Revolving Lights

The building of the large hall had been brought about by people who gave no thought to the wonder of moving from one space to another and up and down stairs. Yet this wonder was more to them than all the things on which their thoughts were fixed. If they would take time to realise it. No one takes time. No one knows it.⁠ ⁠… But I know it.⁠ ⁠… These seconds of knowing, of being told, afresh, by things speaking silently, make up for the pain of failing to find out what I ought to be doing.⁠ ⁠…

Away behind, in the flatly echoing hall, was the busy planning world of socialism, intent on the poor. Far away in tomorrow, stood the established, unchanging world of Wimpole Street, linked helpfully to the lives of the prosperous classes. Just ahead, at the end of the walk home, the small isolated Tansley Street world, full of secretive people drifting about on the edge of catastrophe, that would leave, when it engulfed them, no ripple on the surface of the tide of London life. In the space between these surrounding worlds was the everlasting solitude; ringing as she moved to cross the landing, with voices demanding an explanation of her presence in any one of them.

“Now that,” she quoted, to counter the foremost attack, “is a man who can be trusted to say what he thinks.”

That cloaked her before the clamorous silence. She was an observant intelligent woman; approved. He would never imagine that the hurriedly borrowed words meant, to her, nothing but a shadow of doubt cast across the earnest little socialist. But they carried her across the landing.

At the beginning of the journey to the east-end the Lintoffs were as far away as people in another town. When the east-end was reached they were too near. Their brilliance lit up the dingy neighbourhood and sent out a pathway of light across London. Their eyes were set on the far distance. It seemed an impertinence to rise suddenly in their path and claim attention.

But Michael lost his way and the Lintoffs were hidden, erupting just out of sight. The excitement of going to meet them filtered away in the din and swelter of the east-end streets.

They came upon the hotel at last, suddenly. A stately building with a wide pillared porch. As they went up its steps and into the carpeted hall, cool and clean and pillared, giving on to arched doorways and the distances of large rooms, she wished the Russians could be spirited away, that there were nothing but the strange escape from the midst of squalor into this cool hushed interior.

But they appeared at once, dim figures blocking the path, closing up all the distances but the one towards which they were immediately obliged to move and that quickly ended in a bleak harshly lit room. And now here they were, set down, meekly herded at the table with other hotel people.

No strange new force radiated from them across the chilly expanse of coarse white tablecloth. They were able to be obliterated by their surroundings; lost in the onward-driving tide of hotel-life; responding murmuringly to Michael’s Russian phrases, like people trying to throw off sleep.

Michael moved away with a question to Madame Lintoff sitting alone behind them on her bed. She was left standing, turned towards Lintoff, suddenly aware of the tide that flowed from him as he stood, still motionless, in the middle of the room. He stood poised, without stiffness, his narrow height neither drooping nor upright; as if held in place by the surrounding atmosphere. Nothing came to trouble the space between them as she moved towards him, drawn by the powerful tide. She felt she could have walked through him. She was quite near him now, her face lifted towards the strange radiance of the thin white face, the glow of the flaming beard; a man’s face, yielded up to her, and free from the least flicker of reminder.

“What do you think? What do you see?” she heard herself ask. Words made no break in the tide holding her there at rest.

His words followed hers like a continuation of her phrase:

“Mademoiselle, I see the People.” His eyes were on hers, an intense blue light; not concentrated on her; going through her and beyond in a widening radiance. She was caught up through the unresisting eyes; the dreamy voice away behind her. She saw the wide white spaces of Russia; motionless dark forms in troops, waiting.⁠ ⁠…

She was back again, looking into the eyes that were now upon her personally; but not in the Englishman’s way. It was a look of remote intense companionship. She sustained it, helpless to protest her unworthiness.

She was inside the dark little hall, her luggage being set down in the shadows by the brisk silent maid. At the sight of the wide green staircase ascending to the upper world, the incidents of the journey, translated as she drove to the house into material for conversation, fell away and vanished.

The thud of the swing door, the flurry of summer skirts threshed by flying footsteps; Alma hurrying to meet her.⁠ ⁠… It was folly; madness; to flout the year’s fatigue by coming here to stay, instead of going away with friends also tired and seeking holiday.⁠ ⁠…

With the first step on the yielding pile of the stair-carpet she forgot everything but the escape from noise and gloom and grime. She was going up for four endless weeks into the clean light streaming down from above. This time there should be no brisk beginning. She would act out Alma’s promise to accept her as an invalid deaf mute. There was so much time that fatigue was an asset, the shadow against which all this brightness shone out.

But Alma was not welcoming an invalid. There she stood, at the end of her rush, daintily jigging from foot to foot, in a delicate frilly little dress; heading the perspective of pure white and green, surfaces and angles sharp in the east light coming through the long casement.

She went into her own room. Next door. Opposite to it was Hypo’s room. Opposite to her own door, the door of the bathroom, and just beyond, the swing door leading to the landing and the rooms grouped about it. Outside the low curtained windows was the midst of the garden. She was set down at the heart of the house. Sounds circled about her instead of coming faintly up.⁠ ⁠… She drew back the endmost curtain an inch or two. Bright light fell on her reflection in the long mirror. She was transformed already. It would be impossible to convince anyone that she was a tired Londoner. Here was already the self that no one in London knew. The removal of pressure had relaxed the nerves of her face, restoring its contours. Her mushroom hat had crushed the mass of her hair into a good shape. The sharp light called out its bright golds, deepened the colour of her eyes and the clear tints of her skin. The little old washed out muslin blouse flatly defining her shoulders and arms, pouched softly above the pale grey skirt.⁠ ⁠… I do understand colour⁠ ⁠… that tinge of lavender in such a pale, pale grey; just warming it⁠ ⁠… and belonging perfectly to Grannie’s spidery old Honiton collar.⁠ ⁠… The whole little toilet was quite good; could be forgotten, and would keep fresh, bleached by the dry bright air to paler grey and whiter white, while the notes of bright living colour in her face and hair intensified from day to day. She hunted out her handglass and consulted her unknown eyes. It was true. They were brown; not grey. In the bright light there was a web, thorny golden brown, round the iris. She gazed into its tangled depths. So strange.