Five Women Read online

  What then was this goodness? It did not lie in action, nor yet in being. It was a gleam when the travelling-coat opened. And time was moving much too fast. He was still clinging to the earth, he had not yet uttered the thought ‘I believe in you!' with conviction, he was still saying: ‘And even supposing everything were like that, who could be sure of it?' He was still saying that when Tonka died.

  XIV

  He gave one of the nurses a tip, and she told him of Tonka's last hours and that she had sent her love to him. Then it crossed his mind, casually, as one remembers a poem and wags one's head to the rhythm of it, that it was not really Tonka at all he had been living with: it was something that had called to him.

  He said these words to himself over and over again; he stood in the street with these words in his mind. The world lay around him. He realised, indeed, that he had been changed in some way and that in time he would be yet again another man, but this was, after all, his own doing and not really any merit of Tonka's. The strain of these last weeks —the strain, that is, of course, of working on his invention—was over. He had finished. He stood in the light and she lay under the ground, but all in all what he felt was the cheer and comfort of the light.

  Only, as he stood there looking about him, suddenly he found himself gazing into the face of one of the many children round about—a child that happened to be crying. There in the full blast of sunlight the face wriggled and writhed like a ghastly worm. Then memory cried out in him: ‘Tonka! Tonka!' He felt her, from the ground under his feet to the crown of his head, and the whole of her life. All that he had never understood was there before him in this instant, the bandage that had blindfolded him seemed to have dropped from his eyes—yet only for an instant, and the next instant it was merely as though something had flashed through his mind.

  From that time on much came to his mind that made him a little better than other people, because there was a small warm shadow that had fallen across his brilliant life.

  That was no help to Tonka now. But it was a help to him. And this even though human life flows too fast for anyone to hear each of its voices clearly and find the answer to each of them.

  Unions

  The Perfecting of a Love

  "You really can't come?"

  "Quite impossible, you know. I must try to get this job finished now as fast as I can."

  "But Lilli would be so pleased...."

  "I know. Oh, I know. But it simply can't be done."

  "And I don't like the idea of travelling without you, not a bit ..." his wife said as she poured out tea; and she glanced across to where he sat, in the corner of the room, in the bright chintz-covered armchair, smoking a cigarette. It was evening. Outside, looking out upon the street, the dark green shutters were part of a long row of dark green shutters and in no way distinct from the rest. Like a pair of dark eyelids, lowered in indifference, they concealed the glitter of this room, where from a satin-silver teapot the tea now flowed, striking the bottom of each cup with a faint tinkle and then remaining poised in mid-air, straw-coloured, a translucent, twisted column of weightless topaz. . . . In the slightly concave planes of the teapot there lay reflections, green and grey, with here and there a gleam of blue or yellow, a pool of colours that had run together and now lay quite still. But the woman's arm stood out from the teapot, and the gaze with which she looked across at her husband formed an angle with the line of the arm, a rigid pattern in the air.

  Yes, there was an angle: that was evident. But there was something else, something almost physical, that only these two people within it could feel, to whom this angle was as taut as a steel strut, holding them fast in their places and yet uniting them, making of them—for all the space between-an almost tangible unity. This invisible support rested on the solar plexus, and there they could feel the pressure of it; yet even while it made them sit stiffly upright in their chairs, with faces immobile and eyes unswerving, there, at the point where it conjoined with them, there was a tender stir of animation, something volatile, as though their hearts were fluttering together and merging like two swarms of tiny butterflies.

  On this thin, scarcely real, and yet so perceptible sensation the whole room hung as on a faintly trembling axis, and this in its turn rested on the two people in the room. The objects all around held their breath, the light on the walls froze into golden lace ... everything was a silence and a waiting and was there because of them. Time, which runs through the world like an endless tinsel thread, seemed to pass through the centre of this room and through the centre of these people and suddenly to pause and petrify, stiff and still and glittering ... and the objects in the room drew a little closer together. It was that standstill and then that faint settling which occurs when planes all at once assume order and crystal forms: a crystal, forming here round these two people, the centre of it corresponding to their centre—two people gazing at each other through this holding of the breath and this ensphering, this converging upon them, of everything, and gazing at each other as through thousands of mirroring planes, seeing each other as for the first time... .

  The woman put the teapot down and her hand dropped to the table. As though exhausted by the weight of their happiness, each sank back into the cushions; and while they were still holding each other fast with their eyes, they smiled, as though lost, both feeling the need to speak—and yet not about themselves. So they talked again about the sick man, that mentally sick man, G., in a book they had been reading. Both spoke of a certain passage, and a problem it raised, as if this were what they had just been thinking of; but in fact they were merely resuming a discussion that had strangely fascinated them for days past—as though it were hiding its face and, while seemingly concerned with the book, were actually gazing elsewhere. And indeed after a while their thoughts imperceptibly returned, by way of this unconscious pretext, to a preoccupation with themselves.

