Five Women Read online

  And that was how she recognised what it all amounted to. For this was what it had been like at that other period. What she suddenly felt was: once, long ago ... as though for a long time she had been somewhere else, though never really far away. There was something twilit and uncertain in her, like deranged people's frightened concealment of their passions, and her actions tore loose from her in shreds and were borne away in the memories of strangers. Nothing had ever impregnated her with that fruitful germ of experience which softly begins to swell a soul when those who think they have stripped it of its petals turn away, satiated.... Yet all she suffered shone as with the pallid glitter of a crown, and the muted whispering anguish that was the background of her life was shot with a tremulous gleam. At times then she felt as if her sorrows were burning like little flames in her, and something impelled her to go on kindling new ones. And, doing so, she seemed to feel the pressure of a diadem cutting into her brow, invisible and unreal as something spun of dream-glass. And sometimes it was only a far-off, circling chant inside her head... .

  Claudine sat quite still while the train travelled through the landscape, quietly shaking and rocking. The other people in the carriage talked to each other, but she heard it only as a distant buzz. And while she was thinking of her husband, and her thoughts were enclosed in a soft, weary happiness as in snow-filled air, for all the softness there was something that kept her from moving, as when a convalescent, accustomed to being within four walls, is about to take the first steps out of doors—a happiness that keeps one transfixed and is almost agonising. And behind that again there was still that undefined, wavering chant which she could not quite catch, remote, blurred, like a nursery-rhyme, like a pain, like herself.... In wide, rippling circles it drew her thoughts after it, and she could not see into its face.

  She leaned back and gazed out of the window. It fatigued her to think about that any more. Her senses were alert and achingly perceptive, but there was something behind the senses that wanted to be quiet and expand and let the world glide away over it.... Telegraph-poles slid slanting past. The fields with their dark brown furrows standing out of the snow rolled past and away. Bushes stood as though on their heads, with hundreds of straddling little legs from which there hung thousands of tiny bells of water, dripping, trickling, flashing and glittering.... There was something gay and light about it all, a dilation as when walls open out—something loosened and unburdened and full of tenderness. And from her own body too the gentle weight was now lifted, leaving in her ears a sensation as of melting snow, gradually passing over into a ceaseless, light, loose tinkling. She felt as if with her husband she were living in the world as in a foaming sphere full of beads and bubbles and little feathery rustling clouds. She closed her eyes and abandoned herself to it.

  But after a while she began to think again. The light, regular swaying of the train, the loosening up, the liquescence of nature there outside—it was as if some pressure had lifted; and she suddenly realised that she was on her own. Involuntarily she glanced up. There was still that softly whirling vortex in her senses; but it was like going up to a door that had always been shut and suddenly finding it wide open. Perhaps she had long felt the desire for this; perhaps without her knowing it something had been oscillating in the love between herself and her husband; but all she had known of it was that ever and again it drew them more closely together. And now it had secretly burst open something within her that had long been locked up. Slowly, as out of an almost invisible but very deep wound, in an unceasing stream of little drops, thoughts and feelings welled up, steadily widening the gap.

  There are, in the relationship to those one loves, a great many problems that become buried under the edifice of the shared life before they can be fully worked out; and later the sheer weight of things as they have actually turned out leaves one no strength even to imagine it all differently. Then somewhere on the way there will stand some queer sign-post, there will be some face, a hovering fragrance, an untrodden path petering out amid grass and stones, and the traveller knows he should turn and take the other road, but everything urges him forward; and all that impedes his steps is something like cobwebs, dreams, a rustling branch—and he is quietly paralysed by some thought that has never quite taken shape. Recently it had sometimes happened, perhaps increasingly, that there was this looking back, a more intense leaning into the past. Claudine's constancy revolted against it, for this constancy was not repose but a setting free of forces, a mutual lending of support, an equilibrium arising out of unceasing movement forwards. It was a running hand-in-hand. Then, in the midst of it, there would come this temptation to stand still, to stand there all alone and look around. At such times she would feel her passion as something tyrannical and compulsive, threatening to sweep her away; and even when the temptation was overcome and she felt remorseful and was once again seized with awareness of how beautiful her love was, that awareness was rigid and ponderous as a narcotic state, and she apprehended, with delight and dismay, how each of her movements was laced into it, tall and bulky and stiff as though encased in gold brocade. And yet somewhere there was still a lure, something that lay quiet and pale as March sunlight, the shadows upon earth aching with spring.

  Even in her happiness Claudine was occasionally assailed by a sense of how it was all merely a fact, almost accidental; and she sometimes wondered whether there must not be some other kind of life in store for her, different and remote. This was perhaps only the shape of a thought, an outer shell, which had remained with her from earlier times, and not a real thought with any intention behind it—only a sensation such as might once have gone with the real thought, an empty, unresisting motion, all a craning and a peering, which, withdrawing always and never fulfilled, had long lost its content and was like the entrance to a dark tunnel in her dreams.

