Miriam ran upstairs narrowly ahead of her thoughts. In the small enclosure of her room they surged about her, gathering power from the familiar objects silently waiting to share her astounded contemplation of the fresh material. She swept joyfully about the room ducking and doubling to avoid arrest until she should have discovered some engrossing occupation. But in the instant’s pause at each eagerly opened drawer and cupboard, her mind threw up images. It was useless. There was no escape up here. Pelted from within and without, she paused in laughter with clasped restraining hands ..... the rest of the evening must be spent with people ... the nearest; the Baileys; she would go down into the dining-room and be charming with the Baileys until to-morrow’s busy thoughtless hours were in sight. Half-way downstairs she remembered that the forms waiting below, for so long unnoticed and unpondered, might be surprised, perhaps affronted by her sudden interested reappearance. She rushed on. She could break through that barrier. Mrs.
Bailey’s quiet withholding dignity would end in delight over a shared gay acknowledgment that her house was looking up.

She opened the dining-room door, facing in advance the family gathered at needlework under the gaslight, an island group in the waste of dreary increasing shabbiness .... she would ask some question, apologising for disturbing them. The room seemed empty; the gas was turned dismally low. Only one light was on, the once new, drearily hopeful incandescent burner. Its broken mantle shed a ghastly bluish-white glare over the dead fern in the centre of the table and left the further parts of the room in obscurity. But there was someone there; a man, sitting perched on the sofa-head, and beyond him someone sitting on the sofa. She came forward into silence. They made no movement; boarders, people she did not know, stupefied by their endurance of the dreariness of the room. She crossed to the fireside and stood looking at the clock-face. The clock was not going. “Are you wanting the real Greenwich, Miss Henderson?” She turned, ashamed of her mean revival of interest in a world from which she had turned away, to observe the woman who had found possible a friendly relationship with Mr. Gunner. “Oh yes I do,” she answered hurriedly, carefully avoiding the meeting of eyes that would call forth his numb clucking laughter. But she was looking into the eyes of Mrs. Bailey..... Sitting tucked neatly into the sofa corner, with clasped hands, her shabbiness veiled by the dim light, she appeared to be smiling a far-away welcome from a face that shone rounded and
rosy in the gloom. She was neither vexed nor pleased. She was far away, and Mr. Gunner went on conducting the interview. He was speaking again, with his watch in his hand. He, having evidently become a sort of intimate of the Baileys, was of course despising her for her aloofness during the bad period. She paid no heed to his words, remaining engrossed in Mrs. Bailey’s curious still manner, her strange unwonted air of having no part in what was going on.

She sought about for some question to justify her presence and perhaps break the spell, and recovered a memory of the kind of enquiry used by boarders to sustain their times of association with Mrs. Bailey. In reply to her announcement that she had come down to ask the best way of getting to Covent Garden early in the morning Mrs. Bailey sat forward as if for conversation. The spell was partly broken, but Miriam hardly recognised the smooth dreamy voice in which Mrs. Bailey echoed the question, and moved about the room enlarging on her imaginary enterprise, struggling against the humiliation of being aware of Mr. Gunner’s watchfulness, trying to recover the mood in which she had come down and to drive the message of its gaiety through Mrs. Bailey’s detachment. She found herself at the end of her tirade, standing once more facing the group on the sofa; startled by their united appearance of kindly, smiling, patient, almost patronising tolerance. Lurking behind it was some kind of amusement. She had been an awkward fool, rushing in, seeing nothing. They had been discussing business
together, the eternal difficulties of the house. Mr. Gunner was behind it all now, intimate and helpful and she had come selfishly in, interrupting. Mrs. Bailey had the right to display indifference to her assumption that anything she chose to present should receive her undivided attention; and she had not displayed indifference. If Mr. Gunner had not been there she would have been her old self. There they sat, together, frustrating her. Angered by the pressure of her desire for reinstatement she crashed against their quietly smiling resistance. “Have I been interrupting you?”

“No, young lady; certainly not,” said Mrs. Bailey in her usual manner, brushing at her skirt.

“I believe I have,” smiled Miriam obstinately.

Mr. Gunner smiled serenely back at her. There was something extraordinary in such a smile coming from him. His stupid raillery was there, but behind it was a modest confidence.

“No,” he said gently. “I was only trying to demonstrate to Mrs. Bailey the bi-nomial theorem.”

They did not want her to go away. The room was freely hers. She moved away from them, wandering about in it. It was full, just beyond the veil of its hushed desolation, of bright light; thronging with scenes ranged in her memory. All the people in them were away somewhere living their lives; they had come out of lives into the strange, lifeless, suspended atmosphere of the house. She had felt that they were nothing but a part of its suspension,
that behind their extraordinary secretive talkative openness there was nothing, no personal interest or wonder, no personality, only frozen wary secretiveness. And they had lives and had gone back into them or forward to them. Perhaps Mrs. Bailey and Mr. Gunner had always realised this ... always seen them as people with other lives, not ghosts, frozen before they came, or unfortunates coming inevitably to this house rather than to any other, to pass on, frozen for life, by their very passage through its atmosphere.... There had been the Canadians and the foreigners, unconscious of the atmosphere; free and active in it. Perhaps because they really went to Covent Garden and Petticoat Lane and Saint Paul’s.... There’s not many stays ’ere long; them as stays, stays always. A man writing; pleased with making a single phrase stand for a description of a third-rate boarding-house, not seeing that it turned him into a third-rate boarding-house.... Stays always; always. But that meant boarders; perhaps only those boarders who did nothing at all but live in the house, waiting for their food; “human odds and ends” ....... literary talk, the need for phrases.

These afterthoughts always came, answering the man’s phrase; but they had not prevented his description from coming up always now together with any thoughts about the house. There was a truth in it, but not anything of the whole truth. It was like a photograph ..... it made you see the slatternly servant and the house and the dreadful looking people going in and out. Clever phrases
that make you see things by a deliberate arrangement, leave an impression that is false to life. But men do see life in this way, disposing of things and rushing on with their talk; they think like that, all their thoughts false to life; everything neatly described in single phrases that are not true. Starting with a false statement they go on piling up their books. That man never saw how extraordinary it was that there should be anybody, waiting for anything. But why did their clever phrases keep on coming up in one’s mind?

Smitten suddenly when she stood still to face her question, by a sense of the silence of the room, she recognised that they were not waiting at all for her to make a party there. They wanted to go on with their talk. They had not merely been sitting there in council at the heart of the gloom because the arrival of new boarders was beginning to lift it. They had sat like that many times before. They were grouped together between her and her old standing in the house, and not only they, but life, going, at this moment, on and on. They did not know, life did not know, what she was going to prove. They did not know why she had come down. She could not go back again without driving home her proof. It was here the remainder of the evening must be passed, standing on guard before its earlier part, strung by it to an animation that would satisfy Mrs. Bailey and restore to herself the place she had held in the house at the time when her life there had not been a shapeless going on and on. The shapelessness had gone on too long. Mrs. Bailey had been aware of it, even in her
estrangement. But she could be made to feel that she had been mistaken. Looked back upon now, the interval showed bright with things that would appear to Mrs. Bailey as right and wonderful life; they were wonderful now, linked up with the wonder of this evening, and could be discussed with her, now that it was again miraculously certain they were not all there was.

But Mr. Gunner was still there, perched stolidly in the way. In the old days antagonism and some hidden fear there was in his dislike of her, would have served to drive him away. But now he was immovable; and felt, or for some reason thought he felt, no antagonism. Perhaps he and Mrs. Bailey had discussed her together. In this intolerable thought she moved towards the sofa with the desperate intention of sitting intimately down at Mrs. Bailey’s side and beginning somehow, no matter how, to talk in a way that must in the end send him away. “There’s a new comet,” she said violently. They looked up simultaneously into her face, each of their faces wearing a kind, veiled, unanimous patience. Mrs. Bailey held her smile and seemed about to speak; but she sat back resuming her dreamy composure as Mr. Gunner taking out his notebook cheerfully said:

“If you’ll give me his name and address we’ll take the earliest opportunity of paying a call.”

Mrs. Bailey was pleading for indulgence of her failure to cover and distribute this jest in her usual way. But she was ready now for a seated confabulation. But he would stay, permitted by
her, immovable, slashing across their talk with his unfailing snigger, unreproved.

