Five Women (15 page)

And because he usually had so little to say when he visited Tonka in hospital, he wrote letters to her, saying a great deal that he otherwise kept to himself. He wrote to her almost as seriously as to some great love. Yet even these letters stopped short of ever declaring: ‘I believe in you.' He was quite disconcerted to receive no answers from Tonka, until he realised that he had never posted these letters. The fact was, he could not be sure that he meant what he wrote; it was simply a state of mind that he could do nothing about except write it out of his system. That made him realise how lucky he was, despite everything—he could express himself. Tonka could not do that. And the moment he saw that, he saw Tonka for just what she was; a snowflake falling all alone in the midst of a summer's day. But the very next moment this no longer explained anything. Perhaps it all amounted to no more than that she was a dear, good girl. And time was passing too quickly. One day he was horribly overtaken by the news that she would not last much longer. He reproached himself bitterly for having been so careless, for not having looked after her properly, and he did not attempt to hide this from her.

Then she told him of a dream she had had a few nights earlier. For Tonka also had dreams.

"In my dream I knew I was going to die soon," she said. "And it's a funny thing, you know, but I was very glad. I had a bag of cherries, and I said to myself: ‘Never mind, you just gobble them up quick before you go."'

The next day they would not let him in to see her.

XIII

Then he said to himself: ‘Perhaps Tonka wasn't really so good as I imagined.' But that again only went to prove how mysterious her goodness was. It was the kind of goodness that a dog might have had.

He was overwhelmed by a dry, raging grief that swept through him like a storm. It went howling round the solid walls of his existence, crying: ‘I can't write to you any more, I can't see you any more.' ‘But I shall be with you like God Himself,' he consoled himself, without even knowing what this was supposed to mean. And sometimes he could simply have cried out : ‘Help me, help me! Here I am kneeling before you!' Sadly he said to himself: ‘Think of it, a man walking all alone with a dog in the mountains of the stars, in the sea of the stars!' And he was agonised with tears that became as big as the globe of the sky and would not come out of his eyes.

Wide awake, he now dreamt Tonka's dreams for her.

Once, he dreamed to himself, when all Tonka's hope had gone he would suddenly come into the room again and be there with her. He would be wearing his large-checked, brown tweed travelling-coat. And when he opened it, underneath it he would be quite naked, nothing on his slender white body but a thin gold chain, with tinkling pendants on it. And everything would be like one single day, she would be quite sure of that.

This was how he longed for Tonka, as she had longed for

him. Oh, she was never a loose woman! No man tempted her. If someone pays court to her, she will rather give him to understand, with slightly awkward mournfulness, that such affairs are likely to come to a bad end. And when she leaves the shop in the evening, she is quite full of all the noisy, jolly, annoying events of her day, her ears are full of it all, inwardly she goes on talking of it all, and there is no scrap of room for any stranger. But she knows too that there is a part of her that remains untouched by all this : there is a realm where she is grand, noble, and good, where she is not a little shop-girl, but his equal, deserving of a great destiny. And this was why, in spite of all the difference between them, she always believed she had a right to him. What he was concerned with achieving was something of which she understood nothing at all; it did not affect her. But he belonged to her because at bottom he was good; for she too was good, and somewhere, after all, there must be the palace of goodness where they would live united and never part again.

What then was this goodness? It did not lie in action, nor yet in being. It was a gleam when the travelling-coat opened. And time was moving much too fast. He was still clinging to the earth, he had not yet uttered the thought ‘I believe in you!' with conviction, he was still saying: ‘And even supposing everything were like that, who could be sure of it?' He was still saying that when Tonka died.

XIV

He gave one of the nurses a tip, and she told him of Tonka's last hours and that she had sent her love to him. Then it crossed his mind, casually, as one remembers a poem and wags one's head to the rhythm of it, that it was not really Tonka at all he had been living with: it was something that had called to him.

He said these words to himself over and over again; he stood in the street with these words in his mind. The world lay around him. He realised, indeed, that he had been changed in some way and that in time he would be yet again another man, but this was, after all, his own doing and not really any merit of Tonka's. The strain of these last weeks —the strain, that is, of course, of working on his invention—was over. He had finished. He stood in the light and she lay under the ground, but all in all what he felt was the cheer and comfort of the light.

