LITMIR.BIZ

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Street, was saying to Dussie,

      ‘Your Marty’s worth the knowing, you know. She’s so absolutely herself. There’s such a white flame of sincerity in her. So still and self-contained too. She’s like − well, if one could imagine it − a crystal of flame. Perfectly rigid in its own shape, but with all the play and life of flame.’

      He liked his simile and reverted more than once to it in thought.

      For Martha, she was happy in the possession of his books and gave no thought to the owner.

      In October she went to King’s.

       SIX

       Expansion of the World

      Martha snatched. There was no time to build a cosmos. Her world was in confusion, a sublime disordered plenty. Some other day, far off, she would order it, give it structure and coherence. … Meanwhile there was the snatching.

      She snatched because she lived in fever. Greedy, convulsive, in a jealous agony, she raced for knowledge, panting. Supposing, in the three years of her course at King’s, she should not be able to gather all the knowledge that there was. … When, in March, she sat her first degree examination, and passed, she had a movement of profound disillusion. ‘Is this all I know? I thought I should know everything.’

      She understood that a graduate may be ignorant.

      By that time her panic was over. The grey Crown, that had soared through so many generations above the surge and excitement of youth, had told her that wisdom is patient and waits for its people. The greed went out of her as she looked up morning after morning at its serenity. It was like a great rock amid the changing tides of men’s opinions. Knowledge alters − wisdom is stable. It told her time and again that there was no need for haste. In the long Library, too, with the coloured light filtering through its great end window, and its dim recesses among the laden shelves − where thought, the enquiring experiencing spirit, the essence of man’s long tussle with his destiny, was captured and preserved: a desiccated powder, dusted across innumerable leaves, and set free, volatile, live spirit again at the touch of a living mind − she learned to be quiet. One morning she thought, standing idly among the books: ‘But they might come alive, without my mind.’ And she had a moment of panic. The immensity of life let loose there would be terrifying. They might clutch at her, these dead men, storming and battering at the citadel of her identity, subtly pervading her till they had stolen her very self. She so poor, and they with their magnitude of thought, of numbers. … The panic passed, and elation possessed her in its stead. She stood a long time in a dark corner, watching the people come and go, touch books, open them, read them, replace them, carry them away: and at every contact she thrilled. ‘Spirit is released.’ The great room tingled with it. Even when no one was there, it might turn back to spirit, that dried powdering of words that held the vital element. But the thought no longer gave her fear. It liberated. She walked in a company.

      From the company she kept in the flesh she took less consciously material for her building. She had not yet discovered that men and women are of importance in the scheme of things: though she allowed an exception of course in favour of Professor Gregory. She owed to him one of the earliest of those moments of apocalypse by which life is dated.

      ‘Gweedsake!’ said Emmeline. ‘Sic a lay-aff. You and yer Professor Gregory! You wad think naebody had had a tongue in their heid afore to hear you speak.’

      Martha spoke no more of Professor Gregory, but thought much. The moment of apocalypse had come in his opening lecture. She had climbed the stair, jostled a throng that pushed and laughed and shouted. Everyone was going to hear Professor Gregory’s opening lecture. Martha felt herself carried violently on by the pressure from behind. At the top of the stair, separated from the girls she knew, she was flung suddenly forward. She lost her balance and her breath. … Then she found herself held securely. She had been pitched against a stalwart in navy uniform, who quelled the impetuous rioting throng with a gesture, a glance. They surged round him, chattering and shouting, ‘I say, Daxy −’ ‘Hello, it’s old Dak −’ ‘Daxy, you’re a sight for sair e’en, man −’

      Daxter, Sacrist of King’s, an old campaigner, like Odysseus full of wiles from warfare in the East, greeted them all with one eye and marshalled them with the other; and all the while held Martha firm in a little island amid the stream.

      ‘Now, miss, you go in.’ And the way was clear for her. The old Logic class-room was filled. Greetings were shouted. Voices ran like the assorted noises of a burn. And then two hundred pairs of feet were pounding the floor, and Martha, looking round, saw a long lean man come in, spectacled, with a smile running up his face that drove the flesh into furrows.

      ‘Funny smile,’ Martha was thinking. ‘Not a smooth space left anywhere.’ But she forgot the corrugations when he began to speak. He spoke like a torrent. He digressed, recovered himself, shot straight ahead, digressed again. He forgot his audience, turning farther and farther round till he stood side on to them, gazing through a window and washing his hands with a continually reiterated motion while he spun his monologue. Then suddenly he would turn back upon the class with a wrinkling smile and swift amused aside; and a roar of laughter would rise to the roof, while the feet thundered on the floor. His theme was English literature, but to Martha it seemed that he was speaking the language of some immortal and happy isle, some fabulous tongue that she was enabled by miracle for once to comprehend; and that he spoke of mysteries. …

      The confines of her world raced out beyond her grasp. When he had ended she felt bruised and dizzy, as though from travelling too rapidly through air. The strong airs had smote her. But she had seen new countries, seen − and it was this that elated her, gave her the sense of newness in life itself that makes our past by moments apocryphal − the magnitude of undiscovered country that awaited her conquest. She was carried downstairs in the crowd and at the bottom met the Sacrist, who gave her a look of recognition. At the moment Martha was thinking: ‘And I shall go on travelling like that. There will be more new countries.’ And she was radiant. For sheer joy she broke into a smile; but perceiving that she was smiling straight into the face of Daxter, went hot with confusion and hurried away.

      Daxter, however, accosted her as she was crossing the quadrangle some days later. Shortly she counted his greeting a normal part of her day. He claimed friendship with her as from the beginning.

      ‘You see, miss, you smiled to me the very first day you came.’

      ‘Oh,’ cried Martha, ‘but I didn’t mean to −’ and stopped abruptly, confused again. A tactless thing to say. But Daxter did not seem to be offended. He took her into his den, a narrow room at one corner of the quadrangle, the walls and table of which were covered with photographs. From the photographs ‘Daxy’ could reconstruct the inner history of the University since he had become Sacrist. Here were the giants who had been on the earth in those days. He told Martha tales, such as appear in no official record, of the immediate past of the University, and tales of his campaigns in India, making her world alive for her in new directions. One day he showed her some strips of silk. They had been part of the colours of a regiment − a tattered standard that had hung in the Chapel of King’s till its very shreds were rotting away. He had been ordered to remove it: but round its pole the silk was still fresh, and he had kept the remnant. He cut two snippets of the silk, a snippet of cream and a snippet of cerise, and gave them to Martha.

      ‘That’s history, that is, miss.’ And he put them in an envelope for her.

      Martha carried the envelope in her pocket for nearly a week, deliberating where she might keep her treasure safe from predatory fingers. She had so few possessions and no stronghold for storing them. Madge, on the verge of the teens, had developed an inordinate interest in her appearance. She brewed herself strange scents from perfumed flowers and water, and decanted the product into an ink-bottle, sprinkling her garments lavishly with the concoction; and rubbed her lips and cheeks with purloined geranium petals. Martha caught her once sneaking out

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