“All sorts of people are staying up to see it; I suppose one ought,” Miriam said cheerfully. She could go upstairs and think about the comet. She went away, smiling back her response to Mrs. Bailey’s awakening smile.

Her starlit window suggested the many watchers. Perhaps he would be watching? But if he had seen no papers on the way from Russia he might not have heard of it. It would be something to mention to-morrow. But then one would have to confess that one had not watched. She opened her window and looked out. It was a warm night; but perhaps this was not the right part of the sky. The sky looked intelligent. She sat in front of the window. Very soon now it would not be too early to light the gas and go to bed.

No one had ever seen a comet rushing through space. There was nothing to look for. Only people who knew the whole map of the sky would recognise the presence of the comet.... But there was a sort of calming joy in watching even a small piece of a sky that others were watching too; it was one’s own sky because one was a human being. Knowing of the sky and even very ignorantly a little of the things that made its effects, gave the most quiet sense of being human; and a sense of other human beings, not as separate disturbing personalities, but as sky-watchers..... “Looking at the stars one feels the infinite pettiness of mundane affairs. I am perpetually astonished by the misapplication of the term infinite. How, for
instance, can one thing be said to be infinitely smaller than another?” He had always objected only to the inaccuracy, not to the dreary-weary sentiment. Sic transit. Almost everyone, even people who liked looking at the night-sky seemed to feel that, in the end. How do they get this kind of impression? If the stars are sublime, why should the earth be therefore petty? It is part of a sublime system. If the earth is to be called petty, then the stars must be called petty too. They may not even be inhabited. Perhaps they mean the movement of the vast system going on for ever, while men die. The indestructibility of matter. But if matter is indestructible, it is not what the people who use the phrase mean by matter. If matter is not conscious, man is more than matter. If a small, no matter how small, conscious thing is called petty in comparison with big no matter how big unconscious things, everything is made a question of size, which is absurd. But all these people think that consciousness dies......

The quiet forgotten sky was there again; intelligent, blotting out unanswered questions, silently reaching down into the life that rose faintly in her to meet it, the strange mysterious life, far away below all interference, and always the same.

Teaching, being known as a teacher, had brought about Mrs. Bailey’s confident promise to the Russian student. There was no help for that. If he were cheated, it was part of the general confusion of the outside life. He also was subject to that. It would be a moment in his well-furnished life, caught up whenever his memory touched it, into the strand of
contemptible things. He would see her drifting almost submerged in the flood of débris that made up the boarding-house life, its influence not recognised in the first moments because she stood out from it, still bearing, externally, the manner of another kind of life. The other kind of life was there, but able to realise itself only when she was alone. It had been all round her, a repelling memory, just now in the dining-room .... blinding her .... making her utterly stupid .... and there they were, in another world, living their lives; their smiling patience taking its time, amused that she did not see. Of course that was what he had meant. There was no other possible meaning .... behind barred gates, closed against her, they had sat, patiently impatient with her absurdity .... Mrs. Bailey and Mr. Gunner....

He had had the clearness of vision to discover what she was ...... behind her half-dyed grey hair and terrible ill-fitting teeth. Glorious. Into the midst of her failing experiment, at the very moment when the shadow of on-coming age was making it visibly tragic, had come this man in his youth, clear-sighted and determined, seeing her as his happiness, his girl. She was a girl, modest and good.... Circumstances could do nothing. There as she stood at bay in the midst of them, the thing she believed in, her one test of everything in life, always sure of her defence and the shelter of her curious little iron strength, had come again to her herself, all her own ... it was the unasked reward of her unswerving faith. She stood decorated by a miracle.

Mrs. Bailey had triumphed; justified her everlasting confident smile.

She was enviable; her qualities blazoned by success in a competition whose judges, being blind, never failed in discovery......

But the miracle gleams only for a moment, and the personal life, no longer threading its way in a wonderful shining mysteriously continuous and decisive pattern freely in and out of the world-wide everything, is henceforth labelled and exposed, repeating until the eye wearies of its fixity, one little lustreless shape; and the outside world is left untouched and unchanged. Is it worth while? A blind end, in which death swiftly increases....... But without it, in the end, there is no shape at all?

The hour had been such a surprising success because of a smattering of knowledge: until the moment when he had said I have always from the first been interested in philosophy. Then knowing that the fascinating thing was philosophy and being ignorant of philosophy, brought the certainty of being unable to keep pace..... Philosophy had come, the strange nameless thread in the books that were not novels, with its terrible known name at last and disappeared in the same moment for ever away into the lives of people who were free to study... But if, without knowing it, one had been for so long interested in a subject, surely it gave a sort of right? Perhaps he would go on talking about philosophy without asking questions. No matter what failure lay ahead, it might be possible, even if the lessons lasted
only a little while, to find out all he knew about philosophy. It was a privilege, another of those extraordinary privileges coming suddenly and unexpectedly in strange places, books or people knowing all about things one had already become involved in without knowing when or why, people interested and attracted by a response that at first revealed no differences, so that they all in turn took one to be like themselves, and looking at life in their way. It made a relationship that was as false as it was true. What they were, they were permanently; always true to the same things. Why being so different, was one privileged to meet them? There must be some explanation. There was something that for a while attracted all kinds of utterly different people, men and women—and then something that repelled them, some sudden revelation of opposition, or absolute difference, making one appear to have been playing a part. Insincere and fickle.

What is fickleness? He is fickle, people say, with a wise smile. But one always knows quite well why people go away, and why one goes oneself. Not having the sense of fickleness probably means that one is fickle. There is something behind the accusation and the maddening smile with which it is always made, that makes you say thank heaven. People who are not what they call fickle, but always the same, are always, in the midst of their bland security, depressed about life in general, and have “a poor opinion of humanity.” “Humanity does not change,” they say. It is the same as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be. Oooo.
And now to Godthefather .... and they find even their steadfast relationships dull. They are the people who talk about “ordinary everyday life” and approve of “far horizons” and desert islands and the other side of the moon, as if they were real and wonderful and life was not. If they went there it would be the same to them; they would be just the same there; but something in the way their lives are arranged prevents them from ever suddenly meeting Mr. Shatov. They meet only each other. The men make sly horrible jokes together ..... the Greeks had only one wife; they called it monotony.

...... But I find my daily round at Wimpole Street dull. No, not dull; wrong in some way. I did not choose it; I was forced into it. I chose it; there was something there; but it has gone. If it had not gone I should never have found other things. “But you would have found something else my child.” No. I am glad it has gone. I see now what I have escaped. “But you would have developed differently and not got out of touch. People don’t if they are always together.” But that is just the dreadful thing.... Cléo de Mérode going back sometimes, with just one woman friend, to the little cabarets.... Intense sympathy with that means that one is a sort of adventuress ... the Queen can never ride on an omnibus.

Why does being free give a feeling of meanness? Being able to begin all over again, always unknown, at any moment; feeling a sort of pity and contempt for the people who can’t; and then being happy and forgetting them. But there is pain all round
it that they never know. It is only by the pain of remaining free that one can have the whole world round one all the time.... But it disappears....

No, just at the moment you are most sure that everything is over for ever, it comes again, and you cannot believe it ever disappeared. But with the little feeling of meanness; towards the people you have left and towards the new people. If you have ever failed anybody, you have no right to speak to anyone else. All these years I ought never to have spoken to anybody. “If I have shrunk unequal from one contest the joy I find in all the rest becomes mean and cowardly. I should hate myself if I then made my other friends my asylum.” Emerson would have hated me. But he thinks evil people are necessary. How is one to know whether one is really evil? Suppose one is. The Catholics believe that even the people in hell have a little relaxation now and again. Lewes said it is the relief from pain that gives you the illusion of bliss. It was cruel when she was dying; but if it is true where is the difference? Perhaps in being mean enough to take relief you don’t deserve. Can anyone be thoroughly happy and thoroughly evil?

Botheration. Some clue had been missed. There was something incomplete in the thought that had come just now and seemed so convincing. She turned back and faced the self that had said one ought to meet everything in life with one’s eyes on the sky. It had flashed in and out, between her thoughts. Now it seemed alien. Other thoughts
were coming up, the thoughts and calculations she had not meant to make, but they rushed forward, and there was something extraordinary behind them, something that was part of the sky, of her own particular sky as she knew it. She had the right to make them, having been driven away from turning them into social charm for the dining-room. Once more she turned busily to the sky, thrusting back her thoughts; but it was just the flat sky of everyday, part of London; with nothing particular to say.

