Five Women (16 page)

"Was that the time when___?"

‘"Yes, that was the time when, in your arms, I suddenly began to weep. You thought it was from excess of longing to enter deeper into your feelings with my own. Don't be angry with me—I simply had to tell you. I don't know why. It was all just fancy, but it hurt so much, and I think that was why I couldn't help thinking of that man G. You do understand?"

The man in the armchair stubbed out his cigarette and stood up. His gaze interlocked with hers, both of them swaying as with the tension there is in the bodies of two tightrope-acrobats close together on the rope.

Then, instead of speaking, they drew up the shutters and looked out into the street. It seemed to them they were listening to a crackling of tensions within themselves, to something suddenly stirring into life and then becoming dormant again. They knew they could not live without each other, and that only together, like an ingenious structure of supports and counter-supports, could they carry the burden they had chosen. When they thought of each other, it all struck them as almost painfully morbid, so delicate and daring and incomprehensible did their relationship seem in its sensitiveness to the slightest instability within.

After a while, when the sight of the alien world outside had restored their sense of security, they felt tired and wanted only to fall asleep side by side. They felt nothing but each other, and yet there was—though by now quite small, disappearing into darkness—another feeling too: an opening out as to all four quarters of the sky.

The next morning Claudine set out for the little town where her thirteen-year-old daughter Lilli was at boarding-school.

The child had been born in the time of her first marriage, but the father was an American dentist to whom Claudine had gone, being plagued by toothache during a holiday in the country. She had been vainly waiting to be joined by a lover, whose arrival had been delayed beyond the limits of her patience, and in a queer state of intoxication, compounded of frustration, pain, ether, and the dentist's round white face, which she had seen hovering over hers day after day, it had happened. Her conscience never troubled her on account of this episode, nor indeed on account of any other such that had occurred in that first, wasted part of her life. When some weeks later she had to go for more treatment, she went accompanied by her maid, and with that the affair was over; her memory of it was merely of a strange cloud of sensations that had for a while bewildered and agitated her, as if a cloak had been suddenly flung over her head and then had slid swiftly to the floor.

There was something strange about all her actions and experiences at that period. She could not always bring them to such a quick and sober end as on that one occasion: indeed, at times she seemed to be entirely under the domination of one man or the other, for each of whom she was capable of doing everything demanded of her, to the point of complete self-abnegation and lack of any will of her own. Yet she was never left with any sense of having had intense or important experiences. She performed and suffered acts of a passion so violent as to amount to humiliation, but never lost the awareness that whatever she did, fundamentally it did not touch her and essentially had nothing to do with her. These excesses committed by an unhappy, ordinary, promiscuous woman were like a brook rushing along, always away from her, and her only feeling was of sitting quietly on its bank, lost in thought.

It was an awareness of some ultimate integrity deep within her, never clearly defined, yet always present, that brought about this final reserve and assurance that she possessed even in her headlong abandonment of herself to others. Behind all the intricacies of her actual experiences there was a current of something undiscovered, and although she had never yet grasped this hidden quintessence of her life, perhaps even believing that she would never be capable of penetrating to it, nevertheless, whatever happened, it gave her a sense of liberty such as a guest may have in a strange house, knowing he will be there only on that one occasion and therefore resigning himself; nonchalantly and with a trace of boredom, to whatever comes his way while he is there.

And then all she had done and suffered sank into oblivion when she met the man who was now her husband. There and then she entered into a tranquillity and seclusion in which whatever had gone before no longer mattered. All that mattered was what would come of it now, and the past seemed to have existed only so that they might experience each other the more intensely—or else it was simply forgotten. An overpowering sensation of growth rose about her like drifts of blossom, and only a long way off did there linger a sense of anguish endured, a background from which everything detached itself as in the warmth frost-stiffened limbs slowly and drowsily stir into movement.

There was, perhaps, one feeling that ran, a thin, wan, and scarcely perceptible thread, from her former into her present life. And her having to think of that former life again precisely today might have been chance or might have been because she was travelling to see her child. Whatever its cause, it had emerged only at the railway station, when—among all those many people, and oppressed and disquieted by them—she had suddenly been touched by a sensation that, even as it drifted by, only half recognised, already vanishing, conjured up, obscurely and distantly and yet with almost corporeal verisimilitude, that almost forgotten period of her life.

Claudine's husband had had no time to see her off at the station, and she was alone, waiting for the train, with the crowd pushing and jostling and, like a great ponderous wave of slop-water, slowly shoving her this way and that. Upon the pallid, early morning faces that were all around her emotions seemed to float through this dark precinct like spawn on dim pools of stagnant water. It nauseated her. She felt an urge to brush out of her way, with a negligent gesture, all that was here drifting and shoving; but—whether what horrified her was the physical dominance of what surrounded her or only this murky, monotonous, indifferent light under a gigantic roof of dirty glass and a tangle of iron girders—while she passed, with apparent calm and composure, through the crowd, she felt the compulsion she was under, and she suffered intensely as from a humiliation. In vain she sought refuge within herself; it was as though she had slowly and meanderingly lost herself in this throng—her eyes strayed, she was no longer fully aware of her own existence and when she strained to remember, a thin soft headache hung like a cloud before her thoughts, and her thoughts leaned into it, trying to reach her yesterday. But all that she seized of it was a feeling as if she were secretly carrying something precious and delicate. And she knew she must not betray this to others, because they would not understand and because she was weaker and could not defend herself and was afraid. Slender, shrinking into herself, she walked among them, inwardly arrogant but starting and withdrawing whenever anyone came too near, and hiding behind an unassuming air. And at the same time, in secret delight, she felt the happiness of her life growing more beautiful as she yielded and abandoned herself to this faint, ravelled anxiety.