  But perhaps it was some other, solitary happiness, much more wonderful than everything else—something loose, limber, and obscurely sensitive at a point in their relationship where in other people's love there is nothing but a solid substructure, bony and inanimate. There was a faint unrest in her, an almost morbid yearning for extreme tension, the premonition of an ultimate climax. And sometimes it was as though she were destined to suffer some unimaginable sorrow in love.

  Now and then when she was listening to music this premonition touched her soul secretly, somewhere a long way out.... She would feel a start of terror, suddenly aware of her soul's existence in the realm of the undefined. But every year, as winter passed away, there came a time when she felt nearer to those outermost frontiers than at other times. During those naked, strengthless days, suspended between life and death, she felt a melancholy that could not be that of ordinary craving for love; it was almost a longing to turn away from this great love that she possessed, as though faintly glimmering ahead of her there were the road of an ultimate destiny, leading her no longer to her beloved but away from him, defenceless, out into the soft, dry, withered expanses of some agonising desert. And she realised that this came from a distant place where their love was no longer solely between the two of them, but was something with pallid roots insecurely clutching at the world.

  When they walked together, their shadows had only the faintest tinge of colour and dangled loosely at their heels as though incapable of binding their footsteps to the ground they walked on; and the ring of hard earth under their feet was so curt and clipped, and the bare bushes so stared into the sky, that in those hours a-shudder with enormous visibility it was as if all at once all things, the mute and docile objects of this world, had weirdly disengaged themselves from them. And as the light began to fail, they themselves grew tall, towering like adventurers, like strangers, like unreal beings, spellbound by the fading echo of their own existence, knowing themselves to be full of shards of something incomprehensible to which there was nowhere any response and which was rejected by all things, so that only a broken gleam of it fell into the world, forlornly and irrelevantly flickering here and there, now in an object,
now in a vanishing thought.

  Then she could imagine belonging to another man, and it seemed not like betrayal but like some ultimate marriage, in a realm where they had no real being, where they existed only as music might, a music heard by no one, echoing back from nowhere. For then she felt her own existence merely as a line that she herself incised, gratingly, just to hear herself in the bewildering silence; it was simply something leading from one moment to the next, something in which she became, inexorably and irrelevantly, identical with whatever it was she did—and yet always remained something she could never achieve. And while it suddenly seemed to her as though perhaps they loved each other as yet only with all the loudness of a refusal to hear a faint, frantically intense and anguished call, she had a foreboding of the deeper complications and vast intricacies that came about in the intervals, in the silences, in the moments of awakening out of that uproar into the shoreless world of facts, awakening to stand, with nothing but a feeling, among mindless and mechanical happenings; and it was with the pain of their tall and lonely separateness, standing side by side—something against which all else was no more than an anaesthetising and shutting off and lulling of oneself to sleep with sheer noise—that she loved him when she thought of doing him the final, the mortal injury.

  Even weeks after such an experience her love still had this colouring; then that would gradually fade. But often, when she felt the proximity of another man, it would return, though fainter. It sufficed that there should be someone there —a man of no real concern to her, saying something of no real concern to her—and she would feel herself being gazed at as from that other realm, with a look of amazement that held the question: ‘Why are you still here?' She never felt any desire for such outsiders; it was painful to her to think of them; indeed it disgusted her. But all at once there would be that intangible wavering of the stillness around her; and then she would not know whether she was rising or sinking... .

  Claudine looked out of the window. Out there it was all just the same as before. But—whether as a result of her thoughts or for some other reason—now it was overlaid by a stale, unyielding resistance, as if she were looking through a film of something milky and repugnant. That restless, volatile, thousand-legged gaiety had become unendurably tense; it was all a prancing and trickling, all feverishly excited and mocking, with something in it of pygmy footsteps, far too lively and yet, for her, dull and dead. Here, there, it flung itself upwards, an empty clatter, a grinding past of tremendous friction.

  It was physically painful to gaze out into all that stir, for which she no longer had any feeling. All that life, which only a short while ago had been one with her emotions, was still there outside, overbearing and rigid; but as soon as she tried to draw it to her, the things crumbled away and fell to pieces under her gaze. What came about was an ugliness that twisted and turned in her eyes, as though her soul were leaning outwards there, leaning far out, taut, stretching after something, groping into emptiness.

  And all at once it occurred to her that she too just like all that was around her—spent her life passively, a captive in her own being, committed to one place, to a particular city, to one house in that city, one habitation and one sense of herself, year after year within that tiny area; and with that it seemed as though, if she were to stop and linger for one single moment, her happiness might rush past her and away, like this rumbling, roaring mass rushing through the countryside, rushing away from everything.

  This, it seemed to her, was no mere random thought. On the contrary, there was in it an element of that unbounded, uprearing blankness in which her feelings groped vainly for any support. She was impalpably assailed by something like what comes upon a climber on the rock-face: an utterly cold, still moment when she could hear herself as an unintelligible small sound on that huge surface and then, in the abrupt silence, realised the faintness of her own existence, creeping along, and how great, in contrast, and how full of dreadful forgotten sounds, was the stony brow of the void.

