Five Women Read online

  And there was no hour, during all that time, when he did not try to work it out, asking himself what she must really be like that there was such power in her. Sometimes he would say: "Veronica ..." and feel the sweat that clung to her name, the humble and irrevocable submissiveness of being an attendant shadow and that moist and chilly resignation contenting itself with reality at second hand. And he could not help thinking of her name whenever he saw those two little curls that were so carefully stuck to her forehead as if they did not belong to her, or when he saw her smiling the way she sometimes did when they were sitting at table together and she was waiting on Aunt. And he could not help looking at her whenever Demeter spoke. But there was always some impediment, something that prevented him from being able to understand how a person like her could have become the central point of his passionate resolve. And when he thought about it all he found that even in his earliest memories there was something hovering about her like the faint acrid smoke of candles that have guttered out, an aura of things to be shunned—like the drawing-rooms of this house, motionless, asleep under dust-covers and behind drawn blinds. And only when he heard Demeter talking, saying things that were as ghastly, commonplace and colourless as that furniture which no one ever used, did he feel as if it were all like some vicious practice involving all three of them.

  And for all this, whenever he thought of her in later days, he could not help hearing only one thing: how she had said ‘no'. Three times she had said ‘no', quite suddenly, and it made her an utter stranger to him. The first ‘no' had been spoken softly, and yet it had been queerly as though detached from all that had gone before, floating through the house and away; and the second had been like the crack of a whip or like a panic-stricken clutching at something; and the third had been very quiet again, a sort of collapse, and almost like anguish in the awareness of inflicting pain.

  And at times now, when he thought of her, it seemed to him she was beautiful: of a very complex beauty, the kind one may easily forget to admire and even fall back into regarding as ugliness. And whenever she appeared before him, looming up out of the darkness of the house, which closed again behind her and lay there strangely immobile; or whenever she glided past him with that extraordinary sensuality of hers which was a sort of authority, an aura like that of some mysterious illness—he could never help remembering that she had told him he was an animal for her. This was incomprehensible and how terrifying, much bigger and more real than it had been in the past. And even when he did not see her, he conjured up her image with piercing clarity: her tall figure with the broad, rather flat breast; her low straight brow and the dense, gloomy mass of hair high-piled over those two irrelevant, gentle curls; her large, voluptuous mouth; her bare arms shadowed with faint, black down; and the way she bore her head bowed, as though that fragile neck could not support the load of it without bending, and the peculiar gentleness, at once negligent and almost shameless, with which she thrust her belly a little forward as she walked. But they hardly ever spoke to each other any more.

  Veronica had suddenly heard a bird call, and another call in answer. And that was the end of it. With that little chance happening—as it so often is with these things—there was an end to what had been; and what began now had its existence solely for her.

  For then, cautiously, hastily, like the quick touch of a soft, slightly hairy, pointed tongue, the fragrance of the tall grass and the wild flowers came flitting past their faces. And their last conversation, which had gone on and on, lingeringly, like something one has ceased to pay attention to and yet goes on turning over between one's fingers, here broke off. Veronica had felt a shock, and it was only afterwards that she realised what a strange shock it had been, recognising it by the flush in her face and by a memory that all at once came back to her across an expanse of years: there it was, all unforeseen, hot, and alive. True, a great many memories had come back to her recently, and it seemed to her she must have heard that bird-call even the previous night, and in the night before that, and one night two weeks earlier. And it seemed to her too that she had been tormented by that touch before, she did not know when, perhaps in her sleep. Recently these weird memories had been coming to her time and again, falling into her mind in droplets, falling to left and to right of something, before it and behind it: they were like swarms of birds winging towards a roosting place, her whole childhood. But this time she knew with uncanny certainty: it was the right thing, the real thing, the thing itself. It was a memory that she all at once recognised, even across that expanse of years: there it was at last, in incoherent fragments, hot, and still alive.

  In those days, so long ago, she had loved the hair of a big St. Bernard dog, especially the hair in front where the big chest-muscles rose like two hillocks over the curving bones, protruding at every step the dog took. The mass of that thick coat, and the intense golden-brown of it, overwhelmed her; it was like a treasure beyond counting and like some serene infinitude, so that whenever she tried to keep her eyes fixed on one spot her vision blurred. What she felt was no more or less than the strong, simple, inarticulate affection, the tender companionship that a fourteen-year-old girl will feel for a possession whether animate or inanimate; and yet at this point it was sometimes almost like being in a landscape. It was like walking—here were the woods and the meadow, and here the hill and the field, and in the order of it all each thing was no more than as a little stone simply and perfectly locking into a great pattern, though each, when looked at for its own sake, was seen to be terrifyingly complex and pulsating with repressed life, so marvellous that one had to pause in awe as before an animal crouching tense and still, about to spring.

