Read Ebook: Deadlock: Pilgrimage Volume 6 by Richardson Dorothy M Dorothy Miller

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Ebook has 528 lines and 54480 words, and 11 pages

"I must assume an air of indifference?"

"An English audience will be more likely to understand if you are slower and more quiet. You ought to have gaps now and then."

"Intervals for yawning. Yew shall indicate suitable moments. I see that I am fortunate to have met-hew. I will take lessons, for this lecture, in the true frigid English dignity."

The door opened, admitting Mr. Shatov.

"Mr.--a--Shatov; will be so good; as to grant five minutes; for the conclusion of this interview." He walked forward bowing with each phrase, hiding the intruder and bowing him out of the room. The little dark figure reappeared punctually, and he rose with a snap of the fingers. "The English" he declaimed at large, "have an excellent phrase; hwich says, time is money. This phrase, good though it is, might be improved. Time is let out on usury. So, for the present, I shall leave yew." He turned on the sweeping bow that accompanied his last word and stepped quickly with a curious stiff marching elegance down the room towards Mr. Shatov as though he did not see him, avoiding him at the last moment by a sharp curve. Outside the closed door he rattled the handle as if to make sure it was quite shut.

Miriam sought intently for a definition of what had been in the room .... a strange echoing shadow of some real thing ... there was something real ... just behind the empty sound of him ... somewhere in the rolled up manuscript so remarkably in her hands, making a difference in the evening brought in by Mr. Shatov. Hunger and fatigue were assailing her; but the long rich day mounting up to an increasing sense of incessant life crowding upon her unsought, at her disposal, could not be snapped by retirement for a solitary meal. He walked quickly to the hearth-rug, bent forward and spat into the empty grate.

She broke through her frozen astonishment, "I have just undertaken a perfectly frightful thing" she said, quivering with disgust.

"I find him insufferable."

"It is a musical tongue certainly."

"That's it; music. But the individual is not there; because the tunes are all arranged for him and he sings them, according to rule. The Academy. The purity of the French language. I'm getting so interested."

"He is not in the least what I expected a Frenchman to be like. I can't understand his being so fair."

"What is it you have undertaken?"

He was suddenly grave and impressed by the idea of the lecture ...... why would it be such good practice for her to read and correct it?

Her answer plunged him into thought from which he branched forth with sudden eagerness ... a French translation of a Russian book revealing marvellously the interior, the self life, of a doctor, through his training and experience in practice. It would be a revelation to English readers and she should translate it; in collaboration with him; if she would excuse the intimate subjects it necessarily dealt with. He was off and back again with the book and reading rapidly while she still pondered his grave enthusiasm over her recent undertaking. In comparison with this idea of translating a book, it seemed nothing. But that was only one of his wild notions. It would take years of evenings of hard work. Meanwhile someone else would do it. They would work at it together. With Saturdays and Sundays it would not take so long ..... it would set her standing within the foreign world she had touched at so many points during the last few years, and that had become, since the coming of Mr. Shatov, more and more clearly a continuation of the first beginnings at school..... alors un faible chuchotement se fit entendre au premier ..... ? l'entr?e de ce bassin, des arbres .... se fit entendre .... alors un faible chuchotement se fit entendre ... all one word on one tone ... it must have been an extract from some dull mysterious story with an explanation or deliberately without an explanation; then a faint whispering was audible on the first floor; that was utterly different. It was the shape and sound of the sentences, without the meaning that was so wonderful--alors une faible parapluie se fit entendre au premier--Jan would scream, but it was just as wonderful ...... there must be some meaning in having so passionately loved the little book without having known that it was selections from French prose; in getting to Germany and finding there another world of beautiful shape and sound, apart from people and thoughts and things that happened ... Durch die ganze lange Nacht, bis tief in den Morgen hinein ..... it was opening again, drawing her in away from the tuneless shapeless--

"Are you listening?"

"Yes, but it hasn't begun."

"That is true. We can really omit all this introduction and at once begin."

As the pages succeeded each other her hunger and fatigue changed to a fever of anxious attention.

"Well? Is not that a masterly analysis? You see. That should be translated for your Wimpole Street."

"It is a serious mistake to regard enlightenment as pessimism."

"I don't believe in Continental luminaries."

"Your prejudices are at least frank."

