Five Women Read online

  Veronica too had always known, somewhere in the realm of all that is indifferent : there is an animal, its skin malodorous, loathsomely slimy, an animal that everyone knows. But in her mind it was merely a restless, vaguely outlined dark thing that sometimes went sliding along under her waking consciousness, or a forest, endless and tender as a man asleep.

  II

  In her it had nothing of the animal about it, except for certain lines of its effect upon her soul, as it were lines extended beyond their proper length.... And then Demeter would say: ‘I only need to bend down' ... and Johannes would say, right in the middle of the day: ‘Something in me has sunk deeper, grown longer'.... And there would be a very soft, pallid wish in her that Johannes might be dead.

  And—in some vague way, even while she was still awake —there was a mad, quiet way she had of looking at him when she would let her glances slide softly into him like needles, deeper and deeper, a way of watching to see whether some tremor of his smile, some twist of his lips, some tormented gesture, might not all at once be as a gift offered to her, as though someone dead were rising before her in all the incalculable fullness of life suddenly become real. Then his hair was a thicket and his fingernails were large glimmering discs. She saw fluid clouds in the whites of his eyes, and small mirroring pools. He lay there before her as hideous as if his body were wide open to her, with frontiers all disarmed; but his soul was still hidden in some ultimate feeling that was a feeling only of itself. And if he spoke of God, she would think: By ‘God' he meant that other feeling, perhaps the feeling of some dimension in which he would wish to live.

  Those thoughts of hers were a sign of something diseased in her. But besides this she also thought: Surely an animal would be like that other dimension, gliding past so very close, like things seen through water in one's eyes, spreading in large vague patterns, and yet small and far off when one regards it as something exterior to oneself. Why is it right in a fairy-tale to think in this way of animals that keep guard over princesses? Was that morbid? In this night she felt herself and these images all bright, floating upon a premonitory fear of going under again. Her waking life, that creeping life of hers by day, would once more founder. She knew that. And she saw that everything would then be disease, and full of impossibilities. But if she could manage to hold on to those details that went on growing longer and longer, holding them in her hand like bundles of sticks in spite of the repulsion they caused as soon as they became glued together into a real whole. . . . In this night her thoughts were able to reach the idea of a haleness that was tremendous as mountain air, a state in which she might master all her emotions with the utmost ease.

  Like rings torn apart by some great tension this happiness went whirling through her mind. ‘Now you are dead' was what her love dreamt, and all she meant by that was this strange feeling that had come between herself and the exterior world, a feeling in which the image of Johannes was alive for her. But the hot flickerings of the candlelight burnt their reflections into her lips. And all that happened in this night was no more than such a shining reflection of reality, and, flickering somewhere in her body and seeping away between fragments of her feelings, it cast its vague shadows into the outer world. Then it was as if she could feel Johannes very close to her, just as close to her as she was herself. He was subject then to all her wishes, and her tenderness passed through him unimpeded as the waves pass through those soft, crimson medusas that float in the sea. But at moments her love merely lay as a wide and unmeaning expanse upon him like the sea, exhausted now, and sometimes as the sea perhaps lay over his corpse now, huge and gentle as a cat purring tenderly in its dreams. And then the hours poured like murmuring water... .

  And even as she started up she felt grief for the first time. There was coolness in the air, the candles had burnt down, and only one was still giving light. In the place where Johannes had been used to sit there was now a gaping hole in the room, and all her thoughts could not fill it up. And suddenly even the last candle went out too, silently, like a last departing guest shutting the door softly after him. Veronica was alone in darkness.

  Small, humble sounds went straying through the house, the stairs heaved timorously, shaking off the pressure of the footsteps that had passed over them, and somewhere a mouse nibbled, and then there was the ticking of a deathwatch beetle in the wainscot. When somewhere a clock chimed, she began to be afraid. She was afraid of the unceasing life of this thing that, while she was sleepless with fatigue, went busily, unrestingly, through all the rooms, audible now through the ceiling, now through the floor, from far below. Like a killer who will strike his victim blow after blow, stabbing and slashing without knowing what he is doing, striking simply because something goes on jerking and twitching, she would gladly have seized hold of that unceasing faint sound and have choked it into silence. And all at once she was aware of her aunt asleep, in that room right at the back of the house, her stern, leathery face all wrinkles; and all the furniture stood there dark and heavy and flaccid; and once more she felt afraid of this alien life closing in around her.