  But once, when she was lying beside her dog like that, it struck her: giants must be like this, with mountains and valleys and forests of hair on their chests, and songbirds among the trees in those hairy forests, and tiny lice on the songbirds, and ... she could not follow the thought any further, but it might go on like that for ever, here too each thing fitting within the other, so tightly fitted into it that the only reason it stayed still, it seemed, was that it was under the pressure of such great and potent order. And secretly she thought : if the giants grew angry, all this would suddenly fly apart in all directions, screaming, overwhelming one, over-brimming like some terrifying cornucopia ... and if it were to fall upon her, raging with love, it would be like thundering mountains and roaring trees, and tiny windblown hairs would grow on her body, crawling with tiny insects, and there would be a voice shrieking in ecstasy because of the ineffable wonder of it all, and her breath would be like a multitude of animals enveloping everything, engulfing the world.

  And then, when she noticed that her own breathing made her small pointed breasts rise and fall in the same rhythm as the rising and falling of the shaggy chest beside her, suddenly she felt a sharp dismay and held her breath lest something happen, she did not know what. But when she could not maintain the effort any longer and had to let her breath continue to rise and fall that way, as though that other living creature were slowly drawing it out of her, breath after breath, she closed her eyes and returned to thinking of the giants : it was an uneasy procession of images behind her shut eyelids, but now much nearer to her, and warm as though low clouds were passing over her.

  And when she opened her eyes again, much later, everything was just as it had been, only that the dog was now standing beside her, looking at her. And now she suddenly became aware of something protruding from under his meerschaum-yellow coat, a pointed thing, red and crooked as though in voluptuous pain, and in the moment when she tried to get up she felt the warm, flickering caress of his tongue on her face. And then she had been so strangely paralysed, as though . . . as though she were an animal herself, and in spite of the ghastly fear that came upon her something in her cringed and was burning hot, as though now, at any moment ... like the crying of birds and a fluttering of wings in a hedge, and then a quieting down, soft as the sound of feathers sliding upon feathers... .

 
That was how it had been, that time long ago, and this now was just the same strangely hot shock of fear, so that she recognised it for what it was. For hard though it is to know what a feeling is, this at least she could tell: now, after so many years, she had felt exactly the same fear as then.

  And there stood Johannes, who was going away this very day. And here she stood. It was thirteen or fourteen years since all that had happened, and her breasts were no longer so pointed, so inquisitively red-beaked; they had dropped a little and were now faintly mournful, like two paper hats abandoned on a wide floor—for her chest had broadened and it was as though the very space surrounding her had grown away from her. But she was aware of this less from seeing it in the looking-glass—for it was a long time since, being naked, in her bath or changing her clothes, she had done anything but mechanically go through the necessary motions —than from a feeling. It seemed to her that formerly she had been able to lock herself tight in her clothes, armouring herself on every side, whereas now she merely covered herself with them. And when she thought about her sense of her bodily self; she realised that in earlier days she had had an awareness of herself emanating from within, a sense of being something like a round, tense drop of water; and now for a long time she had been like a small puddle, soft-edged, on the ground. So flattened, so slack and inelastic this feeling was that it would have amounted to no more than sluggishness and torpor had it not been for something else, something incomparably soft in her that very slowly, and with a thousand gingerly caressing folds, clung to her from within.

  Surely there had been a time when she had been closer to life and had felt it more distinctly, as though touching it with her own hands, feeling it bodily. But for a long time now she had ceased to know what it was like; all she knew was that at some point in time something had come between her and life, leaving a barrier between. And she had never known what it was, whether a dream or some day-time sense of creeping anxiety, whether there had been something she had seen that had frightened her or if it was just that she was afraid of seeing things with her own eyes. She had not known it until today. For in the meantime her dim everyday existence had overlaid those old impressions and blurred them as even a light persistent breeze blots out traces in sand. Only the monotony of it had been with her, a sort of humming within her, now fainter, now louder. She no longer knew any intense pleasure or intense suffering; there was nothing that stood out in relief from the rest of her life, and gradually it had all become a mere blur. The days went by one like the other; and, one like the other, the years advanced. She still could feel that each year took something away from her and added something to her and that she was slowly changing with them; yet none of them stood out distinct from the others. Her sense of herself was now vague and fluid, and when she probed her own being all she could discover was the shifting of veiled, indefinite forms, as if she were touching something that stirred under a blanket, without being able to identify it. Gradually it became more and more as though she were living under a woollen blanket herself, or under a bell-shaped cover made of thin horn, which was becoming more and more opaque. Things around her were retreating further and further into the distance, losing their individual features, and her sense of herself seemed to be sinking into the distance too. Between her feelings and herself there was now a vast empty space, and in this void her body lived; it recognised the things around it, it smiled, it was animate, but whatever happened was without coherence or meaning, and often now a gluey disgust oozed soundlessly through this world of hers, smearing all sensations as with a mask of pitch.

