upon a background of dark thoughts, like a voice heard through a storm. even the heaviest parts of the afternoon could be used, in an engrossed forgetfulness of time and place. time pressed. the year was widening and lifting too rapidly towards the heights of june when everything but the green world, fresh gleaming in parks and squares through the london swelter,
sweeping with the tones of spring and summer mingled amongst the changing trees, towards september, would fade from her grasp and disappear.