  Yet there was something—scarcely a real support, merely something that made her sink more slowly, sinking with her—that still held her. She had begun dimly to realise that it was not Johannes but herself that she experienced with such palpable sensuality. And by now her imaginings were overlaid by a resistance that came to her from the day's reality, from shame, from her aunt's matter-of-fact talk, from Demeter's scorn: a constriction, a closing down, now even an abhorrence of Johannes, a vague, increasing compulsion to take it all like a sleepless night. And even that long-soughtfor memory seemed to have slipped stealthily away during these hours, until now it lay far off in the distance, once more tiny and insignificant, without ever having caused even the smallest change in her life. But just as a man will go about his business, pale and with dark rings under his eyes, after things have happened that he would never speak of to anyone, and feel his oddity and weakness amid all that is strong and reasonable in life as something like the thin thread of a quietly meandering tune: so it was with Veronica. Despite her grief there was a faint, teasing delight within her, which hollowed out her body until it became soft and tender, the merest husk around her.

  Suddenly she felt an urge to undress: just for herself, just for the sake of feeling close to herself, alone with herself in a darkened room. The quiet rustle of her clothes sinking to the floor excited her. It was tenderness that went out from her body, as though venturing a few paces into the darkness, perhaps in search of someone, and then faltered and hurried back to cling to the body that it belonged to. And when Veronica picked up her clothes again, slowly, with lingering pleasure in the action, these skirts that still held in their dark folds the little pools of her body's warmth encased her, swelling out like bells, rotund dark caverns, hiding-places where she lurked; and when now and then her body secretly pressed against these coverings around it a tremulous ripple of sensuality went through it, like a hidden light moving restlessly through a house behind closed shutters.

  It was this room. Involuntarily Veronica's gaze turned to the place where the looking-glass hung on the wall, but she could not find her own image. She saw nothing ... perhaps a vague and sliding gleam in the darkness, but even that might have been an illusion. Darkness filled the house like a heavy liquid. It seemed that she herself was nowhere in it. She began to walk about, but everywhere there was only this darkness, nowhere herself; and yet she felt nothing but herself, and wherever she went she both was and was not, just as unuttered words are sometimes really there while silence reigns.

  So it was that she had once talked with angels when she lay ill. They had stood around her bed, and from their wings, even though they did not move, there came a high, thin, sustained note that cut through everything. And all things fell apart then like brittle stone, and the whole world lay there before her, sharp-edged, like broken sea-shells, and only she remained whole, drawing herself ever more tightly into her own body. Consum
ed by fever, fine-drawn and thin as a withered rose-petal, she felt herself to have become transparent; and she felt as though her body were everywhere at once and at the same time contracted to such minuteness that it was as if she were holding it in her own tightly shut hand. And all around her stood those men with rustling wings—a faint crackle as of hair standing on end. For the others nothing of all this seemed to be there; they were shut out from it by that high, thin ringing, as by a glittering trellis through which one can see out but no one can see in. And Johannes spoke to her, the way one speaks to people who must be treated with indulgence and whom one does not take seriously. And in the next room Demeter was pacing up and down; she could hear his scornful footsteps and his huge, hard voice. And all the time she felt only that angels were there, standing around her, men with marvellously plumed hands, and while the others thought she was ill, they themselves, wherever they were, seemed to be outside, kept out by a magic circle drawn around her. And at that time it seemed to her she had achieved everything in the world. But it was only a fever, and when it passed off she realised that it must be so.

  Now, however, there was a touch of that bygone illness in the sensual feelings she had about herself. Carefully withdrawing into herself, making herself small, she avoided touching the objects in the room, feeling their presence even from a distance. There was a quiet ebbing away of hope, collapse in which all that was exterior became as though burst wide open, empty, and beyond it everything became soft and still as behind curtains of mouldering silk. Gradually a mild, grey early-morning light began to fill the house. She stood at the window upstairs, watching the break of day, the people going to market. Now and then a word struck up- wards, towards her, and then she would lean back into the gloom as though to avoid it.

  And softly something wrapped itself round Veronica: a yearning without goal or desire, aimless as the dim aching in her womb before the recurring days. Strange thoughts crossed her mind: to love herself and only herself like this—it was like being able to do anything at all in front of some other person; and when among these thoughts the memory forced its way up—now like a hard, hideous face—the memory that she had killed Johannes, it no longer frightened her. She only caused pain to herself when she saw him; it was like seeing herself from inside, full of loathsomeness and intestines coiled like big worms. At the same time she could see herself looking at herself like that, and it was horror to her. Yet even in this horror of herself there was something ineradicable that pertained to love.