  "How does a man like that see himself, I wonder?" the woman said. And, sunk in her thoughts, she went on almost to herself: "He corrupts children, he lures young women into debauching themselves, and then he stands smiling and staring in fascination at the little scrap of eroticism that faintly flickers in him like summer lightning. Do you think he realises he's doing wrong?"

  "It's hard to say. Perhaps he does--perhaps not," the man answered. "Perhaps one simply can't raise that sort of question about such feelings."

  "What I think," the woman said—and it was now apparent that she was really speaking not of a random character in a book but of something specific that was beginning to loom up, for her, behind the character—"what I think is that he believes his actions are good."

  For a while their thoughts ran on silently side by side, and emerged then in words that were again at a remove; and yet it still was as though they were holding hands in silence and as though everything had been said long ago. "... He does his victims harm. He hurts them. He must know he's demoralising them, confusing their erotic urge, stirring it up so that it'll never again have a single aim, a point of rest. And yet it's as though one could see him smiling, too—his face quite soft and pale, quite melancholy and yet resolute, and full of tenderness—a smile that hovers tenderly over himself and his victim, as a rainy day hovers over the land—heaven sends it, there's no comprehending why—and in his mournfulness, in the feelings that accompany the destruction he wreaks, there lies all the excuse he needs.... Isn't every mind solitary, lonely?"

  "Yes indeed, isn't every mind solitary?"

  These two people, now silent again, were joined in thinking of that third person, that unknown, that one out of so many third persons, as if they were walking through a landscape together: trees, meadows, sky, and all at once the impossibility of knowing why here it is all blue and over there the clouds are gathering. They felt all these third persons surrounding them, enveloping them like that huge sphere which encloses us and sometimes turns an alien, glassy eye upon us, making us shiver when the flight of a bird cuts an inexplicably lurching streak across it. In this tw
ilit room there was all at once a cold, vast solitude, bright as noon.

  Then (and it was like the faintest note drawn from a violin) one of them said: "He's like a house with locked doors. All he has done is within him, like a gentle music perhaps—but who can hear it? It might turn everything into soft melancholy."

  And the other replied : "Perhaps he has walked through himself again and again, with outstretched, groping hands, trying to find a door, and in the end he stands still, and all he can do is put his face close to the impenetrable windowpanes, and see the beloved victims from a long way off, and smile. . . ."

  That was all they said, but in their blissfully communing silence there was a resonance that rose higher and higher. ‘And there's only this smile, overtaking them and floating above them, and binding their last hideous, twitching gestures into a thin-stemmed posy as they bleed to death... . And it lingers tenderly, wondering if they can feel what it has done, and lets the posy fall, and then the mystery of its solitude bears it upwards on vibrant wings, it soars resolutely —an alien beast entering into the marvel-crowded emptiness of space.'

  It was on this solitude that they felt the mystery of their union rested. There was an obscure sense of the world around them, which made them cling to each other; there was a dreamlike sense of chill on all sides except the one where they leaned against each other, disburdening themselves, uniting like two wonderfully well-fitting halves, which, being conjoined, undergoing reduction of their outer limits, in the act of fusion inwardly expand into a larger unity. They were sometimes unhappy because they could not share everything down to the very last and least thing.

  "Do you remember," the woman suddenly said, "a few nights ago, when you held me in your arms--? Did you realise there was something between us then? Something had occurred to me at that moment, nothing of the slightest importance, but it was notyou, and I was suddenly desperate that there could be anything other than you. And I couldn't tell you about it, and then I couldn't help smiling at the thought of how you didn't know and believed yourself very close to me, and later I stopped wanting to tell you and became angry with you for not feeling it yourself, and your caresses could no longer reach me. And I couldn't bring myself to ask you to let me be, for it wasn't anything real, I was really close to you, and all the same it was there like a vague shadow, it was as if I could be far from you and could exist without you. Do you know that feeling—how sometimes everything is suddenly there twice over, one sees all the things around one, complete and distinct as one has known them all along, and then once again, pale, twilit, and aghast, as if they were already being regarded, stealthily and with an alien gaze, by someone else? I wanted to take you and wrench you back into myself—and then again to push you away and fling myself on the ground because it could happen at all...."

  "Was that the time when___?"

  ‘"Yes, that was the time when, in your arms, I suddenly began to weep. You thought it was from excess of longing to enter deeper into your feelings with my own. Don't be angry with me—I simply had to tell you. I don't know why. It was all just fancy, but it hurt so much, and I think that was why I couldn't help thinking of that man G. You do understand?"

  The man in the armchair stubbed out his cigarette and stood up. His gaze interlocked with hers, both of them swaying as with the tension there is in the bodies of two tightrope-acrobats close together on the rope.

  Then, instead of speaking, they drew up the shutters and looked out into the street. It seemed to them they were listening to a crackling of tensions within themselves, to something suddenly stirring into life and then becoming dormant again. They knew they could not live without each other, and that only together, like an ingenious structure of supports and counter-supports, could they carry the burden they had chosen. When they thought of each other, it all struck them as almost painfully morbid, so delicate and daring and incomprehensible did their relationship seem in its sensitiveness to the slightest instability within.

