Chapter II (2)

“But you hardly know him” she exclaimed, sitting down for more leisurely contemplation.

“That is not the point” he said seriously, taking the chair on the other side of the little table. “Poor fellow, he is not long in London, and has almost no friends. He is working in abstruse researchings, needing much spendings on materials, and is threatened by his landlady to leave his apartments.”

“Did he tell you this?” said Miriam sceptically recalling the Polish head, its smooth cold perfect beauty and indifference.

“Most certainly he told me. He must immediately have ten pounds.”

“Perhaps you would not get so much,” persisted Miriam. “And suppose he does not pay it back?”

“You are mistaken. The watch, with the chain, is worth more than the double this sum.” His face expressed a grave simple finality.

“But it is a _shame_,” she cried, jealously eyeing the decoration that seemed now to have been an essential part of their many meetings. Without this mark of opulence, he would not be quite the same...

“Why a shame?” demanded Mr. Shatov, with his little abrupt snorting chuckle. “I shall again have my watch when my father shall send me the next portion of my allowance.” He was not counting on the return of the money! Next month, with his allowance, he would have the watch and forget the incident..... Wealth made life safe for him. People could be people to him; even strangers; not threats or problems. But even a wealthy Englishman would not calmly give ten pounds to a disreputable stranger ... he would suspect him even if he were not disreputable. It _might_ be true that the Pole was in honest difficulties. But it was impossible to imagine him really working at anything. Mr. Shatov did not feel this at all......

“I’m afraid I don’t know any pawn shops” she said, shrinking even from the pronunciation of the word. She scanned her London. They had always been there ... but she had never noticed or thought of them ... “I don’t remember ever having seen one; but I know you are supposed to recognise them,” here was strange useful knowledge, something picturesque floating in from somewhere ... “by three gold balls hanging outside ... I _have_ seen one” they were talking now, the Polish Doctor was fading away. “Yes ... on a bus” his wide child’s eyes were set impersonally on what she saw, “somewhere down by Ludgate Circus.”

“I will at once go there” he said sitting leisurely back with dreaming eyes and his hands thrust into his pockets.

“Oh no” she cried, thrusting off the disaster, “it would be _closed_.”

“That is bad” he reflected, “Ach, no matter. I will write to him that I come on Monday.”

“He would not get your letter until Monday.”

“That is true. I did not think of this.”

There must be pawn shops quite near; in the Tottenham Court Road. They would still be open. Not to suggest this would be to be responsible if anything happened to the Pole... Thrusting down through the numbed mass of her forgotten thoughts to the quick of her nature came the realisation that she was being tested and found wanting ... another of those moments had come round..... She glanced into the open abyss at her own form staring up from its depths, and through her brain flew, in clear record, decisive moments of the past; her self, clearly visible, clothed as she had been clothed, her poise and bearing as she had flinched and fled. Here she was, unchanged, not caring what happened to the man, so long as her evening was not disturbed ... she was a murderess. This was the hidden truth of her life. Above it her false face turned from thing to thing, happy and forgetful for years, until a moment came again to show her that she could face and let slip the risk of anything to anyone, anywhere, rather than the pain of renouncing personal realisation. Already she was moving away. A second suggestion was in her mind and she was not going to make it. She glanced enviously at the unconscious kindliness lolling in the opposite chair. It was clear to its depths; unburdened by spectres of remembered cruelty...... But there was also something else that was different .... easy circumstances; the certainty, from the beginning, of self-realisation.....

“Perhaps someone in the house could tell you.” Oh _stupidity_; blurting out _anything_ to hide behind the sound of voices.

“Possibly. But it is a delicate matter. I could not for instance mention this matter to Mrs. Bailey.”

“Do you like him? Didn’t you find him amongst those dreadful men looking like monkeys?”

“At this Vienna café. Ah indeed it is dreadful there upstairs.”

“He is very handsome.”

