"Michael. Reads _Reynolds's_. A notice of a meeting of London
Tolstoyans. We rushed out in the pouring rain to the Edgware Road and
found nothing at the address but a barred up corner shop-front. Michael
wanted to go home. I told him to go and stood staring at the shop
waiting for it to turn into the Tolstoyans. I knew it would. It did.
Just as Michael was almost screaming in the middle of the road, I turned
down a side street and found a doorway, a bead of gas shining inside
just showing a stone staircase. We crept up and found a bare room,
almost in darkness, a small gas jet, and a few rows of kitchen chairs
and a few people sitting scattered about. A young man at a piano picked
out a few bars of Grieg and played them over and over again. Then the
meeting began. Dora, reading a paper on Tolstoy's ideas. Well, I felt I
was hearing the whole truth spoken aloud for the first time.... But oh
the discussion.... A gaunt man got up and began to rail at everything,
going on till George gently asked him to keep to the subject. He raved
then about some self-help book he had read. Quite incoherent; and
convincing. Then the young man at the piano made a long speech about
hitching your waggon to a star and at the end of it a tall woman, so old
that she could hardly stand, stood up and chanted, in a deep laughing
voice, Waggons and Stars. Waggons and stars. Today I am a waggon.
Tomorrow a star. I'm reminded of the societies who look after young
women. Meet them with a cup of tea, call a cab, put the young woman and
the cup of tea into the cab. Am I to watch my brother's blunderings? No.
I am his lover. Then he becomes a star. And I am a star. Then an awful
man, very broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, with a low forehead and a
sweeping moustache bounded up and shouted; I am a God! You, madam, are a
goddess! Tolstoy is over-civilised! That's why he loves the godlike
peasant. All metaphysicians, artists and pious people are sensualists.
All living in unnatural excesses. The Zulu is a god. How many women in
filthy London can nurse their children? What is a woman? _Children._
What is the glory of man? Unimaginable to town slaves. They go through
life ignorant of manhood, and the metaphysicians wallow in pleasures.
Men and women are divine. There is no other divinity. Let them not sell
their godhead for filthy food and rotting houses and moloch factories.
What stands in the way? The pious people, the artists and the
metaphysicians.... Then a gentleman, in spectacles at the back, quietly
said that Tolstoy's ideas were eclectic and could never apply
generally.... Of course he was right, but it doesn't make Tolstoy any
the less true. And you know when I hear all these convincing socialists
planning things that really would make the world more comfortable, they
always in the end seem ignorant of _humanity_; always behind them I see
little Taylor, unanswerable, standing for more difficult deep-rooted
individual things.