Five Women Read online

  Then she heard the man outside walking cautiously away. And even through the turmoil in her rapt senses she realised : all this was betrayal itself, greater and weightier than the mere lie.

  Slowly she began to rise on her knees, spellbound by the baffling thought that by now it might all have really happened, and she trembled like someone who has escaped from danger by mere chance, not by any effort of his own. She tried to picture it. She saw her body lying underneath that stranger's body, saw it with a lucidity that branches out into every smallest detail, like spilt water seeping into every cranny. She felt her own pallor and heard the shameful words of abandonment and saw above her the man's eyes, holding her down, hovering over her, like the outspread wings of a bird of prey. And all the time she was thinking: ‘This is betrayal!' And now she pictured herself at home again after all this and how he would say: ‘I can't feel you from inside....' And she had no answer but a helpless smile, a smile that tried to say: ‘Believe me, it was not meant against us....'

  And yet there was one knee still pressed against the floor —a senseless, alien thing—and she felt her very existence in it, inaccessible, with all the forlorn, defenceless frailty there is in the ultimate human potentialities that no word can hold fast and no return can ever weave into the pattern of life as it once has been.

  She was empty of thought. She did not know if she was doing wrong. Everything turned into strange and lonely grief—and the grief itself was like another room around her, enclosing a gentle darkness, a diffuse, floating room, softly rising in the air. And then gradually she perceived a strong, clear, indifferent light shining from above. In it she saw everything she did, her own gestures of surrender, and the abandonment of her innermost being, torn out of her in ecstasy, all that in its enormity seemed so real and yet was mere appearance.... There it lay, crumpled, small, and cold, all its relevance lost, far, far below her... .

  And after a long time it seemed to her as if a cautious hand were again trying the door, and she knew he was there outside, listening intently. A whirling dizziness took hold of her, almost forcing her to creep to the door on all fours and draw back the bolt.

  But she remained crouching on the floor in the middle of the room. Once again something held her back—a sense of her own sordidness, the atmosphere of the past. Like a single, violent thrust cutting her sinews, there was the thought that perhaps it was all nothing but a relapse into her past. She raised her hands above her head. ‘Oh my beloved, help me, help me!' she cried out in her thoughts, and felt the cry was true. And yet it was only a soft, caressing thought: ‘We moved towards each other, mysteriously drawn through space, through all the years ... and now, by sad and hurtful ways, I enter into you.'

  And then there was stillness, a great expanse: strength that had been painfully dammed up now pouring in through the breaches in the walls. Like a quiet, mirroring pool of water her life lay there before her, past and future united in the present moment. There are things one can never do—one does not know why. Perhaps those are the most important things? Indeed one knows they are the most important things. And one knows: a deadly languor lies upon life, one feels the stiffness and numbness of it as in frozen fingers. And sometimes again it loosens its hold, dissolves like snow and ice on meadows—one marvels, one is a sombre brightness expanding far, far away. But life, one's own hard and bony life, one's irrevocable life, resumes its callous grip—somewhere the links close—one does nothing at all.

  Suddenly she rose to her feet, and the thought that now she must do this drove her soundlessly forward. Her hands drew the bolt back. There was no sound. The door did not move. And then she opened the door and looked out into the passage: there was no one there. In the dim light from the lamp the bare walls stared at each other through empty space. He had gone without her hearing it.

  She went to bed, her mind full of self-reproaches. And, already on the borders of sleep, she thought : ‘I am hurting you.' But at the same time she had the strange feeling: ‘It is you who do whatever I am doing.' And sinking towards oblivion she knew: ‘We are casting away everything that can be cast away, to hold on to each other all the more tightly, to wrap around us closely what no one can touch.' Then for an instant, thrown up into wakefulness, she thought: ‘This man will triumph over us. But what is triumph?'

  Sinking back into sleep, her thoughts slid down along that question into the depths and her bad conscience accompanied her like a last caress. A vast egoism, deepening and darkening the world, rose over her as over someone dying. Behind closed eyes she saw bushes and clouds and birds, and she became quite small among them, and yet it all seemed to be there only for her sake. And then there was the moment of closing up, of shutting out everything alien; and on the threshold of dream there was perfection, a great and pure love mantling her in a trembling light, dissolution of all apparent contradictions.

  The visitor did not return. She slept undisturbed, her door unlatched—quiet as a tree on a meadow.

  With the next morning a mild, mysterious day began.

  She woke as though behind bright curtains keeping out all the reality of the light outside. She went for a walk; and he accompanied her. Her mind swayed with an intoxicaton that came from the blueness of the air and the whiteness of the snow. They walked to the edge of the little town, and there the white plain before them lay radiant and festive.

  They stood by a fence and looked at a small path behind it. A peasant woman was throwing corn to her hens. A patch of lichen shone yellow in the wintry light.

  "Do you think?" Claudine asked, gazing back through the street and up into the pale blue air; but she did not finish her sentence. After a while she said: "Look at that wreath—I wonder how long it's been hanging there. Does the air feel it? Is it alive?" That was all she said and she did not even know why she said that. He smiled.