  And while she was shrinking from this like a delicate skin, feeling in her very fingertips the voiceless fear of thinking about herself, and while her sensations clung to her like granules and her emotions trickled away like sand, she again heard that peculiar sound: a mere point it seemed, like a bird hovering high in the empty air.

  She was overwhelmed by a sense of destiny. It lay in her having set out on this journey, in the way nature was withdrawing before her, in her having been so scared and huddled and timid even at the very beginning of the journey —scared of herself, of others, and of her happiness. And all at once her past seemed the imperfect expression of something that was yet to come.

  She continued to gaze anxiously out of the window. But gradually, under the pressure of the huge strangeness out there, her mind began to be ashamed of all its protestation and struggle, and it seemed to pause. And now it was becoming imbued with that very subtle, final, passive strength which lies in weakness, and it grew thinner and slighter than a child, softer than a sheet of faded silk. And it was only now with a mildly looming delight that she experienced this ultimate human ecstasy in being a stranger in the world, in seeming to take leave ofit, a sense of being unable to penetrateinto the world, of finding, among all her decisions, none that was meant for herself; and, being forced by them to the very edge of life, she felt the moment before the plunge into the blind vastness of empty space.

  She began obscurely to yearn for her past, wasted and exploited as it had been by people who were strangers to her —yearning for it as for the pale, weak wakefulness there was in the depths of illness, when in the house the sounds moved from one room to another and she no longer belonged anywhere, but, relieved of the pressure of her own personality, continued to lead another life, floating somewhere else.

  Outside, the landscape stormed soundlessly by. In her thoughts people grew very tall and loud and confident, and she huddled into herself, escaping from that, until there was nothing left of her but her nullity, her imponderability, a drifting somewhere towards something. And gradually the train began to travel very quietly, with long, gently rocking movements, through country that still lay under deep snow, and the sky came lower and lower until it seemed only a few paces ahead, trailing along the ground in grey, dark curtains of slowly drifting flakes. Inside the train twilight gathered, yellowish, and the outlines of her fellow-passengers were only vaguely visible : they swayed to and fro, slowly and spectrally. She was no longer aware of what she was thinking, and pleasure in being alone with strange experiences now took a quiet hold of her: it was like the play of very faint, scarcely tangible inquietudes and of great shadowy stirrings of the soul, groping for them. She tried to remember her husband, but all she could find of her almost vanished love was a weird notion as of a room where the windows had long been kept shut. She made an effort to get rid of this, but it yielded only a very little and remained lurking nearby. And the world was as pleasantly cool as a bed in which one stays behind alone... .

  Then she felt as if she were about to be faced with a decision, and she did not know why she felt this, and she was neither glad nor resentful; all she felt was that she did not want either to act or to prevent action. And her thoughts slowly wandered into the snow outside, without a backward glance, always deeper and deeper into the snow, as when one is too tired to turn back and so walks on and on.

  Towards the end of the journey the man opposite said: "An idyll, an enchanted island, a lovely woman at the centre of a fairy-tale all white dessous and lace ..." and he made a gesture towards the landscape. ‘How silly,' Claudine thought, but she could not think of anything to say.

  It was like someone knocking at the door and a big dark face floating behind pale window-panes. She did not know who this person was; she did not care who he was. All she felt was that here was someone wanting something. And now something was beginning to take on shape and become real.

  As when a faint wind rises among clouds, ordering them in a row, and slowly passes away, so she
felt the motion of this materialising reality stirring the still, soft cloudiness of her feelings—insubstantial, passing through her, passing her by.... And, as with many sensitive people, what attracted her in the unintelligible passage of events was all there was in it that did not pertain to herself, to the spirit: what she loved was the helplessness and shame and anguish of her spirit—it was like striking something weaker than oneself, a child, a woman, and then wanting to be the garment wrapped about its pain, in the darkness, alone.

  So they arrived, late in the afternoon, the train almost empty. One by one people had trickled away out of the compartments; station after station had sifted them out from among the other travellers. And now they were swept swiftly together, for there were only three sledges available for the hour's trip from the station to the township, and these had to be shared. Before Claudine knew where she was, she found herself seated with four other people in one of these small conveyances. From in front there came the unfamiliar smell of the horses steaming in the cold, and ripples of scattered light from the lanterns. But at times, too, darkness came flooding right up to the sledge, and away over it, and then she realised they were travelling between two ranks of tall trees, as though along a dark corridor that grew ever narrower the closer they came to their goal.

  Because of the cold she sat with her back to the horses. Opposite her was that man—big, bulky, encased in his fur coat. He blocked the way along which her thoughts strove to travel back home. Suddenly, as though a door had slammed, every glance of hers encountered his dark figure there before her. She was aware of glancing at him several times in order to make sure what he looked like, as though that were all that mattered now and everything else were long settled. She was excited to find that he remained entirely vague: he might have been anyone; he was no more than a sombre bulk of alien being. And sometimes this seemed to be drawing nearer to her, like a moving forest with its mass of tree-trunks. And it was like a weight upon her.