Five Women Read online

  She could feel that once before in her life something about Johannes had given her a sudden fright just like this; but she could not understand what the connection was, why it should have meant so much to her, or what it was to mean for the future—only it all at once seemed as if she were again in the same point on her road, at the very place where she had lost him once before. And she realised that here and now, at this moment, the real experience, her experience of the real Johannes, had passed its zenith and was over. At this moment she felt as if everything were falling apart. Although they were standing close together, for her things were all at a slant, so that he and she seemed to be sliding further and further away from each other. Veronica looked at the trees by the side of the road, and they seemed to be standing straighter and stiffer than was natural. And only now did she feel the full weight of the ‘no' she had uttered in bewilderment and merely in premonition of all this, and realised that it was because of that ‘no' that he was going away, without wanting to go. And for a while she felt inwardly as deep and heavy as if there were two bodies lying beside each other, each body separate and sad, and each of them merely what it was in itself; and she knew it was because what she felt had almost turned into abandonment after all. And something came over her that made her small and weak, reducing her almost to nothingness, until she was like a small dog whimpering and limping on three legs, or like a tattered pennant fluttering but droopingly in a very faint breath of wind: so utterly did it dissolve her. And there was a yearning in her to hold him—a yearning that was like the softness of a broken-shelled snail faintly twitching in its search for another, yearning to stick to it tightly even as it dies.

  But then she looked at him, and she herself hardly knew what she was thinking, except for an inkling that the only thing she did know about it all—this sudden memory that was there now, lying in her all shining, solitary—was very far from being anything that had a meaning in itself: it was something that some great fear had once prevented from coming to perfection, and since then it had lain within her, hardened and encapsulated, blocking the way for something that might have developed in her, and it must fall out of her like a foreign body. For even now her feeling for Johannes was beginning to ebb and flow away from her—something that had long lain as though dead, impotent, captive beneath that feeling, had broken loose, a broad liberating flood that swept the feeling away with it. And instead of her feeling for Johannes, something else, far in the distances at last revealed within her, grew like a dome, a radiance floating into the heights, effortlessly, unendingly exalted, a random glitter apprehended as if through webs of dream.

  And the talk that was going on between their outer selves grew halting, their interchanges briefer. And while they were still struggling with it, Veronica could feel how in the gaps between their words it was turning into something else, and she realised with finality that he had to go away, and she said no more. All they had been saying and trying to say seemed to her futile, since it was decided that he must go and would never return. And because she realised that she no longer had any wish at all to do what she might perhaps otherwise even now have done, whatever was left of it all abruptly assumed a rigid and incomprehensible look. She knew of no meaning and no reason for this sudden change; it was a quick, hard fact, definite as a cast die.

  And as he was still standing there before her amid the tangle of his words, she began to feel how inadequate his presence was, how irrelevant it was that he was really there with her. The reality of it weighed heavily on something in her that was striving to soar and bear away with it the memory of him. At every point she was impeded by his living presence as one might stumble against a dead body, stiff and hostile in its resistance to any effort to shift it. And when she noticed how intently he was still gazing at her, Johannes seemed like a big animal that was lying upon her in exhaustion and which she could not shake off. And once more she felt that memory of hers within her like a small hot object that she clutched tight in her hands, and suddenly something almost made her put out her tongue at him—a sensation strangely midway between flight and enticement, almost like a she-animal's reaction when, hard-pressed, she snaps at her pursuer.