  She was overcome now by a liberating fatigue and, drooping, she was wrapped in what she had done as in cool fur, all mournful and caressing, a stillness where she was all by herself, a gentle, gleaming light ... as though even in her pain there were something that she loved, and even in grief she smiled. And the brighter the day grew, the more it seemed improbable that Johannes could be dead: that was no more now than a hushed companionship from which she was abstracting herself. With no more than the remotest relevance to him, in which she herself did not believe, it was as if some last frontier dividing them had opened wide. She felt a lustful softness and an ineffable nearness, a proximity less of the body than of the soul. It was as if she were gazing at herself out of his eyes and with every movement feeling not only herself being touched by him but also in some indescribable way his sense of touching her; it was like a mysterious spiritual union. At some moments she thought to herself that he was her guardian angel. He had come and gone again after she had perceived his presence, and yet henceforth he would always be with her, he would be watching her when she undressed, and wherever she went she would carry him next to her body, under her skirts; and his gaze would be as gentle as a persistent faint weariness. She did not think this or feel this about the real Johannes, who was a matter of indifference to her; rather it was something wanly grey and tense in her, and her wandering thoughts stood out against it in relief, like dark figures brightly outlined against a wintry sky. What she reached was a mere fringe of something, all groping tenderness. It was a quiet state of being singled out and lifted up ... a sense of becoming stronger and yet of being not there at all . . . it was nothing and yet everything...

  She sat quite still, toying with her thoughts. There is a world that is aloof and apart from this, a different world .. . or perhaps only a sadness ... like walls painted by fever and delusions, and between those walls the words spoken by the sane and healthy have no resonance, but fall to the ground, meaningless ... like carpets on which they cannot walk, so heavy is their tread. A very thin, echoing world she was walking through with him, and on all she did there silence followed, and all she thought went sliding on for ever, like a whispering in a maze of corridors.

  And when at last it was broad daylight, a clear and pallid day, the letter came—such a letter as had been bound to come. Veronica realised that at once: this letter had been bound to come. There was a thundering at the door that went tearing through the silence of the house as a great boulder crashes through a thin blanket of snow. Through the open door wind and light swept in.

  The letter said: ‘What are you that I did not kill myself?

  I am like one who has found his way out into the street. I have got out and cannot go back. The bread I eat, the dark brown boat hauled up on the beach, the boat that was to take me out to sea, everything around me, all that is muted, blurred, all the plenitude of warmth, the flux, the noisiness and aliveness around me—it all holds me fast. We shall talk about this. Everything is outside, quite simple and unrelated, all loosely heaped like a pile of rubble, but it holds me, I am like a post rammed into the ground and taking root again....'

  There were other things in the letter as well, but she could see only this: ‘I have found the way out into the street.' And though it had been bound to happen, there was also, even if scarcely perceptible, a hint of derision in that callous leap into safety, away from her. It was nothing, nothing at all, merely as when there is a sudden chill in the air at dawn and someone begins to talk in a loud voice because it is now day. For everything had happened, once and for all, to him who had come soberly to his senses and was henceforth an onlooker. From that moment on, for a long time, Veronica neither thought nor felt anything; around her there was nothing but a fast, gleaming tranquillity on which no ripple stirred, pale and lifeless as ponds lying silent in early morning light.

  When she roused herself to thought again, it was once more as if she were under a heavy cloak that hindered her movements; and her thoughts became confused, like hands struggling senselessly with a covering they cannot throw off. She could not find the way into simple reality. That he had not shot himself did not become the fact that he was alive; it turned into something within herself, something that grew dumb, sinking down into the depths. Something in her grew dumb andid sank away again, down into that murmurous multitudinous clamour out of which it had only just risen. Now all at once she again heard those voices on every side.

  It was that narrow corridor through which she had once gone running, and then crawling, until there was the place where it widened out, and there was a quiet rising and a standing erect; and now it had closed in on her again. In spite of the silence she felt as though there were people all round her, talking to each other all the time in low voices. She could not distinguish what they were saying. There was something wonderfully mysterious in not understanding what they were saying to each other. Her senses were stretched taut like very thin membranes, and those voices, beating against them, rustled like twigs in a tangled thicket.

  Unknown faces loomed up. They were all faces she did not know: she was well aware that they were her aunt, her girl friends, acquaintances, Demeter, Johannes . . . and yet they remained the faces of strangers. Suddenly she was afraid of them, like someone in fear of being treated with much severity. She made an effort to think of Johannes, but she could no longer even imagine what he had looked like only a few hours earlier. His face blurred and merged with the others. She recalled that he had gone away from her, was far awa
y, lost as in a crowd, and she could not shake off the feeling that from somewhere in that crowd his hidden eyes were watching her with a cunning look. She drew herself together, to make herself very small, to be invisible to that gaze. She tried to close herself up. But all she could feel was a faint and gradually dissolving awareness of herself.

  And then by degrees she lost the sense of ever having been anything else. She could scarcely distinguish herself any longer from other people, and all these faces were now hardly distinguishable from each other, emerging and again merging with each other; they were repulsive to her as unkempt hair, and yet she entangled herself in them, she spoke in answer to words of theirs that she could not understand, and her only need was to keep herself busy. There was a restlessness in her that was trying to get out from under her skin, bursting out like thousands of tiny animals. And ever anew the old faces loomed up and the whole house was filled with this restlessness.