Only, as he stood there looking about him, suddenly he found himself gazing into the face of one of the many children round about—a child that happened to be crying. There in the full blast of sunlight the face wriggled and writhed like a ghastly worm. Then memory cried out in him: ‘Tonka! Tonka!' He felt her, from the ground under his feet to the crown of his head, and the whole of her life. All that he had never understood was there before him in this instant, the bandage that had blindfolded him seemed to have dropped from his eyes—yet only for an instant, and the next instant it was merely as though something had flashed through his mind.

From that time on much came to his mind that made him a little better than other people, because there was a small warm shadow that had fallen across his brilliant life.

That was no help to Tonka now. But it was a help to him. And this even though human life flows too fast for anyone to hear each of its voices clearly and find the answer to each of them.

Unions

The Perfecting of a Love

"You really can't come?"

"Quite impossible, you know. I must try to get this job finished now as fast as I can."

"But Lilli would be so pleased...."

"I know. Oh, I know. But it simply can't be done."

"And I don't like the idea of travelling without you, not a bit ..." his wife said as she poured out tea; and she glanced across to where he sat, in the corner of the room, in the bright chintz-covered armchair, smoking a cigarette. It was evening. Outside, looking out upon the street, the dark green shutters were part of a long row of dark green shutters and in no way distinct from the rest. Like a pair of dark eyelids, lowered in indifference, they concealed the glitter of this room, where from a satin-silver teapot the tea now flowed, striking the bottom of each cup with a faint tinkle and then remaining poised in mid-air, straw-coloured, a translucent, twisted column of weightless topaz. . . . In the slightly concave planes of the teapot there lay reflections, green and grey, with here and there a gleam of blue or yellow, a pool of colours that had run together and now lay quite still. But the woman's arm stood out from the teapot, and the gaze with which she looked across at her husband formed an angle with the line of the arm, a rigid pattern in the air.

Yes, there was an angle: that was evident. But there was something else, something almost physical, that only these two people within it could feel, to whom this angle was as taut as a steel strut, holding them fast in their places and yet uniting them, making of them—for all the space between-an almost tangible unity. This invisible support rested on the solar plexus, and there they could feel the pressure of it; yet even while it made them sit stiffly upright in their chairs, with faces immobile and eyes unswerving, there, at the point where it conjoined with them, there was a tender stir of animation, something volatile, as though their hearts were fluttering together and merging like two swarms of tiny butterflies.

On this thin, scarcely real, and yet so perceptible sensation the whole room hung as on a faintly trembling axis, and this in its turn rested on the two people in the room. The objects all around held their breath, the light on the walls froze into golden lace ... everything was a silence and a waiting and was there because of them. Time, which runs through the world like an endless tinsel thread, seemed to pass through the centre of this room and through the centre of these people and suddenly to pause and petrify, stiff and still and glittering ... and the objects in the room drew a little closer together. It was that standstill and then that faint settling which occurs when planes all at once assume order and crystal forms: a crystal, forming here round these two people, the centre of it corresponding to their centre—two people gazing at each other through this holding of the breath and this ensphering, this converging upon them, of everything, and gazing at each other as through thousands of mirroring planes, seeing each other as for the first time... .

The woman put the teapot down and her hand dropped to the table. As though exhausted by the weight of their happiness, each sank back into the cushions; and while they were still holding each other fast with their eyes, they smiled, as though lost, both feeling the need to speak—and yet not about themselves. So they talked again about the sick man, that mentally sick man, G., in a book they had been reading. Both spoke of a certain passage, and a problem it raised, as if this were what they had just been thinking of; but in fact they were merely resuming a discussion that had strangely fascinated them for days past—as though it were hiding its face and, while seemingly concerned with the book, were actually gazing elsewhere. And indeed after a while their thoughts imperceptibly returned, by way of this unconscious pretext, to a preoccupation with themselves.