“The Poles are perhaps the most beautiful of European peoples. They have also _immense_ courage” ... unsuspicious thoughtfully talking face, lifting her up and out again into light and air..... “But the Pole is undoubtedly the most _treacherous_ fellow in Europe.” Grave live eyes flashed across at her, easily, moulding the lounging form into shapeliness. “He is at the same time of the most distinguished mentality.” Why should anyone help a distinguished mentality to go on being treacherous? “And in particular is this true of the Polish _Jew_. There are in all European universities amongst the very most distinguished professors and students very many Polish Jews.” Le Juif Polonais ... _The Bells_. It was strange to think of Polish Jews going on in modern everyday life...... But if Poles were so evil ... That was Dr. Veslovsky’s expression. Cold evil.

“There was an awful thing last week in Woburn Place.”

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Bailey told me about it. There was a girl who owed her landlady twenty-five shillings. She threw herself out of her bedroom window on the top floor because her landlady spoke to her about it.”

“That is _terrible_” whispered Mr. Shatov. His eyes were dark with pain; his face shrunk as if with cold. “That could _never_ happen in Russia” he said reproachfully.

“Why not?”

“No. In Russia such a thing is impossible. And in student circles most particularly. This young girl living in this neighbourhood without salary was probably some sort of student.”

“Why? She might have been a governess out of work or a poor clerk. Besides I thought people were always committing suicide in Russia.”

“That is of course a gross exaggeration. There are certainly suicides in Russia as everywhere. But in Russia suicide, which does certainly occur in abnormally high frequency amongst the young intelligentsia, arises from trouble of _spirit_. They are psychopath. There comes some spiritual crisis and--phwtt-- ... It is characteristic of the educated Slav mind to lose itself in face of abstractive insolubilities. But for need of _twenty-five shillings_. I find in this something peculiarly horrible. In midst of your English civilisation it is pure-barbaric.”

“There has not been any civilisation in the world yet. We are still all living in caves.” The quotation sounded less convincing than at Wimpole Street......

“That is too superficial. Pardon me, but it implies a too slight knowledge of what has been in the past and what still persists in various developmental stages.” Miriam felt about among the statements which occurred to her in rapid succession, all contradicting each other. Yet somebody in the world believed each one of them...... Mr. Shatov was gravely waiting, as if for her agreement with what he had just said. Far away below her clashing thoughts was something she wanted to express, something he did not know, and that yet she felt he might be able to shape for her if only she could present it. But between her and this reality was the embarrassment of a mind that could produce nothing but quotations. She had no mind of her own. It seemed to be there when she was alone; only because there was no need to express anything. In speech she could produce only things other people had said and with which she did not agree. None of them expressed the underlying thing..... Why had she not brought down Maeterlinck?

Mr. Shatov’s quiet waiting had ended in a flow of eager talk. She turned unwillingly. Even he could go on, leaving things unfinished, talking about something else...... But his mind was steady. The things that were there would not drop away. She would be able to consider them ... watching the effect of the light of other minds upon the things that floated in her own mind; so dreadfully _few_ now that he was beginning to look at them; and all ending with the images of people who had said them, or the bindings of books where she had found them set down ...... yet she felt familiar with all points of view. Every generalisation gave her the clue to the speaker’s mind .... wanting to hear no more, only to criticise what was said by pointing out, whether she agreed with it or no, the opposite point of view......

She smiled encouragingly towards his talk, hurriedly summoning an appearance of attention into her absent eyes while she contemplated his glowing pallor and the gaze of unconscious wide intelligence, shining not only towards her own, but also with such undisturbed intentness upon what he was describing. She could think later on, next year, when he had gone away leaving her to confront her world with a fresh armoury. As long as he stayed, he would be there, without effort or encouragement from her, filling her spare hours with his untired beauty, drawing her along his carefully spun English phrases, away from personal experiences, into a world going on independently of them; unaware of the many scattered interests waiting for her beyond this shabby room, and yet making them shine as he talked, newly alight with rich superfluous impersonal fascination, no longer isolated, but vivid parts of a whole, growing more and more intelligible as he carried her further and further into a life he saw so distinctly, that he made it hers, too quickly for her to keep account of the inpouring wealth.....