Thinking it over up here, alone in the universe, could not hurt the facts. To-morrow there would be more facts. That could not be helped, unless one died in the night or the house were burned down. Facing the empty sky, sitting between it and the empty stillness of the house she felt she was beaten; too tired now to struggle against the tide of reflections she had fled downstairs to avoid......

Only this morning, it seemed days ago, coming into the hall at Wimpole Street, the holidays still about her, little changes in the house, the greetings, the busy bustling cheerfulness, the sense of fresh beginnings, all ending in that dreadful moment of realisation; being back in the smell of iodoform for another year; knowing that the holidays had changed nothing; that there was nothing in this life that could fulfil their promises; nothing but the circling pressing details, invisible in the distance, now all there, at a glance, horribly promising to fill her days and leave her for her share only tired evenings. Unpacking, the spell of sunburnt
summer-scented, country-smelling clothes, the fresh beginning in her room, one visit to an A.B.C. and the British Museum and everything would be dead again. No change at Tansley Street; through the crack in the dining-room door Mr. Rodkin and his newspapers, Mr. Gunner sitting over the empty grate waiting for nothing; Mrs. Mann standing on the hearthrug, waiting to explain away something, watching Sissie and Mrs. Bailey clear the table, with a smile fixed on her large well-made child’s face, Mr. Keppel coming out of the room with his graceful halting lounge and going on, unseeing, upstairs, upright in his shabby dreamy grey clothes as if he were walking on level ground. Lingering a moment too long, Mrs. Bailey in the hall, her excited conspirator’s smiles as she communicated the news of Mr. Rodkin’s friend and the lessons, as if nothing were changed and one were still always available for association with the house; her smiling calculating dismay at the refusal, her appeal to Mr. Rodkin, his abstracted stiff-jointed emergence into the hall with his newspaper, his brilliant-eyed, dried-up laugh, his chuckling assertion, like a lawyer, that he had promised the lessons and Shatov must not be disappointed; the suspicion that Mrs. Bailey was passing the moments in fear of losing a well-to-do newcomer, an important person brought in by her only good boarder; the wretched sense of being caught and linked up again in the shifts and deceptions of the bankrupt house; the uselessness; the certainty that the new man, as described, would be retained only by his temporary ignorance and helplessness,
the vexatious thought of him, waiting upstairs in the drawing-room in a state of groundlessly aroused interest and anticipation, Mr. Rodkin’s irresponsible admiring spectator’s confidence as he made the introductions and vanished whilst the little dark frock-coated figure standing alone in the cold gaslight of the fireless room was still in the attitude of courteous obeisance; the happy ease of explaining to the controlledly waiting figure the impossibility of giving lessons on one’s own language without the qualification of study; his lifted head, the extraordinary gentleness of the white, tremulous, determined features, the child-like openness of the broad forehead, the brilliant gentle deprecating eyes, familiar handsome unknown kindliness gleaming out between the high arch of rich black hair and the small black sharply-pointed French beard; the change in the light of the cold room with the sound of the warm deep voice; the few well-chosen struggling words; scholarship; that strange sense that foreigners bring, of knowing and being known, but without the irony of the French or the plebeianism of Germans and Scandinavians, bringing a consciousness of being on trial, but without responsibility.....

The trial would bring exposure. Reading and discussion would reveal ignorance of English literature....

The hour of sitting accepted as a student, talking easily, the right phrases remembering themselves in French and German, would not come again; the sudden outbreak of happiness after mentioning Renan ..... how had she suddenly known that he
made the Old Testament like a newspaper? Parfaitement; j’ai toujours été fort intéressé dans la philosophie. After reading so long ago, not understanding at the time and knowing she would only remember, without words, something that had come from the pages. Perhaps that was how students learned; reading and getting only a general impression and finding thoughts and words years afterwards; but then how did they pass examinations?

For that moment they had been students together, exchanging photographs of their minds. That could not come again. It was that moment that had sent him away at the end of the lesson, plunging lightly upstairs, brumming in his deep voice, and left her singing in the drawing-room .... the best way would be to consider him as something superfluous, to be forgotten all day and presently, perhaps quite soon, to disappear altogether.... But before her exposure brought the lessons to an end and sent him away to find people who were as learned as he was, she would have heard more. To-morrow he would bring down the Spinoza book. But it was in German. They might begin with Renan in English. But that would not be reading English. He would demur and disapprove. English literature. Stopford Brooke. He would think it childish; not sceptical enough. Matthew Arnold. Emerson. Emerson would be perfect for reading; he would see that there was an English writer who knew everything. It would postpone the newspapers, and meanwhile she could find out who was Prime Minister and something about the English
system of education. He must read Emerson; one could insist that it was the purest English and the most beautiful. If he did not like it, it would prove that his idea that the Russians and the English were more alike than any other Europeans was an illusion. Emerson; and the Comet.

 

Mr. Shatov stood ceremoniously waiting and bowing as on the previous evening, a stranger again; conversational interchange was far away at the end of some chance opening that the hour might not bring. Miriam clasped her volume; she could fill the time triumphantly in correcting his accent and intonation, after a few remarks about the comet.

Confronting him she could not imagine him related to Emerson. No continental could fully appreciate Emerson; except perhaps Maeterlinck. It would have been better to try something more simple, with less depth of truth in it. Darwin or Shakespeare. But Shakespeare was poetry; he could not go about in England talking Shakespeare. And Darwin was bad, for men.

He listened in his subdued controlled way to her remark and again she saw him surrounded by his world of foreign universities and professors, and wondered for a sharp instant whether she were betraying some dreadful English, middle-class, newspaper ignorance; perhaps there were no longer any comets; they were called by some other name ... he might know whether there was still a nebular theory and whether anything more had
been done about the electrical contact of metals ... that man in the Revue des deux Mondes saying that the first outbreak of American literature was unfortunately feminine. Mill thought intuition at least as valuable as ratiocination.... Mill; he could read Mill. Emerson would be a secret attack on him, an eloquent spokesman for things no foreigner would agree with. “Ah yes,” he said thoughtfully, “I always have had great interest for astronomy, but now please tell me,” he lifted yesterday’s radiant face. Had there been yesterday that glow of crimson tie showing under the point of his black beard and the gold watch-chain across the blackness of his waistcoat? “how I shall obtain admission to the British Moozayum.”

Miriam gave instructions delightedly. Mr. Shatov hunched crookedly in his chair, his head thrown up and listening towards her, his eyebrows raised as if he were singing and on his firm small mouth the pursed look of a falsetto note. His brown eyes were filmed, staring averted, as if fixed on some far-away thing that did not move; it was like the expression in the eyes of Mr. Helsing but older and less scornful. There was no scorn at all, only a weary cynically burning knowledge, yet the eyes were wide and beautiful with youth. Yesterday’s look of age and professorship had gone; he was wearing a little short coat; in spite of the beard he was a student, only just come from being one amongst many, surrounded in the crowding sociable foreign way; it gave his whole expression a warmth; the edges of his fine soft richly-dented black hair, the contours of his pale face, the careless hunching of his
clothes seemed in a strange generous way unknown in England, at the disposal of his fellow-creatures. Only in his eyes was the contradictory lonely look of age. But when they came round to meet hers, his head still reined up and motionless, she seemed to face the chubby upright determination of a baby, and the deep melancholy in the eyes was like the melancholy of a puppy.

“Pairhaps,” he said, “one of your doctors shall sairtify me for a fit and proper person.”

Miriam stared her double stupefaction. For a moment, as if to give her time to consider his suggestion, his smile remained, still deferential but with the determined boldness of a naughty child lurking behind it; then his eyes fell, too soon to catch her answering smile. She could not, with his determined unaverted and now nervously quivering face before her, either discourage the astounding suggestion or resent his complacent possession of information about her.

“I should tell you,” he apologised gently, “that Mrs. Bailey has say me you are working in the doctors’ quarter of London.”

“They are not doctors,” said Miriam, feeling stiffly English, and in her known post as dental secretary utterly outside his world of privileged studious adventure, “and you want a householder who is known to you and not a hotel or boarding-house keeper.”