  She stood beside him, and it was as if everything were engraved in metal, still trembling from the pressure of the engraver's burin. And while she felt him looking at her, observing her, something within her fell into shape and lay wide and brilliant as fields lie one next to the other under the eyes of a circling bird.

  ‘This life, now bright blue, now dark—somewhere a small bright patch of yellow—what is the meaning of it? This voice calling to the hens, this faint patter of the strewn grains of corn, and then all at once something that strikes across it all like the tolling of a bell on the hour—what does it say, and to whom? This thing without a name, eating its way down into the depths and only sometimes shooting up through the narrow slit of seconds and flashing through some passer-by and at other times lying as though dead—what can it mean?' She looked around with quiet eyes and felt all the things about her without thinking of them, felt them as one feels the touch of hands laid on one's forehead when there is nothing more to say.

  And after that she listened merely with a smile. It was obvious that he felt he was carefully drawing his net tighter round her, and she let him have his way. While he talked to her she felt no more than one feels when walking between houses, hearing people talk indoors. The pattern of her thoughts was sometimes invaded by another current, which drew her thoughts along with it, now this way, now that; and she would follow of her own free will—then for a short time, half emerging from shadowy depths, would almost return to herself, and once again would follow the current, would sink. Softly and silently the entangling flow of it took her captive.

  And in between she felt this man's love of himself as intensely as if it were a feeling of her own. His tenderness towards himself infected her with a faint sensual excitement. It was like entering a realm where everything was hushed, and silent decisions prevailed, decisions not of one's own making. She knew herself hard pressed and knew herself to be giving way, but it no longer mattered. Something far within her was like a bird upon a branch, singing... .

  She ate a light supper and went to bed early. There was a deadness in things now; she no longer felt any erotic excitement. Yet after a short sleep she woke, thin
king: ‘He's downstairs, waiting.' She groped for her clothes and dressed, simply got up and dressed—without feeling, without thought, with only a remote awareness of doing wrong; and then perhaps, at the very last moment, there was a sense of being exposed and defenceless. And so she went downstairs.

  The room was deserted. The tables and chairs were tense and still, looming indistinctly in the silence of the night. In one corner, there he sat.

  She said something, without quite knowing what—perhaps: "I was feeling so alone there upstairs...." And she knew just how he was bound to misinterpret it. After a while he took her hand. She rose, hesitated, and then ran out of the room. She knew this was behaving like any silly little woman, and there was a thrill in that. On the stairs she heard footsteps behind her. The stairs creaked. Her thoughts were suddenly very remote and abstract, but her body was trembling like an animal hunted down, deep in the forest.

  Then, sitting in her room, he said: "You are in love with me, aren't you? I grant you, I'm no artist or philosopher, I'm just human—but a whole man, yes, I think I may say, a whole man."

  "What is a whole man?" she asked.

  "What a queer question!" he exclaimed, chafing.

  "No, that's not what I mean," she said. "I'm thinking how odd it is that one can be fond of someone just because one is fond of him—fond of his eyes, his tongue—not his words, but the sound of them...."

  He kissed her and said: "So that is how you love me?"

  Claudine found the strength to answer: "No, what I love is being with you—the fact, the mere chance, of being with you. One might equally well be among the Eskimos, wearing trousers made of skins, and have drooping breasts. And be delighted with it all. Can't there, after all, be other kinds of whole people?"

  But he said: "You're mistaken. You are in love with me. Only you can't face it yet. And just that is the sign of true passion."

  Involuntarily something in her shrank when she realised how he was assuming possession of her.

  But he murmured: "No, don't say anything."

  Claudine was silent. But while they were undressing, she began to talk—again out-of-place, aimless, even senseless talk, merely like a disconsolate movement of her hands, an urge to stroke and smooth away, a sort of by-play.... "It's like slipping through a narrow pass—suddenly everything's changed. Animals, people, flowers, oneself—it's all quite different. You wonder: if I'd always lived here, how would I think about this, how would I feel about that? Isn't it odd that there's only a line—only one line one has to cross? I should like to kiss you and then jump back across that line and look from over there. And then jump back to you, time and again. And each time, crossing the frontier, surely I'd feel it more and more distinctly. I should grow paler all the time, people would die—no, not die, shrink, shrivel up... . And so would the trees and animals. And in the end there'd be nothing left but faint, faint smoke . . . and then only a tune ... floating through the air ... over a void...."

  And all at once she said: "Go away. Please.... It sickens me."

  But he only smiled.

  "Please go away," she said.

  And then she felt in horror how, in spite of everything, her body was swelling up with lust. Yet at the back of her mind there was a shadowy memory of something she had once experienced on a day in spring: a state that was like giving herself to everyone and yet belonging only to the one beloved... .

  And from a long way off—as children say of God: He is great—she saw and knew the image of her love.