  Now the wind began to rise again, and on it her feelings widened out, floating free of all that was hard, resistant, and full of hate—not that she abandoned that, but it went deep down into her, drawn in like something very soft, until there was nothing left of it but a forlorn dismay in which she seemed to be wrapped: and it was as if in leaving it behind she also left herself behind. And everything else, all around her, was tremulous with premonitions. The opacity that had hitherto lain heavily upon her life, like a dark mist, was now stirring. It was as if the outlines of objects long sought in vain had become recognisable through a veil, only to vanish again. And although nothing of this appeared so clearly that her fingers could have grasped it, everything sliding away elusively between the quiet, fumbling words she and Johannes spoke while here was nothing really to say, yet all the words that must now remain unspoken seemed already visible from a long way off, like things in a landscape seen from a high promontory, and all shone with that queerly vibrant meaning which condenses everyday events into significance when they are re-enacted on a stage, rising up as pointers along some road not delineated on flat and stony ground. What had spread over the world was like a very sheer silken mask, bright and silver-grey, flickering as though at any moment it might tear. And she kept her gaze fixed on it until her eyes dazzled, unable to focus, as if she were being shaken by gusts of some invisible force.

  So they stood side by side. And as the wind came blowing more and more strongly along the road and was like some marvellously soft and fragrant animal laying itself upon things, on her face, on the nape of her neck, in her armpits . . . breathing everywhere, its soft velvety fur overlaying everything and, at every breath she drew, pressing tighter on her skin ... both her horror and her expectation dissolved in a languid warmth that began to circle round her, mute and blind and slow, like blood blown by the wind. And suddenly she could not help thinking of something she had once been told: that millions of infinitesimal living entities have their habitation on every human being and that with every drawn breath and every breath exhaled there are incalculable rivers of life that come and go. She lingered for an instant in astonishment at this thought, feeling a warmth and a darkness as though being borne along in a huge crimson wave. But then she sensed another presence within this sweltering bloodstream.

  She looked up, and there he stood before her, his hair blown towards her in the wind, the quivering tips of it almost touching her own. And now she was overtaken by a wild, shrieking desire that was like two swarms of birds plunging and intermingling as they fly, and she would gladly have torn her life out of her body and poured it all over him out of the sheltering, burning darkness of drunken turmoil. But their bodies stood there stiff and unyielding, with closed eyes, merely allowing it all to happen secretly, as though they must not know of it. And they grew more and more tired and empty, stooping slightly, and then it was all very gentle and quiet and there was a deep and tender hush as though they were silently bleeding to death, the blood running into each other's veins.

  And as the wind rose it seemed to her as though his blood were mounting from the earth on which they stood, mounting under her skirts, filling her body with stars and chalices, blue and yellow, and there was a light touch as of delicate tendrils and a very still, voluptuous delight such as flowers may feel when they conceive by the wind.

  And when the sun was setting, sending its rays through the hem of her skirts, she was still standing there, quiescent and without a word and abandoned to this light, as shameless as though she knew everyone could see. And as in some far off oblivion she had a sense, even now, of that greater yearning which was yet to be fulfilled. But at this moment all that was as muted and sad as if far, far off there were bells ringing. And so the two of them stood there, side by side, grave and tall—two enormous animals, their backs
bowed, outlined against the evening sky.

  The sun had set. Veronica walked back, alone and meditative, along the path between meadows and fields.

  i'~lll1ll~l'G From this leave-taking, as though from a broken husk on the ground, there had risen a sense of her own existence; it was suddenly so firm and solid that she felt like a knife plunged into that other person's life. Everything was clearly defined: he had gone away and was going to kill himself. She did not question it; it was simply a thing as majestically oppressive as some ponderous, dark form lying on the earth. It seemed as irrevocable as a dividing-line sliced through time, with everything that was previous to it eternally fixed and petrified. This day leapt out from the row of all the other days with the sudden flash of a drawn sword; indeed, it was as if she positively could see her soul's relationship to that other soul, a relationship that had now become final and unalterable, before her in mid-air like the broken branch of a tree pointing upwards into eternity.

  At moments she felt tenderness for Johannes, to whom she owed this; and then again she would feel nothing, only the sense of her own walking. What urged her on was the knowledge that her destiny was solitude and nothing else; and with this she walked on between meadows and fields.