“That is very English. But no matter. Perhaps it shall be sufficient that I am graduate.”

“You could go down and see the librarian, you must write a statement.”

“That is an excellent idee.”

“I am a reader, but not a householder.”

“No matter. That is most excellent. You shall pairhaps introduce me to this gentleman. Ah, that is very good. I shall be most happy to find myself in that institution. It is one of my heartmost dreams of England to find myself in midst of all these leeter-aytchoors..... When can we go?”

There was a ring on the little finger of the hand that drew from an inner pocket a limp leather pocket-book; pale old gold curving up to a small pimple of jewels. The ringed hand moving above the dip of the double watch-chain gave to his youth a strange look of mellow wealthy middle age.

“Ah. I must write in English. Please tell me. But shall we not go at once, this evanink?”

“We can’t; the reading-room closes at eight.”

“That is very English; well; tell me what I shall write.”

Miriam watched as he wrote with a small quick smoothly moving pencil. The pale gold of the ring was finely chased. The small cluster of tiny soft-toned pearls encircling and curving up to a small point of diamond were set in a circlet of enamel, a marvellous rich deep blue. She had her Emerson ready when the writing was done.

“What is Emerson?” he enquired, sitting back to restore his book to its pocket. “I do not know this writer.” His reared head had again the look of heady singing, young, confronting everything, and with all the stored knowledge that can be
given to wealthy youth prepared to meet her precious book. If he did not like it there was something shallow in all the wonderful continental knowledge; if he found anything in it; if he understood it at all, they could meet on that one little plot of equal ground; he might even understand her carelessness about all other books.

“He is an American,” she said, desperately handing him the little green volume.

“A most nice little volume,” he demurred, “but I find it strandge that you offer me the book of an American.”

“It is the most perfect English you could have. He is a New Englander, a Bostonian; the Pilgrim Fathers; they kept up the English of our best period. The fifteenth century.”

“That is most interesting,” he said gravely, turning the precious pages. “Why have I not heard of this man? In Russia we know of course their Thoreau, he has a certain popularity amongst extremists, and I know also of course their great poet, Vitmann. I see that this is a kind of philosophical disquisitions.”

“You could not possibly have a better book for style and phraseology in English, quite apart from the meaning.”

“No,” he said, with reproachful gravity, “preciosity I cannot have.”

Miriam felt out of her depth. “Perhaps you won’t like Emerson,” she said, “but it will be good practice for you. You need not attend to the meaning.”

“Well, ach-ma, we shall try, but not this evanink;
I have headache, we shall rather talk; let us return to the soobjects we have discussed yesterday.” He rested his elbows on the table, supporting his chin on one hand, his beard askew, one eye reduced to a slit by the bulge of his pushed up cheek, his whole face suddenly pallid and heavy, sleepy-looking.

“I am most-interested in philosophy,” he said, glowering warmly through his further, wide-open eye. “It was very good to me. I found myself most excited after our talk of yesterday. I think you too were interested?”

“Yes, wasn’t it extraordinary?” Miriam paused to choose between the desire to confess her dread of confronting a full-fledged student and a silence that would let him go on talking while she contemplated a series of reflections extending forward out of sight from his surprising admission of fellowship. It was so strange, an exhilaration so deep and throwing such wide thought-inviting illumination, to discover that he had found yesterday exceptional; that he too, with all his wonderful life, found interest scattered only here and there. Meanwhile his eagerness to rekindle without fresh fuel, the glow of yesterday, confessed an immaturity that filled her with a tumult of astonished solicitude.

“You must let me correct your English to-day,” she said, busily taking him with her voice by the hand in a forward rush into the empty hour that was to test, perhaps to destroy the achievement of their first meeting. “Just now you said ‘the subjects we have discussed yesterday.’ ‘Have’ is the
indefinite past; ‘yesterday,’ as you used it, is a definite point of time; passé défini, we discussed yesterday. We have always discussed these things on Thursdays. We always discussed these things on Thursdays. Those two phrases have different meanings. The first indefinite because it suggests the discussions still going on, the second definite referring to a fixed period of past time.”

She had made her speech at the table and glanced up at him apologetically. Marvelling at her unexpected knowledge of the grammar of her own tongue, called into being she supposed by the jar of his inaccuracy, she had for a moment almost forgotten his presence.

“I perceive,” he said shifting his chin on his hand to face her fully, with bent head and moving beard-point; his voice came again as strange, from an immense distance; he was there like a ghost; “that you are in spite of your denials a most excellent institutrice. Ach-ma! My English is bad. You shall explain me all these complications of English verb-mixing; but to-night I am reeally too stupid.”

“It is all quite easy; it only appears to be difficult.”

“It shall be easy; you have, I remark, a more clear pure English than I have met; and I am very intelligent. It shall not be difficult.”

Miriam hid her laughter by gathering up one of his books with a random question. But how brave. Why should not people admit intelligence?...... It was a sort of pamphlet, in French.

“Ah, that is most interesting; you shall at once
read it. He is a most intelligent man. I have hear this lectchoor——”

“I heard, I heard,” cried Miriam.

“Yes; but excuse a moment. Really it is interstink. He is one of the most fine lecturours of Sorbonne; membre de l’Académie; the soobject is l’Attention. Ah it is better we shall speak in French.”

“Nur auf deutsch kann man gut philosophieren,” quoted Miriam disagreeing with the maxim and hoping he would not ask where she had read it.

“That is not so; that is a typical German arrogance. The French have some most distinguished p-sychologues, Taine, and more recently, Tarde. But listen.”

Miriam listened to the description of the lecture. For a while he kept to his careful slow English and her attention was divided between her growing interest in the nature of his mistakes, her desire to tell him that she had discovered that he spoke Norman English in German idiom with an intonation that she supposed must be Russian, and the fascination of watching for the fall of the dead-white, black-fringed eyelids on to the brooding face, between the framing of each sentence. When he passed into French, led by a quotation which was evidently the core of the lecture, she saw the lecturer, and his circle of students and indignantly belaboured him for making, and them for quietly listening to the assertion that it is curious that the human faculty of attention should have originated in women.

Certainly she would not read the pamphlet.
However clever the man might be, his assumptions about women made the carefully arranged and solemnly received display of research, irritatingly valueless. And Mr. Shatov seemed to agree, quite as a matter of course.... “Why should he be surprised?” she said when he turned for her approval. “How, surprised,” he asked laughing, an easy deep bass chuckle, drawing his small mouth wide and up at the corners; a row of small square even teeth shining out.

“Ach-ma,” he sighed, with shining eyes, looking happily replete, “he is a great p-sycho-physiologiste,” and passed on to eager narration of the events of his week in Paris. Listening to the strange inflections of his voice, the curiously woven argumentative sing-song tone, as if he were talking to himself, broken here and there by words thrown out with explosive vehemence, breaking defiantly short as if to crush opposition in anticipation, and then again the soft almost plaintive sing-song beginning of another sentence, Miriam presently heard him mention Max Nordau and learned that he was something more than the author of Degeneration. He had written Die Conventionellen Lügen der Kulturmenschheit, which she immediately must read. He had been to see him and found a truly marvellous white-haired old man, with eyes, alive; so young and vigorous in his enthusiasm that he made Mr. Shatov at twenty-two feel old.

After that she watched him from afar, set apart from his boyhood, alone with her twenty-five years on the borders of middle-age. There was the secret of the youthful untested look that showed in
certain poses of his mature studious head. His beard and his courtly manner and the grave balanced intelligence of his eyes might have belonged to a man of forty. Perhaps the Paris visit had been some time ago. No; he had come through France for the first time on his way to England.... She followed him, growing weary with envy, through his excursions in Paris with his father; went at last to the Louvre, mysterious grey building, heavy above a row of shops, shutting in works of “art,” in some extraordinary way understood, and known to be “good”; and woke to astonishment to find him sitting alone, his father impatiently gone back to the hotel, for an hour in motionless contemplation of the Venus, having wept at the first sight of her in the distance. The impression of the Frenchman’s lecture was driven away. All the things she had heard of on these two evenings were in the past.

He was in England now, through all the wonders of his continental life, England had beckoned him. Paris had been just a stage on his confident journey; and the first event of his London life would be Saturday’s visit to the British Museum. His eager foreign interest would carry the visit off .... and she remembered, growing in the thought suddenly animated towards his continued discourse, that she could show him the Elgin Marbles.