  And it was only when this strange emotion began to work in her, which had reached its peak today, that she had begun to wonder whether everything might not yet be again the way it had once been. And later she had even wondered whether this might not be love. Love? A long time it would have been on the way, and slow in coming; slow it would have been on its way. And yet even such slowness was too swift for the rhythm of her life; for the rhythm of her life was slower still, it was very slow, it was now no more than a languid opening and closing of the eyes, with, in the interval, a momentary glance that could not focus on things, that slid off and away from them, slid slowly away, untouched by anything. It was with such a gaze that she had seen it coming, and that was why she could not believe it was love.

  She dreaded him as obscurely as she dreaded all things alien to her, an aversion without the sharp edge of hatred, merely as if he were a distant country beyond the frontier where one's own land merges softly and mournfully with the sky. But since that time she realised that all happiness had gone out of her life because something made her feel abhorrence of all that was not herself; and whereas formerly she had felt like someone who does not know the inner meaning of her own actions, now it seemed to her that she had merely forgotten that meaning and might perhaps begin to remember it. And the notion of something marvellous that would then come about tormented her like a memory drifting just below the surface of consciousness—a sense of something important she had forgotten. And all this began at the time of Johannes' return, when in the very first instant she recalled, without knowing why, how Demeter had once struck him and how Johannes had smiled.

  Since then she felt as if someone had come who possessed whatever it was she lacked, carrying it with him as he went quietly on his way through the twilit wilderness of her life. It was simply that he was there, going on his way, and that as he looked at things they slowly and falteringly began to fall into a pattern before her eyes. It seemed to her sometimes, when he smiled in a startled way at himself, that it was as if he were breathing the world in and holding it in his body, feeling it within him, and then when he set it down before him again, very gently and carefully, he appeared to her like a circus-performer juggling with his hoops all alone, just for himself; it was no more than that. And yet it was anguish to her, in the intensity of her own unseeing imagination, to think how beautiful everything might well be for him; she was jealous of something she merely imagined he might be feeling. For although the ordered picture of the world continually crumbled away under her gaze, and although what she felt for things was only the avid love that a mother feels for a child she lacks the strength to guide, still, at times now her languor would begin to vibrate like a string, like a note sounding at once deep within the ear and somewhere in the world, rising in a great vault, kindling a light ... a light and people whose gestures were a long-drawn yearning, lines extending far, far away and meeting far, far away in the infinite.

  He said these were ideals, and that gave her the courage to believe it might all come true. And perhaps all she was doing was trying to stand up straight: but it was still painful, as if her body were sick and incapable of supporting her.

  And it was then too that all her other memories began to come back to her, all except one. They all came, and she did not know why, and only had a vague sense that one was still missing and that it was only for the sake of that one missing memory that all the others had come. And the idea grew in her that Johannes might be able to help her to find it, and that her whole life depended on remembering this one forgotten thing. And she also realised that what gave her the feeling was not some strength in him, but his quietness, his weakness, that quiet invulnerable weakness of his that was a vast background to all he did, an empty landscape where he was alone with whatever happened to him. But that was as far as her understanding would take her, and she was perturbed and she suffered because whenever she thought herself close to recovering that memory, all she remembered was an animal. What often came to her mind when she thought ofJohannes was animals—or Demeter—and she obscurely felt that he and she had a common enemy and tempter in Demeter. For her he was like a huge, rampant growth overshadowing her memory, sucking the strength out of it. And she did not know whether all this was caused by the thing she had forgotten or whether it was a hint of some meaning that must yet take on shape. Was this love? Something in her was on the move; something was drawing her onward. She herself
did not know what it was. It was like walking along a road apparently towards a destination, but with a premonition that gradually made one's footsteps falter—a premonition that at some point before the end one would suddenly find an entirely different road and recognise it for one's own.

  But he did not understand that; he did not know how difficult it was for her, this wavering sense of a life that was to arise for him and her, based on something still quite unknown to her, whereas he desired her in all simple reality as his wife or lover. She could not comprehend that; to her it seemed meaningless and at that moment almost vile. She had never experienced any direct and simple desire; but never at any other time had men seemed to her so absolutely a mere pretext, one that no time should be wasted on, a token of something else that was no more than elusively embodied in them. And suddenly she withdrew into herself and crouched there in her own darkness, staring at him, an& with amazement, for the first time, felt this withdrawal to be like a sensual contact and abandoned herself to it with a lecherous awareness of doing so right before his eyes and yet out of his reach. Something in her bristled, soft and electric as a cat's fur—bristled with antagonism to him. And she let her ‘no' roll out of her hiding-place, right to his feet, following it with her eyes as if it were a little glittering marble... . And then, when he was about to crush it under his heel, she screamed.

  And now, when there at last the leave-taking was, erect and inexorable between them, walking between them as they walked together for the last time, all at once it happened: suddenly, fully defined and clear, that utterly lost, forgotten thing came back to Veronica's memory. She recognised it only with her feelings, without knowing how she did so, and she was a shade disappointed because there was nothing in it to tell her why it mattered; but it was like entering into a refreshing coolness.