The Tunnel · Chapter 4 (3/3)

“So do I. I think the child’s quite right there. Freedom is life. We may be slaves all day and guttersnipes all the rest of the time but ach Gott, we are free.”

“What a perfectly extraordinary idea.”

“I know. But I don’t see how you can get away from it,” mused Miriam, dreamily holding out against Jan’s absorbed sewing and avoiding for a moment Mag’s incredulously speculative eyes; “if it’s true,” she went on, the rich blur of the warm room becoming as she sent out her voice evenly, thinking eagerly on, a cool clear even daylight, “that everything that can possibly happen does happen, then there must be somewhere in the world, every possible kind of variation of us and this room.”

“D’you mean to say,” gurgled Mag with a fling of her knickered leg and an argumentative movement of the hand that hung loosely dangling a cigarette over the fireside arm of the chair, “that there are millions of rooms exactly like this each with one thing different⁠—say the stem of one narcissus broken instead of whole for instance.”

“My dear Miriam, infinitude couldn’t hold them.”

“Infinitude can hold anything⁠—of course I can see the impossibility of a single world holding all the possible variations of everything at once⁠—but what I mean is that I can think it and there must be something corresponding to it in life⁠—anything that the mind can conceive is realised, somehow, all possibilities must come about, that’s what I mean I think.”

“You mean you can see, as it were in space, millions of little rooms⁠—a little different,” choked Mag.

“Yes I can⁠—quite distinctly⁠—solid⁠—no end to them.”

“I think it’s a perfectly horrible idea,” stated Jan complacently.

“It isn’t⁠—I love it and it’s true⁠ ⁠… you go on and on and on, filling space.”

“Then space is solid.”

“It is solid. People who talk of empty space don’t think⁠ ⁠… space is more solid than a wall⁠ ⁠… yes⁠ ⁠… more solid than a diamond⁠—girls, I’m sure.”

“Space is full of glorious stars.⁠ ⁠…”

“Yes; I know but that’s such a tiny bit of it.⁠ ⁠…”

“Millions and trillions of miles.”

“Those are only words. Everything is words.”

“Well you must use words.”

“You ought not to think in words. I mean⁠—you can think in your brain by imagining yourself going on and on through it, endless space.”

“You can’t grasp space with your mind.”

“You don’t grasp it. You go through it.”

“I see what you mean. To me it is a fearful idea. Like eternal punishment.”

“There’s no such thing as eternal punishment. The idea is too silly. It makes God a failure and a fool. It’s a man’s idea. The men who take the hearthrug. Sitting on a throne judging everybody and passing sentence is a thing a man would do.”

“But humanity is wicked.”

“Then God is. You can’t separate God and humanity and that includes women who don’t really believe any of those things.”

“But. Look at the churches. Look at women and the parsons.”

“Women like ritual and things and they like parsons, some parsons, because they are like women, penetrable to light, as Wilberforce said the other day, and understand women better than most men do.”

“Miriam, are you a pantheist?”

“The earth the sea and the sky

“The sun the moon and the stars

“Are not these, oh soul,

“That’s the Higher Pantheism.”

“Nearer is he than breathing, closer than hands and feet. It doesn’t matter what you call it.”

“If you don’t accept eternal punishment there can’t be eternal happiness.”

“Oh punishment, happiness; tweedledum, tweedledee.”

“Well⁠—look here, there’s remorse. That’s deathless. It must be. If you feel remorseful about anything the feeling must last as long as you remember the thing.”

“Remorse is real enough. I know what you mean. But it may be shortsightedness. Not seeing all round a thing. Is that Tomlinson? Or it may be cleansing you. If it were complete Mag it would kill you outright. I can believe that. I can believe in annihilation. I am prepared for it. I can’t think why it doesn’t happen to me. That’s just it.”

“I should like to be annihilated.”

“Shut up von Bohlen; you wouldn’t. But look here Miriam child, do you mean to say you think that as long as there is something that keeps on and on, fighting its way on in spite of everything one has, well, a right to exist?”