 

The next evening, going down to the drawing-room at the appointed time, Miriam found it empty and lit only by the reflection from the street.
Standing in the dim blue light she knew so well, she passed through a moment of wondering whether she had ever really sat talking in this room with Mr. Shatov. It seemed so long ago. His mere presence there had been strange enough; youth and knowledge and prosperity where for so long there had been nothing but the occasional presence of people who were in mysterious disgraceful difficulties, and no speech but the so quickly acrimonious interchange of those who are trying to carry things off. Perhaps he was only late. She lit the gas and leaving the door wide sat down to the piano. The loose flatly vibrating shallow tones restored her conviction that once more the house was as before, its usual intermittent set of boarders, coming punctually to meals, enduring each other downstairs in the warmth until bedtime, disappearing one by one up the unlighted stairs, having tea up here on Sundays, and for her, the freedom of the great dark house, the daily oblivion of moving about in it, the approach up the quiet endlessly dreaming old grey street in the afternoon, late at night, under all the changes of season and of weather; the empty drawing-room that was hers every Sunday morning with its piano, and always there at night within its open door, inviting her into its blue-lit stillness; her room upstairs, alive now and again under some chance spell of the weather, or some book which made her feel that any life in London would be endurable for ever that secured her room with its evening solitude, now and again the sense of strange fresh invisibly founded beginnings; often a cell of torturing mocking memories and apprehensions,
driving her down into the house to hear the dreadful voices, giving out in unchanged accents, their unchanging words and phrases.

Someone had come into the room, bringing a glow of life. She clung to her playing; he need not know that she had been waiting for him. A figure was standing almost at her side; with that voice he would certainly be musical .... the sturdiness and the plaintiveness were like the Russian symphonies; he could go to the Queen’s Hall; his being late for the lesson had introduced music.... She broke off and turned to see Sissie Bailey, waiting with sullen politeness to speak. Mr. Shatov was out. He had gone out early in the afternoon and had not been seen since. In Sissie’s sullenly worried expression Miriam read the Baileys’ fear that they had already lost hold of their helpless new boarder. She smiled her acceptance and suggested that he had met friends. Sissie remained grimly responseless and presently turned to go. Resuming her playing, Miriam wondered bitterly where he could have lingered, so easily dropping his lesson. What did it matter? Sooner or later he was bound to find interests; the sooner the better. But she could not go on playing; the room was cold and black; horribly empty and still.... Mrs. Bailey would know where he had set out to go this afternoon; she would have directed him. She played on zealously for a decent interval, closed the piano and went downstairs. In the dining-room was Sissie, alone, mending a table-cloth.

To account for her presence Miriam enquired whether Mrs. Bailey were out. “Mother’s lying
down,” said Sissie sullenly, “she’s got one of her headaches.” Miriam sympathised. “I want her to have the doctor; it’s no use going on like this.” Miriam was drawn irresistibly towards Mrs. Bailey, prostrate in her room with her headache. She went down the hall feeling herself young and full of eager strength, sinking with every step deeper and deeper into her early self; back again by Eve’s bedside at home, able to control the paroxysms of pain by holding her small head grasped in both hands; she recalled the strange persistent strength she had felt, sitting with her at night, the happiness of the moments when the feverish pain seemed to run up her own arms and Eve relaxed in relief, the beautiful unfamiliar darkness of the midnight hours, the curious sharp savour of the incomprehensible book she had read lying on the floor by the little beam of the nightlight. She could surely do something for Mrs. Bailey; meeting her thus for the first time without the barrier of conversation; at least she could pit her presence and her sympathy against the pain. She tapped at the door of the little room at the end of the passage. Presently a muffled voice sounded and she went in. A sense of release enfolded her as she closed the door of the little room; it was as if she had stepped off the edge of her life, out into the wide spaces of the world. The room was lit feebly by a small lamp turned low within its smoky chimney. Its small space was so crowded that for a moment she could make out no recognisable bedroom shape; then a figure rose and she recognised Mr. Gunner standing by a low camp bedstead. It’s Miss Henderson he
said quietly. There was a murmur from the bed and Miriam bending over it saw Mrs. Bailey’s drawn face, fever-flushed, with bright wild eyes. “We think she ought to have a doctor,” murmured Mr. Gunner. “M’m” said Miriam absently.

“Good of you,” murmured Mrs. Bailey thickly. Miriam sat down in the chair Mr. Gunner had left and felt for Mrs. Bailey’s hands. They were cold and trembling. She clasped them firmly and Mrs. Bailey sighed. “Perhaps you can persuade her,” murmured Mr. Gunner. “M’m” Miriam murmured. He crept away on tiptoe. Mrs. Bailey sighed more heavily. “Have you tried anything?” said Miriam dreamily, out into the crowded gloom.

The room was full of unsightly necessaries, all old and in various stages of dilapidation, the overflow of the materials that maintained in the rest of the house the semblance of ordered boarding-house life. But there was something vital, even cheerful in the atmosphere; conquering the oppression of the crowded space. The aversion with which she had contemplated, at a distance, the final privacies of the Baileys behind the scenes, was exorcised. In the house itself there was no life; but there was brave life battling in this room. Mrs. Bailey would have admitted her at any time, with laughing apologies. Now that her entry had been innocently achieved, she found herself rejoicing in the disorder, sharing the sense Mrs. Bailey must have, every time she retired to this lively centre, of keeping her enterprise going for yet one more day. She saw that to Mrs. Bailey the house
must appear as anything but a failure and the lack of boarders nothing but unaccountable bad luck. “A compress, or hot fomentations, hot fomentations could not do harm and they might be very good.”

“Whatever you think my dear; good of you” murmured Mrs. Bailey feebly. “Not a bit” said Miriam looking about wondering how she should carry out, in her ignorance, this mysteriously suggested practical idea. There was a small fire in the little narrow fireplace, with a hob on either side. Standing up she caught sight of a circular willow pattern sink basin with a tap above it and a cupboard below set in an alcove behind a mound of odds and ends. The room was meant for a sort of kitchen or scullery; and it had been the doctors’ only sitting-room. How had the four big tall men, with their table and all their books, managed to crowd themselves in?

In the dining-room Sissie responded with unconcealed astonishment and gratitude to Miriam’s suggestions and bustled off for the needed materials, lingering, when she brought them, to make useful suggestions, affectionately controlling Mrs. Bailey’s feeble efforts to help in the arrangements, and staying to supply Miriam’s needs, a little compact approving presence.

As long as the hot bandages were held to her head Mrs. Bailey seemed to find relief and presently began to murmur complaints of the trouble she was giving. Miriam, longing to sing, threatened to withdraw unless she would remain untroubled until she was better, or weary of the treatment.
At ten o’clock she was free from pain, but her feet and limbs were cold.

“You ought to have a pack all over,” said Miriam judicially.

“That’s what I felt when you began,” agreed Mrs. Bailey.

“Of course. It’s the even temperature. I’ve never had one, but we were all brought up homeopathically.” Sissie went away to make tea.

“Was you?” said Mrs. Bailey drawing herself into a sitting posture. Miriam launched into eager description of the little chest with its tiny bottles of pilules and tinctures and the small violet-covered book about illnesses strapped into its lid; the home-life all about her as she talked.... Belladonna; aconite; she was back amongst her earliest recollections, feeling small and swollen and feverish; Mrs. Bailey, sitting up, with her worn glad patient face seemed to her more than ever like her mother; and she could not believe that the lore of the book and the little bottles did not reside with her.

“Aconite,” said Mrs. Bailey, “that was in the stuff the doctor give me when I was so bad last year.” That was all new and modern. Mrs. Bailey must see if she could only rapidly paint them for her, the home scenes all about the room.

“They use those things in the British Pharmacop?ia, but they pile them in in bucketsful with all sorts of minerals” she said provisionally, holding to her pictures while she pondered for a
moment over the fact that she had forgotten until to-night that she was a homeopath.

Mr. Gunner came quietly in with Sissie and the tea, making a large party distributed almost invisibly in the gloom beyond the circle of dim lamplight. There was a joyful urgency of communication in the room. But the teacups were filled and passed round before the accumulated intercourse broke through the silence in a low-toned remark. It seemed to come from everyone and to bear within it all the gentle speech that had sounded since the world began; light spread outward and onward from the darkened room.