  The Temptation of Quiet Veronica

  Somewhere there are two voices. Perhaps they merely lie mute on the pages of a diary, now side by side, now intertwining, according as the pages come: the woman's a dark deep voice that is from the first instant rounded, self-collected, and yet enclosed by the mellow, expansive, ever expanding voice of the man, and the man's voice with many ramifications, like a thing unfinished, the sound of it revealing all that the speaker has had no time to conceal. Or perhaps not even that. Or perhaps after all there is, somewhere in the world, a point towards which these two voices—scarcely distinguishable as they are amid the dull confusion of everyday humdrum noises—dart like two rays of light, there at last to mingle. Perhaps one should feel the need to search for that point, which may be nearer than one thinks, though it betrays its nearness only in a stirring like that of a music not yet audible, but already imprinted, in heavy folds vaguely outlined in the still impenetrable curtain of things far off. If one found it, perhaps these scattered fragments here would once more assume their wholeness, would shed their malady and weakness, and stand erect and firm in the lucidity of day.

  "Oh wheeling and revolving of things!" It was afterwards that he spoke to it as though it were a person: afterwards, in those days of fearful crisis when he was suspended between imagination—now drawn tight as a sheerest thread by some imperceptible certainty—and the accustomed reality of every day. It was in those days when he made a desperate last effort to drag the incomprehensible other thing into the realm of hither reality and then, in his exhaustion, surrendered, letting himself fall back into the simplicity of real life as though into a mound of warm and tumbled pillows. It was then that he spoke to it as though it were a person.

  There was no hour in those days when he did not talk to himself; and he talked aloud because he was afraid. Something had sunk deep into him with all the unintelligible, irresistible force of a pain suddenly intensifying somewhere in the body and turning into a mass of inflamed tissue and assuming ever more tangible reality, until finally and unmistakably it is there as an illness and asserts its domination over the body, smiling the torturer's mild, ambiguous smile.

  "Oh, wheeling and revolving of things!" Johannes cried out imploringly. "Oh, would that you were also outside of me!" And he would cry : "Would that you had a garment so that I could clutch the hem of it and hold you fast! Would that I might speak with you! That I might say: You are God. And I would keep a little pebble under my tongue when I spoke to you, to make it more real! Oh, that I could say: I commend myself to you, you will help me, you who watch all that I do. For do what I may, something of me lies utterly still, still as the centre of a turning wheel, and that is you”

  But as it was he merely lay with his mouth in the dust, and his heart groped for this thing as a child might grope in yearning. And all he knew was that he needed it because he was a coward; that he knew. And yet it was something that happened as though to draw strength out of his weakness, a strength of which he had a premonition and which lured him on as nothing else had ever allured him except somethingsometimes—in his youth: the mighty, still faceless head of some great force as yet only dimly apprehended, yet making a man feel that his shoulders might grow up into it from below and that he might wear it as his own head, his own face fusing with it, gazing out of it.

  And once he had said to Veronica: "It is God." He was timid and pious then—that had been long ago; it had been his first attempt to give a shape to this indefinable thing of which they both felt the presence. In the dark house they glided past each other, upstairs and downstairs, always passing each other by. But when he had put it into those words, the words had lost their meaning and told nothing of what he meant.

  Yet what he meant was, at that time, perhaps only something like those patterns one may see in stones, or in the cracks of a wall, in clouds, in swirling water: intimations of no one knows what, or where, or what its full reality may be. What he meant was perhaps only the indecipherable manifestation of something that is itself not yet there; perhaps it was like those rare expressions that will appear on a face to which they have no relevance, being relevant only to other faces suddenly surmised beyond the horizon of visible things—little tunes amid the sound of wind or water, feelings flickering through people. Indeed there were feelings in him that, when he groped for them with words, turned out to be something else: not yet feelings at all, but only as if something in him had extended beyond him, the tips of it already dipping into some liquesc
ence—his fear, his stillness, his taciturnity—as things sometimes do extend on fever-bright spring days when their shadows creep out beyond them and lie as quietly, all flowing in one direction, as reflections lie in the mirror of a stream.

  And what he often said to Veronica was this: it was not really fear or weakness that he felt, but something like the vague dread that may hover, like a rustling of leaves, about some experience that one does not yet know, has not even glimpsed; that it was the way one sometimes is quite sure, though without understanding why, that dread has the aura of a woman or that weakness will some time be a morning in a country house and the air outside filled with the trilling of birds. It was in this strange condition that he lived; and so it was that such vague patterns arose in his mind, defying definition.

  Once, however, Veronica looked at him with her large, quietly unconsenting eyes—they were sitting alone in one of the big shadowy rooms—and asked:

  "So there's something in you too, is there, that you can't feel or really understand, and you only call it God, thinking of it as outside yourself and as something real because you have thought it, as though it would then take you by the hand? And perhaps it is the thing you never want to call cowardliness or softness? Something imagined in human shape, capable of hiding you among the folds of its garment? And you use such words as ‘God' for something that has direction but no substance, for something that is movement although there is nothing that moves, for visions that never emerge all the way into the light of real day—you use such words for it, do you, because the words in their dark robes come walking out of another world, with the assurance of strangers who come from some great realm where all is well ordered, and they walk like living people? Tell me, is it because they come like the living and because at any price you must feel that they are real?"