She beamed in spacious self-congratulation and plunged into the midst of his theme in holiday mood. She was in a theatre, without walls, her known world and all her memories spread, fanwise about her, all intent on what she saw, changing, retreating to their original form, coming forward, changing again, obliterated, and in some deep difficult way challenged to renewal. The scenes she watched opened out one behind the other in clear perspective, the earlier ones remaining visible, drawn aside into bright light as further backgrounds opened. The momentary sound of her own voice in the room encouraging his narrative, made no break; she dropped her remarks at random into his parentheses, carefully screening the bright centres as they turned one by one into living memories......

Suddenly she was back withering in the cold shabby room before the shock of his breaking off to suggest with a swift personal smile that she herself should go to Russia. For a moment she stared at him. He waited, smiling gently. It did not matter that he thought her worthy...... The conviction that she had already been to Russia, that his suggestion was foolish in its recommendation of a vast superfluous undertaking, hung like a veil between her and the experiences she now passed through in imagining herself there. The very things in the Russian student circles that had most appealed to her, would test and find her out. She would be one of those who would be mistrusted for not being sufficiently careless about her dress and hair. It would not suit her to catch up her hair with one hairpin. She would not be strong enough to study all day and half the night on bread and tea. She was sure she could not associate perpetually with men students, even living and sharing rooms with them, without the smallest flirtation. If she were wealthy like he, she would not so calmly accept having all things in common; poor she would be uneasy in dependence on other students. She sat judged. There was a quality behind all the scenes, something in the Russians that she did not possess. It was the thing that made him what he was..... It answered to a call that was being made all the time to everyone, everywhere. Yet why did so many of them _drink_?

“Well?” said Mr. Shatov. The light was going down. “_What_ is this?” he asked staring up impatiently at the lessening flame. “Ah it is simply _stupid_.” He hurried away and Miriam heard his voice shouting down to Mrs. Bailey from the staircase as he went, and presently in polite loud-toned remonstrance from the top of the basement stairs. The gas went up, higher than it had been before. It must be eleven. It was not fair to keep the gas going for two people. She must wind up the sitting and send him away.

“What a piece of English stupidity,” he bellowed gently, coming back across the room.

“I suppose she is obliged to do it” said Miriam feeling incriminated by her failure to resent the proceeding in the past.

“How _obliged_?”

“She has had an awful time. She was left penniless in Weymouth.”

“That is bad; but it is no cause for _stupidity_.”

“I know. She doesn’t understand. She managed quite well with lodgers; she will never make boarders pay. It’s no use giving her hints. The house is full of people who don’t pay their bills. There are people here who have paid nothing for eighteen months. She has even lent them money.”

“Is it possible?” he said gravely.

“And the Irish journalist _can’t_ pay. He is a home-ruler.”

“He is a most distinguished-looking man. Ah but she is _stupid_.”

“She can’t _see_” said Miriam--he was _interested_; even in _these_ things. She dropped eagerly down amongst them. The whole evening and all their earlier interchange stood far off, shedding a relieving light over the dismal details and waiting to be resumed, enriched by this sudden excursion--“that when better people come she ought to alter things. It isn’t that she would think it wrong, like the doctor who felt guilty when he bought a carriage to make people believe he had patients, though of course speculation _is_ wrong”--she felt herself moving swiftly along, her best memories with her in the cheerful ring of her voice, their quality discernible by him, a kind of reply to all he had told her--“because she believes in keeping up appearances; but she doesn’t know how to make people comfortable.” She was creating a wrong impression but with the right voice. Without Miss Scott’s suggestions, the discomforts would never have occurred to her.