Taking her share in the remarks that followed, Miriam marvelled. Unqualified and unprepared, utterly undeserving as she felt, she was aware, within the controlled tone of her slight words, of something that moved her, as she listened, to a strange joy. It was within her, but not herself; an unknown vibrating moulding force.....

When Sissie went away with the tea-things, Mr. Gunner came to the bedside to take leave. Sitting on the edge of the bed near Miriam’s chair he bent murmuring; Miriam rose to go; Mrs. Bailey’s hand restrained her. “I think you know” whispered Mr. Gunner, “what we are to each other.” Miriam made no reply; there was a golden suffusion before her eyes, about the grey pillow. Mrs. Bailey was clutching her hand. She bent and kissed the hollow cheek, receiving on her own a quick eager mother’s kiss, and turned to offer her free hand to Mr. Gunner who painfully wrung it in both his own. Outside in the darkness
St. Pancras clock was striking. She felt a sudden sadness. What could they know of each other? What could any man and woman know of each other?

When Mr. Gunner had gone and she was alone with Mrs. Bailey, the trouble lifted. It was Mrs. Bailey who had permitted it, she who would steer and guide, and she was full of wisdom and strength. She could unerringly guide anyone through anything. But how had she arrived at permitting such an extraordinary thing?

“Poor boy,” sighed Mrs. Bailey.

“Why poor boy? Nothing of the sort,” said Miriam.

“Well, it’s a comfort to me you think that; I’ve worried meself ill over him. I’ve been keeping him off for over a twelvemonth.”

“Well, it’s all settled now so you needn’t worry any more.”

“It’s his age I look to; he’s only two and twenty,” flushed Mrs. Bailey.

“He looks older than that.”

“He does look more than his age, I allow; he never had any home; his father married a second time; he says this is the first home he’s had; he’s never been so happy.” All the time he had been halting about in the evenings in the dining-room, never going out and seeming to have nothing to do but a sort of malicious lying-in-wait to make facetious remarks, he had been feeling at home, happy at home, and growing happier and happier. Poor little man, at home in nothing but the dining-room at Tansley Street.... Mrs. Bailey.....
Was he good enough for her? She had not always liked or even approved of him.

“Well; that’s lovely. Of course he has been happy here.”

“That’s all very well for the past; but there’s many breakers ahead. He wants me to give up and have a little home of our own. But there’s my chicks. I can’t give up till they’re settled. I’ve told him that. I can’t do less than my duty by them.”

“Of course not. He’s a dear. I think he’s splendid.” But how generously glowing the struggling house seemed now; compared to a life alone, in some small small corner, with Mr. Gunner.....

“Bless ’im. He’s only a clurk, poor boy, at thirty-five weekly.”

“Of course clerks don’t make much; unless they have languages. He ought to learn one or two languages.”

“He’s not over strong. It’s not money I’m thinking of—” she flushed and hesitated and then said with a girlish rush, “I’d manage; once I’m free; I’d manage. I’d work my fingers to the bone for ’im.” Marvellous, for a little man who would go on writing yours of yesterday’s date to hand as per statement enclosed; nothing in his day but his satisfaction in the curves and flourishes of his handwriting ... and then home comforts, Mrs. Bailey always there, growing more worn and ill and old; an old woman before he was thirty.

“But that won’t be for a long time yet; though Polly’s doing splendid.”

“Is she?”

“Well, I oughtn’t to boast. But they’ve wrote me she’s to be pupil-teacher next year.”

“Polly?”

“Polly,” bridled Mrs. Bailey and laughed with shining eyes. “The chahld’s not turned fifteen yet, dear little woman blesser.” Miriam winced; poor little Polly Bailey, to die so soon, without knowing it.

“Oh, that’s magnificent.” Perhaps it was magnificent. Perhaps a Bailey would not feel cheated and helpless. Polly would be a pupil-teacher, perkily remaining her same self, a miniature of Mrs. Bailey, already full of amused mysterious knowledge and equal to every occasion.

Mrs. Bailey smiled shyly, “She’s like her poor mother; she’s got a will of her own.” Miriam sat at ease within the tide .... where did women find the insight into personality that gave them such extraordinary prophetic power? She herself had not an atom of it. Perhaps it was matronhood; and Mary hid all these things in her heart. No; aunts often had it, even more than matrons; Mrs. Bailey was so splendidly controlled that she was an aunt as well as a mother to the children. She contemplated the sharply ravaged little head, reared and smiling above the billows of what people called ‘misfortunes’ by her conscious and self-confessed strength of will; yes, and unconscious fairness and generosity, reflected Miriam and an immovable sense of justice. All these years of scraping and contrivance had not corrupted Mrs. Bailey; she ought to be a judge, and not Mr.
Gunner’s general servant.... Justice is a woman; blindfolded; seeing from the inside and not led away by appearances; men invent systems of ethics, but they cannot weigh personality; they have no individuality, only conformity or non-conformity to abstract systems; yet it was impossible to acknowledge the power of a woman, of any woman she had ever known, without becoming a slave; or to associate with one, except in a time of trouble; but in her deliberate excursion into this little room she was free; all her life lay far away, basking in freedom; spreading out and out, illimitable; each space and part a full cup on which no hand might be laid .... that little man was just a curious foreign voice, which would presently rouse her impatience .... and just now he had seemed so near.... Was she looking at him with Mrs. Bailey’s eyes? Mrs. Bailey would say, “oh yes, I think he’s a very nice little man.” Beyond his distinction as a well-to-do boarder, he would have, in her eyes, nothing to single him out; she would respect his scholarship, but regarding it as a quality peculiar to certain men; and without the knowledge that it was in part an accident of circumstance. She would see beyond it; she would never be prostrate before it.

But the distant vision of the free life was not Mrs. Bailey’s vision; there was something there she could not be made to understand, and would in any way there were words that tried to express it, certainly not approve. Yet why did it come so strongly here in her room? The sense of it was here, somewhere in their intercourse, but she was
unconscious of it..... Miriam plumbed about in the clear centre—where without will or plan or any shapely endeavour in her life, she was yet so strangely accepted and indulged. Mrs. Bailey was glancing back at her from the depths of her abode, her face busy in control of the rills of laughter sparkling in her eyes and keeping, Miriam knew, as she moved, hovering, and saw the fostering light they shed upon the world, perpetual holiday; the reassuring inexhaustible substance of Mrs. Bailey’s being.

“It’s Sissie I worry about,” said Mrs. Bailey. Miriam attended curiously. “She’s like her dear father; keeps herself to herself and goes on; she’s a splendid little woman in the house; but I feel she ought to be doing something more.”

“She’s awfully capable” said Miriam.

“She is. There’s nothing she can’t turn her hand to. She’ll have the lock off a door and mend it and put it on again and put in a pane of glass neater than a workman and no mess or fuss.” Miriam sat astonished before the expanding accumulation of qualities.

“I don’t know how I should spare her; but she’s not satisfied here; I’ve been wondering if I couldn’t manage to put her into the typing.”

“There isn’t much prospect there” recited Miriam, “the supply is bigger than the demand.”

“That is so” assented Mrs. Bailey; “but I see it like this; where there’s a will there’s a way and one has to make a beginning.” Mrs. Bailey had made up her mind. Quite soon Sissie would know
typewriting; a marketable accomplishment; she would rank higher in the world than a dental secretary; a lady typist with a knowledge of French. That would be her status in an index. No doubt in time she would learn shorthand. She would go capably about, proud of her profession; with a home to live in, comfortably well off on fifteen shillings a week; one of the increasing army of confident illiterate young women in the city; no, Sissie would not be showy; she would bring life into some office, amongst men as illiterate as herself; as soon as she had picked up “yours to hand” she would be reliable and valuable..... Sissie, with a home, and without putting forth any particular effort, would have a place in the world.....

