Deadlock : $b Pilgrimage, Volume 6 — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Deadlock : $b Pilgrimage, Volume 6
John Stuart Mill · en
On her way down the corridor she met a young man with a long neck above
a low collar, walking like an undergraduate, with a rapid lope and a
forward hen-like jerk of the head, but with kind religious looking eyes.
Underneath his conforming manner and his English book and talk-found
thoughts, he was acutely miserable, but never alone long enough to find
it out; never even long enough to feel his own impulses. Two girls came
swiftly by, bare-headed, in reform dresses, talking eagerly in
high-pitched out-turned cultured voices, their uncommunicating selves
watchfully entrenched behind the polite Norman idiom. She carried on
their manner of speech at lightning speed in her mind, watching its
effect upon everything it handled, of damming up, shaping, excluding all
but ready-made thought and opinion. Just ahead was an arched doorway and
a young man with a sheaf of pamphlets standing within it. “It may” she
announced in character to an imaginary companion, “prove necessary to
have some sort of conversational interchange with this individual.”
Certainly it left one better prepared for the interview than saying Good
Lord shall we have to _say_ something to this creature? She got safely
through the doorway, exchanging a slight bow with the young man as he
provided her with a syllabus, and entered a large lofty quietly-lit
room, where a considerable audience sat facing a raised platform more
brightly illuminated, and from which they were confronted by a row of
seated forms. She went down the central gangway, bold in her desire for
a perfect hearing and slipped into a seat in the second row of chairs.
The chairman was taking his place and in the dying down of conversation
she heard a quiet flurry of draperies approaching with delicate
apologetic rhythm up the gangway. It was the tall young woman. She
passed, a veiled figure with bent head and floating scarf, along the
little passage between the front row of the audience and the fern-edged
platform, upon which she presently emerged, taking her place next to a
lady who now rose and came forward, tall and black robed, and whose
face, sharply pointing beneath the shadow of a plumy hat, had the
expression of an eagle searching the distance with calm piercing eyes.
In rousing ringing grievous tones she begged to be allowed to precede
the chairman with an important announcement. Miriam inwardly groaned as
the voice chid tragically on, demanding a realisation on the part of
all, of the meaning for London of the promised arrival in its midst of a
world-famed authority in Greek letters. She felt the audience behind her
quelled into absolute stillness, and took angry refuge in the cover of
her syllabus. “The Furthermore Settlement” she read, printed boldly at
the head of the page. It was one of those missions; to bring culture
amongst the London poor ..... “devoted young men from the Universities.”
Those girls in the corridor, wrapped in their code, were doing
“settlement work.” They did not look philanthropic.