“Ah she is _stupid_. That is the whole thing.” He sat forward stretching and contracting his hands till the muscles cracked; his eyes, flashing their unconcerned contemptuous judgment, were all at once the brilliant misty eyes of a child about to be quenched by sudden sleep.

“_No_,” she said resentfully, “she wants good people, and when they come she has to make all she can out of them. If they stayed she would be able to afford to do things better. Of course they don’t come back or recommend her; and the house is always half empty. Her _best_ plan would be to fill it with students at a fixed low figure.” Miss Scott again ...... his attention was wandering... “The dead _flowers_,” he was back again, “in dirty water in a cracked vase; Sissie rushing out, while breakfast is kept waiting, to buy just enough butter for one meal.”

“Really?” he giggled.

“She has been most awfully good to me.”

“Why not?” he chuckled.

“Do you think you will go and see your Polish friend to-morrow?” She watched anxiously.

“Yes” he conceded blinking sleepily at the end of a long yawn. “I shall perhaps go.”

“He might be driven to desperation” she muttered. Her accomplished evening was trembling in the balance. Its hours had frittered away the horrible stranger’s chance.

“Ah no” said Mr. Shatov with a little laugh of sincere amusement, “Veslovski will not do foolish things.” She rose to her feet on the tide of her relief, meeting, as she garnered all the hours of her long day and turned with an out-spreading sheaf of questions towards the expanses of evening leisure so safely at her disposal in the oncrowding to-morrows, the rebuke of the brilliantly burning midnight gas.

“But tell me; how has Mrs. Bailey been so good?” He sat conversationally forward as if it were the beginning of the evening.

“Oh well.” She sought about distastefully amongst the phrases she had collected in descriptions given to her friends, conveying nothing. Mr. Shatov knowing the framework, would see the detail alive and enhance her own sense of it. She glanced over the picture. Any single selection would be misleading. There was enough material for days of conversation. He was waiting eagerly, _not_ impatient after all of personal experiences. Yet nothing could be told......

“You see she lets me be amphibious.” Her voice smote her. Mrs. Bailey’s kindliness was in the room. She was squandering Mrs. Bailey’s gas in an effort that was swiftly transforming itself under the influence of her desire to present an adequate picture of her own separate life. His quickening interest drove her on. She turned her eyes from the gas and stared at the carpet, her picture broken up and vanishing before the pathos of its threadbare faded patterns.

“I’m neither a lodger nor a boarder,” she recited hurriedly. “I have all the advantages of a boarder; the use of the whole house. I’ve had this room and the piano to myself for years, on Sunday mornings until dinner time, and when there are interesting people I can go down to dinner. I do for weeks on end sometimes, and it is so convenient to be able to have meals on Sundays.”

“It is really a most _admirable_ arrangement,” he said heartily.

“And last year I had a bicycle accident. I was brought back here with a very showy arm; in a cab. Poor Mrs. Bailey fainted. It was not at all serious. But they gave me their best room, the one behind this, for weeks and waited upon me most beautifully, and mind you they did not expect any compensation, they knew I could not afford it.”

“An injury that should disable for so many weeks shall not have been a light one.”

“That was the doctor. You see it was Saturday. It was more than an hour before they could find anyone at all, and then they found a small surgeon in Gower Street. He stitched up my arm with a rusty darning needle taken from Mrs. Bailey’s work-basket just as it was. I told him I had some carbolic in my room; but he said Nevorr mind that. I’m not one of yrr faddists, and bound it all up and I came down to dinner. I had just come back from the first week of my holiday; bicycling in Buckinghamshire, perfect, I never felt so well in my life. I was going to Paris the next day.”

“That was indeed most unfortunate.”