  After a while, when the sight of the alien world outside had restored their sense of security, they felt tired and wanted only to fall asleep side by side. They felt nothing but each other, and yet there was—though by now quite small, disappearing into darkness—another feeling too: an opening out as to all four quarters of the sky.

  The next morning Claudine set out for the little town where her thirteen-year-old daughter Lilli was at boarding-school.

  The child had been born in the time of her first marriage, but the father was an American dentist to whom Claudine had gone, being plagued by toothache during a holiday in the country. She had been vainly waiting to be joined by a lover, whose arrival had been delayed beyond the limits of her patience, and in a queer state of intoxication, compounded of frustration, pain, ether, and the dentist's round white face, which she had seen hovering over hers day after day, it had happened. Her conscience never troubled her on account of this episode, nor indeed on account of any other such that had occurred in that first, wasted part of her life. When some weeks later she had to go for more treatment, she went accompanied by her maid, and with that the affair was over; her memory of it was merely of a strange cloud of sensations that had for a while bewildered and agitated her, as if a cloak had been suddenly flung over her head and then had slid swiftly to the floor.

  There was something strange about all her actions and experiences at that period. She could not always bring them to such a quick and sober end as on that one occasion: indeed, at times she seemed to be entirely under the domination of one man or the other, for each of whom she was capable of doing everything demanded of her, to the point of complete self-abnegation and lack of any will of her own. Yet she was never left with any sense of having had intense or important experiences. She performed and suffered acts of a passion so violent as to amount to humiliation, but never lost the awareness that whatever she did, fundamentally it did not touch her and essentially had nothing to do with her. These excesses committed by an unhappy, ordinary, promiscuous woman were like a brook rushing along, always away from her, and her only feeling was of sitting quietly on its bank, lost in thought.

  It was an awareness of some ultimate integrity deep within her, never clearly defined, yet always present, that brought about this final reserve and assurance that she possessed even in her headlong abandonment of herself to others. Behind all the intricacies of her actual experiences there was a current of something undiscovered, and although she had never yet grasped this hidden quintessence of her life, perhaps even believing that she would never be capable of penetrating to it, nevertheless, whatever happened, it gave her a sense of liberty such as a guest may have in a strange house, knowing he will be there only on that one occasion and therefore resigning himself; nonchalantly and with a trace of boredom, to whatever comes his way while he is there.

  And then all she had done and suffered sank into oblivion when she met the man who was now her husband. There and then she entered into a tranquillity and seclusion in which whatever had gone before no longer mattered. All that mattered was what would come of it now, and the past seemed to have existed only so that they might experience each other the more intensely—or else it was simply forgotten. An overpowering sensation of growth rose about her like drifts of blossom, and only a long way off did there linger a sense of anguish endured, a background from which everything detached itself as in the warmth frost-stiffened limbs slowly and drowsily stir into movement.

  There was, perhaps, one feeling that ran, a thin, wan, and scarcely perceptible thread, from her former into her present life. And her having to think of that former life again precisely today might have been chance or might have been because she was travelling to see her child. Whatever its cause, it had emerged only at the railway station, when—among all those many people, and oppressed and disquieted by them—she had suddenly been touched by a sensation that, even as it drifted by, only half recognised, already vanishing, conjured up, obscurely and distantly and yet with almost corporeal verisimilitude, that a
lmost forgotten period of her life.

  Claudine's husband had had no time to see her off at the station, and she was alone, waiting for the train, with the crowd pushing and jostling and, like a great ponderous wave of slop-water, slowly shoving her this way and that. Upon the pallid, early morning faces that were all around her emotions seemed to float through this dark precinct like spawn on dim pools of stagnant water. It nauseated her. She felt an urge to brush out of her way, with a negligent gesture, all that was here drifting and shoving; but—whether what horrified her was the physical dominance of what surrounded her or only this murky, monotonous, indifferent light under a gigantic roof of dirty glass and a tangle of iron girders—while she passed, with apparent calm and composure, through the crowd, she felt the compulsion she was under, and she suffered intensely as from a humiliation. In vain she sought refuge within herself; it was as though she had slowly and meanderingly lost herself in this throng—her eyes strayed, she was no longer fully aware of her own existence and when she strained to remember, a thin soft headache hung like a cloud before her thoughts, and her thoughts leaned into it, trying to reach her yesterday. But all that she seized of it was a feeling as if she were secretly carrying something precious and delicate. And she knew she must not betray this to others, because they would not understand and because she was weaker and could not defend herself and was afraid. Slender, shrinking into herself, she walked among them, inwardly arrogant but starting and withdrawing whenever anyone came too near, and hiding behind an unassuming air. And at the same time, in secret delight, she felt the happiness of her life growing more beautiful as she yielded and abandoned herself to this faint, ravelled anxiety.