"I had forgotten the author was Russian. That idea of the rush of mixed subjects coming to the medical student too quickly one after the other for anything to be taken in, is awful, and perfectly true. Hosts of subjects, hosts of different theories about all of them; no general ideas ..... Doctors have to specialise when they are boys and they remain ignorant all their lives."

"This is not only for doctors. You have touched the great problem of modern life. No man can, to-day, see over the whole field of knowledge. The great Leibnitz was the last to whom this was possible."

To be ignorant always, knowing one must die in ignorance. What was the use of going on? Life looked endless. Suddenly it would seem short. "Wait till you're fifty and the years pass like weeks." You would begin to see clearly all round you the things you could never do. Never go to Japan. Already it was beginning. No college. No wanderjahre...... Translating books might lead to wanderjahre.

"It's certainly a book that ought to be translated." At least there could be no more "Eminent men." There might always be someone at work somewhere who would suddenly knock him down like a ninepin.

"Well you shall see. I will read you a passage from later, that you may judge whether you will care. I must tell you it deals of intimate matters. You must excuse."

It was not only that he thought she might object. He also realised that the English reserves between them were being swept away. It was strange that a free Russian should have these sensibilities. He read his extract through, bringing it to a close in shaken tones, his features sensitively working.

Everyone ought to know...... It ought to be shouted from the house-tops that a perfectly ordinary case leaves the patient sans connaissance et nageant dans le sang.

"It's very interesting," she said hurriedly, "but in English it would be condemned as unsuitable for general reading."

"I thought that possible."

"The papers would solemnly say that it deals with subjects that are better veiled."

"Indeed it is remarkable. John Bull is indeed the perfect ostrich."

"Oh no; I'm sure it doesn't."

"You have touched a most interesting problem of psychology."

"Besides Paris is full of Americans."

"It is the same proposition. They are the cousins of the English."

"They have certainly a most remarkable naivety."

"What? What is that?"

"Have you heard that the Shah preferred of a whole concert, only the tuning of the orchestra?"

"But when I thought of one of my sisters, I used to want to die. If she had been there we should both have yelled, without moving a muscle of our faces. Harriett is perfect for that. We learnt it in church. But when she used to twist all the fingers of her gloves into points, under the seat, and then show them to me suddenly, in the Litany" ....

"What? What is this? No. Tell me. You were very happy with your sisters."

"That's all. She waggled them, suddenly."

"You don't know you're happy."

"That is not the point. This early surrounding lingers and affects all the life."

"But you were six years old. That is what is important. You do not perhaps realise the extent of the remaining of this free life of garden and woods with you."

"I know it is there. I often dream I am there and wake there, and for a few minutes I could draw the house, the peaked shapes of it, and the porches and french windows and the way the lawns went off into the mysterious parts of the garden; and I feel then as if going away were still to come, an awful thing that had never happened. Of course after the years in the small house by the sea, I don't remember the house, only the sea and the rocks, the house at Barnes grew in a way to be the same, but I never got over the suddenness of the end of the garden and always expected it to branch out into distances, every time I ran down it. I used to run up and down to make it more......." He was no longer following with such an intentness of interest. There ought to have been more about those first years. Now, no one would ever know what they had been......

"But you know, although nothing the Americans say is worth hearing, there is something wonderful about the way they go on. The way they all talk at once, nobody listening. It's because they all know what they are going to say and everyone wants to say it first. They used to talk in parties; a set of people at one part of the table all screaming together towards a set at another part, and other people screaming across them at another set. The others began screaming back at once, endless questions, and if two sets had seen the same thing they all screamed together as soon as it was mentioned. I never heard one person talking alone; not in that August set. And there was one woman, a clergyman's wife, with a little pretty oval face and the most perfect muslin dresses which she did not appreciate, who used to begin as soon as she came in and go on right through the meal, filling up the gaps in her talk with gasps and exclamations. Whenever any place was mentioned she used to turn and put her hand over her husband's mouth till she had begun what she wanted to say, jumping up and down in her chair."

"I know now why they all have such high piercing voices. It comes from talking in sets. But I always used to wonder what went on behind; in their own minds."

"Do not wonder. There is no arri?re-boutique in these types. They are most simple."

"They don't like us. They think we are frigid; not cordial, is one of their phrases."

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