“Well, that may be the survival of the fittest which doesn’t mean the ethically fittest as Huxley had to admit. We kill the ethically fittest at present. We killed Christ. They go to Heaven. All of us who survive have things to learn down here in hell. Perhaps this is hell. There seems something, ahead.”

“Ourselves. Rising on the ashes of our dead selves. Lord, it’s midnight⁠—”

The chill of the outside night, solitude and her cold empty room.⁠ ⁠…

“I’m going to bed.”

“So am I. We shall be in bed, Miriam, five minutes after you have gone.”

Jan went off for the hot water bottles.

“All right, I’m going⁠—” Miriam bent for her shoes. The soles were dry, scorching; they scorched her feet as she forced on the shoes; one sole cracked across as she put her foot to the ground⁠ ⁠… she braced the muscles of her face and said nothing. It must be forgotten before she left the room that they were nearly new and her only pair; two horrid ideas, nagging and keeping things away.

Outside in the air daylight grew strong and clear in Miriam’s mind. Patches of day came in a bright sheen from the moonlit puddles, distributed over the square. She crossed the road to the narrow pathway shadowed by the trees that ran round the long oblong enclosure. From this dark pathway the brightness of the wet moonlit roadway was brighter and she could see façades that caught the moonlight. There was something trying to worry her, some little thing that did not matter at all, but that some part of her had put away to worry over and was now wanting to consider. Mag’s affairs⁠ ⁠… no she had decided about that. It might be true about blunted sensibilities; but she had meant for some reason to let that other man kiss her, and people never ask advice until they have made up their minds what they are going to do and Mag was Mag quite apart from anything that might happen. She would still be Mag if she were old⁠ ⁠… or mad. That was a firm settled real thing, real and absolute in the daylight of the moonlit square. She wandered slowly on humming a tune; every inch of the way would be lovely. The figure of a man in an overcoat and a bowler hat loomed towards her on the narrow pathway and stopped. The man raised his hat, and his face showed smiling with the moonlight on it. Miriam had a moment’s fear; but the man’s attitude was deprecating and there was her song; it was partly her own fault. But why, why⁠ ⁠… fierce anger at the recurrence of this kind of occurrence seized her. She wanted him out of the way and wanted him to know how angry she was at the interruption.

“Well,” she snapped angrily, coming to a standstill in the moonlit gap.

“Oh,” said the man a little breathlessly in a lame broken tone, “I thought you were going this way.”

“So I am,” retorted Miriam in a loud angry shaking tone, “obviously.”

The man stepped quickly into the gutter and walked quickly away across the road. St. Pancras church chimed the quarter.

Miriam marched angrily forward with shaking limbs that steadied themselves very quickly⁠ ⁠… the night had become suddenly cold; bitter and penetrating; a northeast wind, of course. It was frightfully cold after the warm room; the square was bleak and endless; the many façades were too far off to keep the wind away; the pavement was very cold under her right foot; that was it; the broken sole was the worry that had been trying to come up; she could walk with it; it would not matter if the weather kept dry⁠ ⁠… an upright gait, hurrying quickly away across the moonlit sheen; just the one she had summoned up anger and courage to challenge was not so bad as the others⁠ ⁠… they were not bad; that was not it; it was the way they got in the way⁠ ⁠… figures of men, dark, in dark clothes, presenting themselves, calling attention to themselves and the way they saw things, mean and suggestive, always just when things were loveliest. Couldn’t the man see the look of the square and the moonlight?⁠ ⁠… that afternoon at Hyde Park Corner⁠ ⁠… just when everything flashed out after the rain⁠ ⁠… the sudden words close to her ear⁠ ⁠… my beauty⁠ ⁠… my sweet⁠ ⁠… you sweet girl⁠ ⁠… the puffy pale old face, the puffs under the sharp brown eyes. A strange⁠ ⁠… conviction in the trembling old voice⁠ ⁠… it was deliberate; a sort of statement; done on purpose, something chosen that would please most. It was like the conviction and statement there had been in Bob Greville’s voice. Old men seemed to have some sort of understanding of things. If only they would talk with the same conviction about other things as there was in their tone when they said those personal things. But the things they said were worldly⁠—generalisations, like the things one read in books that tired you out with trying to find the answer, and made books so awful⁠ ⁠… things that might look true about everybody at some time or other and were not really true about anybody⁠—when you knew them. But people liked those things and thought them clever and smiled about them. All the things the old men said about life and themselves and other people, about everything but oneself, were sad; disappointed and sad with a glint of far off youth in their faces as they said them⁠ ⁠… something moving in the distance behind the blue of their eyes.⁠ ⁠… “Make the best of your youth my dear before it flies.” If it all ended in sadness and envy of youth, life was simply a silly trick. Life could not be a silly trick. Life cannot be a silly trick. That is the simple truth⁠ ⁠… a certainty. Whatever happens, whatever things look like, life is not a trick.

