Deadlock

By Dorothy M. Richardson.

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I

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 tomorrow’s busy thoughtless hours were in sight. Halfway 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 faraway 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 binomial 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 boardinghouse, not seeing that it turned him into a third-rate boardinghouse. … 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 tomorrow. 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 forever, 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 debris that made up the boardinghouse 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 oncoming 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.