“Well I don’t know. I was going with a woman I did not really know. I meant to go, and she had been thinking of going and knew Paris and where to stay cheaply and suggested we should join forces. A sort of marriage of convenience. I was not really disappointed. I was relieved; though awfully sorry to fail her. But everyone was so kind I was simply astonished. I spent the evening on the sofa in the dining-room; and they all sat quietly about near me. One man, a Swede, who had only just arrived, sat on the end of the sofa and told Swedish folk stories in a quiet motherly voice, and turned out afterwards to be the noisiest, jolliest, most screamingly funny man we have ever had here. About eleven o’clock I felt faint and we discovered that my arm must have broken out again some time before. Two of the men rushed off to find a doctor and brought an extraordinary little old retired surgeon with white hair and trembling hands. He wheezed and puffed and bound me up afresh and went away refusing a fee. I wanted some milk, and the Swede went out at midnight and found some somewhere ...... I come back with at least one cow or I come not at all..... Of course a week later I had stitch abscesses.”

“But this man was a _criminal_.”

“Yes wasn’t it abominable. Poor man. The two doctors who saw my arm later said that many limbs have been lost for less. He counted on my being in such good health. He told Mrs. Bailey I was in splendid health. But he sent in a big bill.”

“I sincerely trust you did not pay this.”

“I sent him a description of his operation, told him the result and said that my friends considered that I ought to prosecute him.”

“Certainly it was your duty.”

“I don’t know. I hate cornering people. It would not have made him different and I am no better than he is.”

“That is a most extraordinary point of view.”

“I was sorry afterwards that I had written like that.”

“Why?”

“Because he threw himself into Dublin Harbour a year later. He must have been in _fearful_ difficulties.”

“No excuse for criminal neglect.”

“The most wonderful thing in the accident itself,” pursued Miriam firmly, grasping her midnight freedom and gazing into the pattern her determination that for another few minutes no one should come up to interrupt, “was being so near to death.” She glanced up to gauge the effect of her improvisation. The moment she was now intent upon had not been ‘wonderful.’ She would not be able to substantiate it; she had never thought it through. It lay ahead now for exploration if he wished, ready to reveal its quality to her for the first time ...... he was sitting hunched against the wall with his hands driven into his pockets, waiting without resistance, with an intentness equal to her own ... she returned gratefully to her carpet. “It was a skid” she said feeling the oily slither of her front tyre. “I fell with my elbow and head between the horses’ heels and the wheel of a dray. The back-thrown hoof of the near horse caught the inner side of my arm, and for a long long time I saw the grey steel rim of the huge wheel approaching my head. It was strained back with all my force, my elbow pressing the ground, but I thought it could not miss me. There was a moment of absolute calm; _indifference_ almost. It came after a feeling of hatred and yet pity for the wheel. It was so awful, wet glittering grey, and relentless; and stupid, it could not help going on.”

“This was indeed a most _remarkable_ psychological experience. It happens rarely to be so near death with full consciousness. But this absence of fear must be in you a personal idiosyncracy.”

“But I _was_ afraid. The thing is that you don’t go _on_ feeling afraid. Do you see?”

“I hear what you say. But while there is the chance of life the instinct of self-preservation is so strong” ...

“But that is the surprise; the tumult in your body, something surging up and doing things without thinking.”

“Instinctive nervous reaction.”

“But there is something else. In the moment you are _sure_ you are going to be killed, death changes. You wait, for the moment after.”

“That is an illusion, the strength of life in you that cannot, midst good health, accept death. But tell me; your arm was certainly broken?” His gently breathed question took away the sting of his statement.

“No. The wheel went over it just above the bend of the elbow. I did not feel it, and got up feeling only a little dizzy just for a moment and horribly annoyed at the crowd round me. But the two men who were riding with me told me afterwards that my face was grey and my eyes quite _black_.”

“That was shock.” He rose and stood facing her, in shadow; dark and frock-coated, like a doctor.

“Yes; but I mean it shows that things look worse than they are.”

“That is most certainly a deduction that might be drawn. Nevertheless you suffered a most formidable _shock_.”

She moved towards the gas looking decisively up at it; and felt herself standing unexpressed, under the wide arch of all they had said. He must be told to remember to put out the gas before he went. That said, there was nothing in the world but a reluctant departure.