Everybody was so calm . The calmness of insanity. Nobody quite all there. Yet intelligent. What were they all thinking about, wreathed in films of intelligent insanity; watching the performance in the intervals of lives filled with words that meant nothing … breath was more than words; the fact of breathing … but everyone was in such a hurry.
“I would ask” … one horrified glance revealed his profile quivering as he hesitated. A louder, confident, dictatorial English voice had rung out simultaneously from the other side of the hall. He would have to sit down, shaken by his brave attempt. But to the whole evening, the deep gentle tones had been added, welling through and beyond the Englishman’s strident, neat proclamation, and containing, surely everyone must hear it, so much of the answer to the essential question. The chairman hesitated, turned decisively and the other man sat down.
“What the lecturer makes of the psycho-physical parallelism?”
He drove home his question on a note of reproachful expostulation and sat down drawn together, with bent head and eye downcast, but listening intently with his serenely singing child’s brow. Miriam was instantly sorry that his words had got through, their naked definiteness changing the eloquent tone, sharpening it to a weapon, a borrowed weapon.
“That’s it,” she breathed, hoping the lecturer’s answer would throw some light on the meaning of the fascinating phrase, floating before her, fresh from far-off philosophical battlefields, bright from centuries of contemplation, flashing out now, today, in Europe triumphantly, in desperate encounters. The lecturer was on his feet, gleaming towards their centre of the audience his recognition of the clean thrust.