“I’ll make some inquiries” said Miriam cheerfully. Mrs. Bailey thanked her with weary eagerness; she was flushed and flagging; the evening’s work was being cancelled by the fascination which had allowed her to go on talking. She admitted a return of her neuralgia and Miriam, remorseful and weary, made her lie down again. She looked dreadfully ill; like someone else; she would go off to sleep looking like someone else, or lie until the morning, with plans going round and round in her head and get up, managing to be herself until breakfast was over. But all the time, she had a house to be in. She was Mrs. Bailey; a recognised centre. Miriam sat alone, the now familiar little room added to the strange collection of her inexplicable life; its lamplit walls were dear to her, with the extraordinary same dearness of all walls
seen in tranquillity. She seemed to be responding to their gaze. Had she answered Mrs. Bailey’s murmur about going to bed? It seemed so long ago. She sat until the lamp began to fail and Mrs. Bailey appeared to be going to sleep. She crept out at last into the fresh still darkness of the sleeping house. On the first floor there was a glimmer of blue light. It was the street lamp shining in through Mr. Shatov’s wide-open empty room. When she reached her own room she found that it was one o’clock. Already he had found his way to some horrible haunt. She wrapped her evening round her, parrying the thought of him. There should be no lesson to-morrow. She would be out, having left no message.

 

When she came in the next evening he was in the hall. He came forward with his bearded courteous emphatically sweeping foreign bow; a foreign professor bowing to an audience he was about to address. Bitte verzeihen Sie, he began, his rich low tones a little breathless; the gong blared forth just behind him; he stood rooted, holding her with respectful melancholy gaze as his lips went on forming their German sentences. The clangour died down; people were coming downstairs drawing Miriam’s gaze as he moved from their pathway into the dining-room, still facing her with the end of his little speech lingering nervously on his features. He was in his frock-coat and shone richly black and white under the direct lamplight; he was even more handsome than she had thought,
solidly beautiful, glowing in shapely movement as he stood still and gestureless before her, set off by the shapelessly moving, dinner drawn forms passing into the dining-room. She smiled in response to whatever he may have said and wondered, having apologised for yesterday, in what way he would announce to her the outside engagement for this evening for which he was so shiningly prepared. “Zo,” he said gravely, “if you are now free, I will almost immediately come up; we shall not wait till eight o’clock.” Miriam bowed in response to the sweeping obeisance with which he turned into the dining-room, and ran upstairs. He came up before the end of the first course, before she had had time to test in the large overmantel the shape of her hair that had seemed in the little mirror upstairs, accidentally good, quite like the hair of someone who mysteriously knew how to get good effects.

“I have been sleeping,” he said in wide cheerful tones as he crossed the room, “all day until now. I am a little stupid; but I have very many things to say you. First I must say you,” he said more gravely and stood arrested with his coat tails in his hands, in front of the chair opposite to hers at a little table, “that your Emerson is most-wonderful.”

Miriam could not believe she had heard the deep-toned emphatic words. She stared stupidly at his unconscious thoughtful brow; for a strange moment feeling her own thoughts and her own outlook behind it. She felt an instant’s pang of disappointment; the fine brow had lost something,
seemed familiar, almost homely. But an immense relief was surging through her. “No—Ree—ally, most-wonderful,” he reiterated with almost reproachful emphasis, sitting down with his head eagerly forward between his shoulders, waiting for her response. “Yes, isn’t he?” she said encouragingly and waited in a dream while he sat back and drew little volumes from his pocket, his white eyelids downcast below his frowning brow. Would he qualify his praise? Had he read enough to come upon any of the chills and contradictions? However this might be, Emerson had made upon this scholarly foreigner, groping in him with his scanty outfit of language, an overwhelming impression. Her own lonely overwhelming impression was justified. The eyes came up again, gravely earnest. “No,” he said, “I find it most difficult to express the profound impression this reading have made on me.”

“He isn’t a bit original,” said Miriam surprised by her unpremeditated conclusion, “when you read him you feel as if you were following your own thoughts.”

“That is so; he is not himself philosophe; I would call him rather, poète; a most remarkable quality of English, great dignity and with at the same time a most perfect simplicity.”

“He understands everything; since I have had that book I have not wanted to read anything else .... except Maeterlinck” she murmured in afterthought, “and in a way he is the same.”

“I do not know this writer” said Mr. Shatov, “and what you say is perhaps not quite good. But
in a manner I can have some sympa-thaytic apprysiacion with this remark. I have read yesterday the whole day; on different omnibuses. Ah. It was for me most-wonderful.”

“Well, I always feel, all the time, all day, that if people would only read Emerson they would understand, and not be like they are, and that the only way to make them understand what one means would be reading pieces of Emerson.”

“That is true; why should you not do it?”

“Quotations are feeble; you always regret making them.”

“No; I do not agree,” said Mr. Shatov devoutly smiling, “you are wrong.”

“Oh, but think of the awful people who quote Shakespeare.”

“Ach-ma. People are, in general, silly. But I must tell you you should not cease to read until you shall have read at least some Russian writers. If you possess sensibility for language you shall find that Russian is most-beautiful; it is perhaps the most beautiful European language; it is, indubitably, the most rich.”

“It can’t be richer than English.”

“Certainly, it is richer than English. I shall prove this to you, even with dictionary. You shall find that it occur, over and over, that where in English is one word, in Russian is six or seven different, all synonyms, but all with most delicate individual shades of nuance .... the abstractive expression is there, as in all civilised European languages, but there is also in Russian the most immense variety of natural expressions, coming
forth from the strong feeling of the Russian nature to all these surrounding influences; each word opens to a whole aper?u in this sort .... and what is most significant is, the great richness, in Russia, of the people-language; there is no other people-language similar; there is in no one language so immense a variety of tender diminutives and intimate expressions of all natural things. None is so rich in sound or so marvellously powerfully colourful..... That is Russian. Part of the reason is no doubt to find in the immense paysage; Russia is zo vast; it is inconceivable for any non-Russian. There is also the ethnological explanation, the immense vigour of the people.”

Miriam went forward in a dream. As Mr. Shatov’s voice went on, she forgot everything but the need to struggle to the uttermost against the quiet strange attack upon English; the double line of evidence seemed so convincing and was for the present unanswerable from any part of her small store of knowledge; but there must be an answer; meantime the suggestion that the immense range of English was partly due to its unrivalled collection of technical terms, derived from English science, commerce, sports, “all the practical life-man?uvres” promised vibrating reflection, later.

But somewhere outside her resentful indignation, she found herself reaching forward unresentfully towards something very far-off, and as the voice went on, she felt the touch of a new strange presence in her Europe. She listened, watching intently, far-off, hearing now only a voice, moving on, without connected meaning.... The strange
thing that had touched her was somewhere within the voice; the sound of Russia. So much more strange, so much wider and deeper than the sound of German or French or any of the many tongues she had heard in this house, the inpouring impression was yet not alien. It was not foreign. There was no barrier between the life in it and the sense of life that came from within. It expressed that sense; in the rich, deep various sound and colour of its inflections, in the strange abruptly controlled shapeliness of the phrases of tone carrying the whole along, the voice was the very quality he had described, here, alive: about her in the room. It was, she now suddenly heard, the disarming, unforeign thing in the voice of kind commercial little Mr. Rodkin. Then there was an answer. There was something in common between English and this strange language that stood alone in Europe. She came back and awoke to the moment, weary. Mr. Shatov had not noticed her absence. He was talking about Russia. Unwillingly she gave her flagging attention to the Russia already in her mind; a strip of silent sunlit snow, just below Finland, St. Petersburg in the midst of it, rounded squat square white architecture piled solidly beneath a brilliant sky, low sledges smoothly gliding, drawn by three horses, bell-spanned, running wildly abreast, along the silent streets or out into the deeper silence of dark, snow-clad wolf-haunted forests that stretched indefinitely down the map; and listened as he drew swift pictures, now north, now south. Vast outlines emerged faintly, and here and there a patch remained, vivid. She saw
the white nights of the northern winter, felt the breaking through of spring in a single day. Whilst she lingered at Easter festivals in churches, all rich deep colour blazing softly through clouds of incense, and imagined the mighty sound of Russian singing, she was carried away to villages scattered amongst great tracts of forest, unimaginable distances of forest, the vast forests of Germany small and homely ..... each village a brilliant miniature of Russia, in every hut a holy image; brilliant colouring of stained carved wood, each peasant a striking picture, filling the eye in the clear light, many “most-dignified”; their garments coloured with natural dyes, “the most pure plant-stain colours,” deep and intense. She saw the colours, mat and sheenless, yet full of light, taking the light in and in, richly, and turned grievously to the poor cheap tones in all the western shops, clever shining chemical dyes, endless teasing variety, without depth or feeling, cheating the eye of life; and back again homesick to the rich tones of reality...... She passed down the winding sweep of the Volga, a consumptive seeking health, and out into the southern plains where wild horses roamed at large, and stayed at a lodge facing towards miles and miles of shallow salt water, sea-gull haunted, and dotted with floating islands of reeds, so matted and interwoven that one could get out from the little shallow leaky fishing-boat and walk upon them; and over all a crystal air so life-giving that one recovered. She heard the peasants in the south singing in strong deep voices, dancing by torchlight a wild dance with a name that described the dance....