Miriam began singing again when she felt herself in her own street, clear and empty in the moonlight. The north wind blew down it unobstructed and she was shivering and singing⁠ ⁠… “spring is co‑ming a‑and the swa‑llows⁠—have come back to te‑ell me so.” Spring could not be far off. At this moment in the dark twilight behind the thick north wind the squares were green.

Her song, restrained on the doorstep and while she felt her already well-known way in almost insupportable happiness through the unlit hall and through the moonlight up the seventy-five stairs, broke out again when her room was reached and her door shut; the two other doors had stood open showing empty moonlit spaces. She was still alone and unheard on the top floor. Her room was almost warm after the outside cold. The row of attic and fourth floor windows visible from her open lattice were in darkness, or burnished blue with moonlight. Warm blue moonlight gleamed along the leads sloping down to her ink-black parapet. The room was white and blue lit, with a sweet morning of moonlight. She had a momentary impulse towards prayer and glanced at the bed. To get so far and cast herself on her knees and hide her face in her hands against the counterpane, the bones behind the softness of her hands meeting the funny familiar round shape of her face, the dusty smell of the counterpane coming up, her face praying to her hands, her hands praying to her face, both throbbing separately with their secret, would drive something away. Something that was so close in everything in the room, so pouring in at the window that she could scarcely move from where she stood. She flung herself more deeply into her song and passed through the fresh buoyant singing air to light the gas. The room turned to its bright evening brown. Prayer. Being so weighed down and free with happiness was the time⁠ ⁠… sacrifice⁠ ⁠… the evening sacrifice of praise and prayer. That is what that means. To toss all the joys and happiness away and know that you are happy and free without anything. That you cannot escape being happy and free. It always comes.

Why am I so happy and free? she wondered with tears in her eyes. Why? Why do lovely things and people go on happening? To own that something in you had no right. But not crouching on your knees⁠ ⁠… standing and singing till everything split with your joy and let you through into the white white brightness.

To see the earth whirling slowly round, coloured, its waters catching the light. She stood in the middle of the floor hurriedly discarding her clothes. They were old and worn, friendly and alive with the fresh strength of her body. Other clothes would be got somehow; just by going on and working⁠ ⁠… there’s so much⁠—eternally. It’s stupendous. I’ve no right to be in it; but I’m in. Someone means me to be in. I can’t help it. Fancy people being alive. You would think everyone would go mad. She found herself in bed, sitting up in her flannellette dressing jacket. The stagnant air beneath the sharp downward slope of the ceiling was warmed by the gas. The gaslight glared beautifully over her shoulder down on to the page.⁠ ⁠…

All that has been said and known in the world is in language, in words; all we know of Christ is in Jewish words; all the dogmas of religion are words; the meanings of words change with people’s thoughts. Then no one knows anything for certain. Everything depends upon the way a thing is put, and that is a question of some particular civilisation. Culture comes through literature, which is a half-truth. People who are not cultured are isolated in barbaric darkness. The Greeks were cultured; but they are barbarians⁠ ⁠… why? Whether you agree or not, language is the only way of expressing anything and it dims everything. So the Bible is not true; it is a culture. Religion is wrong in making word-dogmas out of it. Christ was something. But Christianity which calls Him divine and so on is false. It clings to words which get more and more wrong⁠ ⁠… then there’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be quite sure of rejoicing about. The Christians are irritating and frightened. The man with side-whiskers understands something. But.