  The world grew small in the dusk. And gradually Veronica began to be borne along by a strange pleasure that was like cruelly thin air: she inhaled it with twitching nostrils till it filled her lungs and buoyed her up; her arms reached out into the distance, and her steps became so light that her feet lost touch with the ground and she was carried away high over the woods.

  She felt so volatile, she was almost sick with delight. Nor did this tension release her until she put her hand on the outer door of the house. It was a small, solid, rounded door. When she locked it after her it was like an impenetrable barrier, and she stood in the darkness as though at the bottom of a still, subterranean pool of water. Slowly she took a few paces ahead, feeling the proximity of the cool enclosing walls, though she did not touch them. It was a queerly secret, furtively-familiar feeling; she knew that now she was home.

  Then she quietly did all that she had to do, and the day drew to its end like all the other days. From time to time the thought of Johannes loomed up among her other thoughts, and then she would glance at the clock and guess where he must be by now. Once, however, she made an effort not to think of him for a long time, and when she did think of him again she realised that now the train must be travelling through the mountain valleys southwards into the night, and an unknown landscape shut her out, leaving her behind in darkness.

  She went to bed and soon fell asleep. But she slept lightly and impatiently as someone for whom the next day there is something extraordinary in store. Under her eyelids there was a perpetual radiance, and towards morning it grew still brighter, seeming to expand, until it became immeasurably vast. When Veronica awoke she knew: it was the sea.

  By now he must be in sight of the sea, and there was nothing more that he need do except carry out his resolve. She imagined that he would take a boat and row far out and —then there would be a shot. But she did not know when this would be. She began guessing and trying to work it out in various ways. Would he go straight from the railway-station to find a boat? Or would he wait until evening? Till evening, when the sea was a great expanse of utter calm, gazing at one as though with enormous eyes? All day she went about in such uneasiness that it was as though her skin were all the time being pricked with tiny pins. Now and then, from here or there—perhaps out of a gilded frame glittering on a wall, or out of the darkness of the stairwell, or out of the white linen that she was embroidering Johannes' face would loom up. Pale, with purplish lips, bloated and distorted from being in the water.... Or merely a black lock of hair over a shattered forehead. And now and then she was invaded by drifting fragments of tenderness that came as though on the returning tide. And when it was evening she knew that now it must be over.

  Yet somewhere in the remote depths of her being there was a vague thought that it was all senseless: this expectation of hers and this way in which she was treating things unknown to her as though they were reality. From time to time the notion would flit through her mind that Johannes was not dead, and it was as if something were snatching at a large soft blanket, and for an instant such a fragment of reality would leap up, only to collapse again. Then she would feel the evening outside gliding around the house, and felt how silent and how ordinary it all was. And it was like thinking: Once there was a night; it came and went. She knew it. But then this feeling died away. Slowly a profound peace sank over her, and a sense of mystery, sinking in innumerable folds.

  And so the night came, this one night of her life when all that had ever taken form under the twilit blanket of the long malaise that her existence was, all that had been dammed off from reality, became like a drop of acid corroding everything, spreading into weird patterns of unimaginable experience; and now at long last it had the force to break through into her consciousness.

  Driven by some urge that she could not account for, she lit all the candles in her room and sat there among them, unmoving in the centre of it. Then she took out a portrait of Johannes and set it before her. But it no longer seemed that what she had been waiting for had anything to do with Johannes and his fate; nor did it seem to be within her either, as anything she imagined. What she all at once realised was that it was some sense of her surroundings that had changed, expanding into an unknown territory halfway between dream and waking.