Throughout the recital were vivid words, each a picture of the thing it expressed. She would never forget them. Russia was recognisable. So was every language .... but no foreign sound had brought her such an effect of strength and musical beauty and expressiveness combined. That was it. It was the strange number of things that were together in Russian that was so wonderful. In the end, back again in England, sitting in the cold dilapidated room before the table of little books, weary, opposite Mr. Shatov comfortably groaning and stretching, his eyes already brooding in pursuit of something that would presently turn into speech, she struggled feebly with a mournful uneasiness that had haunted the whole of the irrevocable expansion of her consciousness. A German, not a Russian ethnologist, and therefore without prejudice, had declared that the Russians were the strongest kinetic force in Europe. He proved himself disinterested by saying that the English came next. The English were “simple and fundamentally sound.” Not intelligent; but healthy in will, which the Russians were not. Then why were the Russians more forceful? What was kinetic force? And ... mystery .... the Russians themselves knew what they were like. “There is in Russia except in the governing and bourgeois classes almost no hypocrisy.” What was kinetic... And religion was an “actual force” in Russia! “What is ki——”

“Ah but you shall at least read some of our great Russian authors .... at least Tourgainyeff and Tolstoy.”

“Of course I have heard of Tolstoy.”

“Ah, but you shall read. He has a most profound knowledge of human psychology; the most marvellous touches. In that he rises to universality. Tourgainyeff is more pure Russian, less to understand outside Russia; more academical; but he shall reveal you most admirably the Russian aristocrat. He is cynic satirical.”

“Then he can’t reveal anything,” said Miriam. Here it was again; Mr. Shatov, too, took satire quite unquestioningly; thought it a sort of achievement, worthy of admiration. Perhaps if she could restrain her anger, she would hear at least in some wonderful explanatory continental phrase, what satire really was, and be able to settle with herself why she knew it was in the long run, waste of time; why the word satirist suggested someone with handsome horns and an evil clever eye and thin cold fingers. Thin. Swift was probably fearfully thin. Mr. Shatov was smiling incredulously. If he went on to explain she would miss the more important worrying thing. Novels. It was extraordinary that he should....

“I don’t care for novels... I can’t see what they are about. They seem to be an endless fuss about nothing.”

“That may apply in certain cases. But it is a too extreme statement.”

“It is extreme. Why not? How can a statement be too extreme if it is true?”

“I cannot express an opinion on English novelistic writings. But of Tolstoy it is certainly not true. No; it is not in general true that in fictional
representations there is no actuality. I have read with my first English teacher in Moscow a story of your Myne-Reade. There was in this story a Scotch captain who remained for me most typical British. He was very fine this chap. This presentation here made me the more want what I have want always since a boy; to come to England.” Was Mayne Reade a novelist? Those boys’ stories were glorious. But they were about the sea; and the fifth form ... “a noble three-bladed knife, minus the blades”.....

“There’s a thing called the Ebb-Tide,” she began, wondering how she could convey her impression of the tropical shore; but Mr. Shatov’s attention, though polite, was wandering, “I’ve read some of Gorki’s short stories,” she finished briskly. They were not novels; they were alive in some way English books were not. Perhaps all Russian books were...

“Ah Gorrrki. He is come out direct from the peasantry; very powerfully strange and rough presentations. He may be called the apostle of misère.”

... the bakery and the yard; the fighting eagles, the old man at the prow of the boat with his daughter-in-law.... All teaching something. How did people find it out?

“But really I must tell you of yesterday” said Mr. Shatov warmly. “I have made a Schach-Partei. That was for me very good. It include also a certain exploration of London. That is for me I need not say most fascinatink.” Miriam listened eagerly. The time was getting on; they
had done no work. She had not once corrected him and he was plunging into his preliminary story as if their hour had not yet begun. She was to share...

“There was on one of these many omnibuses a gentleman who tell me where in London I shall obtain a genuine coffee. Probably you know it is at this Vienna Café, in Holeborne. You do not know this place? Strange. It is quite near to you all the time. Almost at your British Museum. Ah; this gentleman has told me too a most funny story of a German who go there proudly talking English. He was waiting; ach they are very slow in this place, and at last he shouts for everyone to hear, Vaiter! Venn shall I become a cup of coffee?”

Miriam laughed her delight apprehensively. “Ah, I like very much these stories,” he was saying, his eyes dreamily absent, she feared, on a memory-vista of similar anecdotes. But in a moment he was alive again in his adventure. “It was at London Bridge. I have come all the way, walkingly, to this Café. It is a strange place. Really glahnend; Viennese; very dirrty. But coffee most excellent; just as on the Continent. You shall go there; you will see. Upstairs it is most dreadful. More dirrty; and in an intense gloom of smoke, very many men, ah they are dreadful, I could not describe to you. Like monkeys; but all in Schach-parteis. That shall be very good for me. I am most enthusiastic with this game since a boy.”

“Billiards?”

Why should he look so astonished and impatiently explain so reproachfully and indulgently? She
grasped the meaning of the movements of his hands. He was a chess-player “a game much older—uralt—and the most mental, the only true abstractive game.” How differently an English chess-player would have spoken. She regarded his eager contained liveliness. Russian chess players remained alive. Was chess mental? Pure tactics. Should she declare that chess was a dreadful boring indulgence, leading nowhere? Perhaps he would be able to show her that this was not so.... Why do the Germans call two people playing chess a chess-party? “I have met there a man, a Polish doctor. We have made party and have play until the Café close, when we go to his room and continue there to play till the morning. Ah, it was most-beautiful.”

“Had you met him before?”

“Oh no. He is in London; stewdye-ink medicine.”

“Studdying,” said Miriam impatiently, lost in incredulous contemplation. It could not be true that he had sat all night playing chess with a stranger. If it were true, they must both be quite insane ..... the door was opening. Sissie’s voice, and Mr. Shatov getting up with an eager polite smile. Footsteps crossing the room behind her; Mr. Shatov and a tall man shaking hands on the hearthrug; two inextricable voices; Mr. Shatov’s presently emerging towards her, deferentially, “I present you Dr. Veslovski.” The Polish doctor, gracefully bowing from a cold narrow height, Mr. Shatov, short, dumpy, deeply-radiant little friend, between them; making a little speech,
turning from one to the other. The Polish head was reared again on its still cold grey height; undisturbed.... Perfect. Miriam had never seen anything so perfectly beautiful. Every line of the head and face harmonious; the pointed beard finishing the lines with an expressiveness that made it also a feature, one with the rest. Even the curious long narrow capless flatly lying foreign boots, furrowed with mud-stiffened cracks, and the narrowly cut, thin, shabby grey suit shared the distinction of the motionless reined-in head. Polish beauty. If that were Polish beauty the Poles were the most beautiful people in Europe. Polish; the word suggested the effect, its smooth liquid sheen, sinuous and graceful without weakness .... the whole word was at home in the eyes; horribly beautiful, abysses of fathomless foreign ... any kind of known happenings were unthinkable behind those eyes .... yet he was here; come to play chess with Mr. Shatov who had not expected him until Sunday, but would go now immediately with her permission, to fetch his set from upstairs. She lingered as he hurried away, glancing at the little books on the table. The Emerson was not among them. The invisible motionless figure on the hearthrug had brought her a message she had forgotten in her annoyance at his intrusion. Going from the room towards his dim reflection in the mirror near the door she approached the waiting thought—Mr. Shatov’s voice broke in, talking eagerly to Mrs. Bailey on the floor below. From the landing she heard him beg that it might be some large vessel, quite voll tea;
some drapery to enfold it, and that the gazz might be left alight. They were going to play chess, through the night, in that cold room .... but the thought was gladly there. The Polish doctor’s presence had confirmed Mr. Shatov’s story. It had not been a young man’s tale to cover an escapade.