"How does a man like that see himself, I wonder?" the woman said. And, sunk in her thoughts, she went on almost to herself: "He corrupts children, he lures young women into debauching themselves, and then he stands smiling and staring in fascination at the little scrap of eroticism that faintly flickers in him like summer lightning. Do you think he realises he's doing wrong?"

"It's hard to say. Perhaps he does--perhaps not," the man answered. "Perhaps one simply can't raise that sort of question about such feelings."

"What
I
think," the woman said—and it was now apparent that she was really speaking not of a random character in a book but of something specific that was beginning to loom up, for her, behind the character—"what I think is that he believes his actions are good."

For a while their thoughts ran on silently side by side, and emerged then in words that were again at a remove; and yet it still was as though they were holding hands in silence and as though everything had been said long ago. "... He does his victims harm. He hurts them. He must know he's demoralising them, confusing their erotic urge, stirring it up so that it'll never again have a single aim, a point of rest. And yet it's as though one could see him smiling, too—his face quite soft and pale, quite melancholy and yet resolute, and full of tenderness—a smile that hovers tenderly over himself and his victim, as a rainy day hovers over the land—heaven sends it, there's no comprehending why—and in his mournfulness, in the feelings that accompany the destruction he wreaks, there lies all the excuse he needs.... Isn't every mind solitary, lonely?"

"Yes indeed, isn't every mind solitary?"

These two people, now silent again, were joined in thinking of that third person, that unknown, that one out of so many third persons, as if they were walking through a landscape together: trees, meadows, sky, and all at once the impossibility of knowing why here it is all blue and over there the clouds are gathering. They felt all these
third persons
surrounding them, enveloping them like that huge sphere which encloses us and sometimes turns an alien, glassy eye upon us, making us shiver when the flight of a bird cuts an inexplicably lurching streak across it. In this twilit room there was all at once a cold, vast solitude, bright as noon.

Then (and it was like the faintest note drawn from a violin) one of them said: "He's like a house with locked doors. All he has done is within him, like a gentle music perhaps—but who can hear it? It might turn everything into soft melancholy."

And the other replied : "Perhaps he has walked through himself again and again, with outstretched, groping hands, trying to find a door, and in the end he stands still, and all he can do is put his face close to the impenetrable windowpanes, and see the beloved victims from a long way off, and smile. . . ."

That was all they said, but in their blissfully communing silence there was a resonance that rose higher and higher. ‘And there's only this smile, overtaking them and floating above them, and binding their last hideous, twitching gestures into a thin-stemmed posy as they bleed to death... . And it lingers tenderly, wondering if they can feel what it has done, and lets the posy fall, and then the mystery of its solitude bears it upwards on vibrant wings, it soars resolutely —an alien beast entering into the marvel-crowded emptiness of space.'

It was on this solitude that they felt the mystery of their union rested. There was an obscure sense of the world around them, which made them cling to each other; there was a dreamlike sense of chill on all sides except the one where they leaned against each other, disburdening themselves, uniting like two wonderfully well-fitting halves, which, being conjoined, undergoing reduction of their outer limits, in the act of fusion inwardly expand into a larger unity. They were sometimes unhappy because they could not share everything down to the very last and least thing.

"Do you remember," the woman suddenly said, "a few nights ago, when you held me in your arms--? Did you realise there was something between us then? Something had occurred to me at that moment, nothing of the slightest importance, but it was notyou, and I was suddenly desperate that there could be anything other than you. And I couldn't tell you about it, and then I couldn't help smiling at the thought of how you didn't know and believed yourself very close to me, and later I stopped wanting to tell you and became angry with you for not feeling it yourself, and your caresses could no longer reach me. And I couldn't bring myself to ask you to let me be, for it wasn't anything
real,
I was really close to you, and all the same it was there like a vague shadow, it was as if I could be far from you and could exist without you. Do you know that feeling—how sometimes everything is suddenly there twice over, one sees all the things around one, complete and distinct as one has known them all along, and then once again, pale, twilit, and aghast, as if they were already being regarded, stealthily and with an alien gaze, by someone else? I wanted to take you and wrench you back into myself—and then again to push you away and fling myself on the ground because it could happen at all...."