  The space between herself and the objects around her ceased to be emptiness; instead there was a strange network of relations. All the objects were in their places—the table, the wardrobe, the clock on the wall—as solidly there as though nothing could ever shift them; and they were all as though heavily loaded with themselves, distinct from her and as firmly locked into themselves as a clenched fist. And yet at moments it was as though they were within her, or they gazed at her as if they had eyes, gazing out of some space that lay like a sheet of glass between herself and her room. And they were there as though for many years they had been waiting only for this one evening in order to find themselves, curving and bulging, arching high, with something emanating from them that was a kind of excess—until the sense of the moment rose like a hollow cube around Veronica and she herself became a silent room full of flickering candles, herself a room enclosing everything. And sometimes she was overcome with exhaustion after so much tension, and then it seemed that she was no more than a shining; and a radiance would flare up in her limbs, and she would feel it like a weight upon her and grow tired under the load of her own being, as one grows tired in the circle of light under a softly humming lamp. And her thoughts moved through this radiance and out into the bright sleepiness, like thin-tipped tendrils, a now visible pattern of delicate capillaries. And everything became more and more silent; veils sank about her, softly as drifts of snow floating down before the illumined windows of her conscious mind; and now and then there was a crackling, jagged flash of great light.... But after a while she rose once more to the limits of this strangely tense state of wakefulness, and all at once she had the distinct awareness: this is what Johannes is like now, he is within this other dimension of reality, within this kind of transformed space.

  Children and dead people have no souls. But the soul that living people have is what prevents them from loving,no matter how much they may want to; it is that which, in all love, withholds a residue. Veronica was in this moment aware that the thing that cannot be given away by even the greatest love is the very thing that endues all emotions with direction, steering them away from whatever clings to them with timorous faith, the one thing that endues all emotions with something that is inaccessible to even the most dear beloved: something that is always ready to turn away and leave. It is something that even as it comes towards the beloved will smile and, as though keeping some secret pledge, turn and glance back the other way. But children and dead people are either not yet anything or no longer anything,
and so it seems possible to believe that they may yet become everything, or that they have been it; they are like the hollowed-out reality of empty vessels, lending their shape to dreams. Children and dead people have no soul—no soul of such a kind. Nor have animals. To Veronica animals were terrifying, a menace in their ugliness; yet in their eyes there was that pin-bright glint of here and now, the falling droplet of oblivion.

  To those who are searching without any definite aim the soul is something like that. All her sombre life long Veronica had been in dread of one kind of love and had yearned for another kind; in dreams it is sometimes the way she yearned for it to be. The things that really happen take their course in the full strength of what they are, hugely, draggingly, and yet like something that is within the person to whom they happen. It hurts, but just the way it does when one hurts oneself; it is humiliating, yet a humiliation like that floats away like a cloud drifting nowhere, and there is no one there to see it; such a humiliation floats like the blissful floating of a dark cloud.... So she wavered between Johannes and Demeter.... And dreams are not within one, nor are they rags and tatters of reality; somewhere there is a totality of feeling where they are at home and grow high, arching into a dome, hovering, weightless, like one fluid in another. In dreams one abandons oneself to a beloved the way one fluid merges with another; there is an altered sense of space, for the awakened soul is a hollow space within space and cannot ever be filled—the soul causes the space around it to warp and become like ice that is full of bubbles.

  Veronica could now recall that she had sometimes dreamed. Never before tonight had she realised that. All she had known was that at times when she had wakened it had been as if she had become accustomed to some other rhythm, and she had then collided with the confining walls of her conscious mind; and yet somewhere there was a chink through which she could still see brightness ... only a chink, yet she could sense the vastness of the space that lay beyond. And now it occurred to her that she must have dreamt often. And she gazed through the substance of her waking life and saw the life and pattern of her dreams, just as with the returning memory of conversations and actions long ago there also returns the memory of a pattern of emotions and thoughts that has long been overlaid. It is as one may often have remembered words that were spoken in the past, and then, after many years, one suddenly recalls too that all during that conversation there had been bells chiming, chiming.... Such were the talks she had had with Johannes, and such with Demeter. And underlying all those spoken words she now began to recognise the dog, the rooster, and a clenched fist striking a face.... And then there was Johannes speaking of God. Slowly, clingingly, as a snail moves, his words slid over it all.