And that was how she recognised what it all amounted to. For this was what it had been like at that other period. What she suddenly felt was:
once, long ago ...
as though for a long time she had been somewhere else, though never really far away. There was something twilit and uncertain in her, like deranged people's frightened concealment of their passions, and her actions tore loose from her in shreds and were borne away in the memories of strangers. Nothing had ever impregnated her with that fruitful germ of experience which softly begins to swell a soul when those who think they have stripped it of its petals turn away, satiated.... Yet all she suffered shone as with the pallid glitter of a crown, and the muted whispering anguish that was the background of her life was shot with a tremulous gleam. At times then she felt as if her sorrows were burning like little flames in her, and something impelled her to go on kindling new ones. And, doing so, she seemed to feel the pressure of a diadem cutting into her brow, invisible and unreal as something spun of dream-glass. And sometimes it was only a far-off, circling chant inside her head... .

Claudine sat quite still while the train travelled through the landscape, quietly shaking and rocking. The other people in the carriage talked to each other, but she heard it only as a distant buzz. And while she was thinking of her husband, and her thoughts were enclosed in a soft, weary happiness as in snow-filled air, for all the softness there was something that kept her from moving, as when a convalescent, accustomed to being within four walls, is about to take the first steps out of doors—a happiness that keeps one transfixed and is almost agonising. And behind that again there was still that undefined, wavering chant which she could not quite catch, remote, blurred, like a nursery-rhyme, like a pain, like herself.... In wide, rippling circles it drew her thoughts after it, and she could not see into its face.

She leaned back and gazed out of the window. It fatigued her to think about that any more. Her senses were alert and achingly perceptive, but there was something behind the senses that wanted to be quiet and expand and let the world glide away over it.... Telegraph-poles slid slanting past. The fields with their dark brown furrows standing out of the snow rolled past and away. Bushes stood as though on their heads, with hundreds of straddling little legs from which there hung thousands of tiny bells of water, dripping, trickling, flashing and glittering.... There was something gay and light about it all, a dilation as when walls open out—something loosened and unburdened and full of tenderness. And from her own body too the gentle weight was now lifted, leaving in her ears a sensation as of melting snow, gradually passing over into a ceaseless, light, loose tinkling. She felt as if with her husband she were living in the world as in a foaming sphere full of beads and bubbles and little feathery rustling clouds. She closed her eyes and abandoned herself to it.

But after a while she began to think again. The light, regular swaying of the train, the loosening up, the liquescence of nature there outside—it was as if some pressure had lifted; and she suddenly realised that she was on her own. Involuntarily she glanced up. There was still that softly whirling vortex in her senses; but it was like going up to a door that had always been shut and suddenly finding it wide open. Perhaps she had long felt the desire for this; perhaps without her knowing it something had been oscillating in the love between herself and her husband; but all she had known of it was that ever and again it drew them more closely together. And now it had secretly burst open something within her that had long been locked up. Slowly, as out of an almost invisible but very deep wound, in an unceasing stream of little drops, thoughts and feelings welled up, steadily widening the gap.

There are, in the relationship to those one loves, a great many problems that become buried under the edifice of the shared life before they can be fully worked out; and later the sheer weight of things as they have actually turned out leaves one no strength even to imagine it all differently. Then somewhere on the way there will stand some queer sign-post, there will be some face, a hovering fragrance, an untrodden path petering out amid grass and stones, and the traveller knows he should turn and take the other road, but everything urges him forward; and all that impedes his steps is something like cobwebs, dreams, a rustling branch—and he is quietly paralysed by some thought that has never quite taken shape. Recently it had sometimes happened, perhaps increasingly, that there was this looking back, a more intense leaning into the past. Claudine's constancy revolted against it, for this constancy was not repose but a setting free of forces, a mutual lending of support, an equilibrium arising out of unceasing movement forwards. It was a running hand-in-hand. Then, in the midst of it, there would come this temptation to stand still, to stand there all alone and look around. At such times she would feel her passion as something tyrannical and compulsive, threatening to sweep her away; and even when the temptation was overcome and she felt remorseful and was once again seized with awareness of how beautiful her love was, that awareness was rigid and ponderous as a narcotic state, and she apprehended, with delight and dismay, how each of her movements was laced into it, tall and bulky and stiff as though encased in gold brocade. And yet somewhere there was still a lure, something that lay quiet and pale as March sunlight, the shadows upon earth aching with spring.

Even in her happiness Claudine was occasionally assailed by a sense of how it was all merely a fact, almost accidental; and she sometimes wondered whether there must not be some other kind of life in store for her, different and remote. This was perhaps only the shape of a thought, an outer shell, which had remained with her from earlier times, and not a real thought with any intention behind it—only a sensation such as might once have gone with the real thought, an empty, unresisting motion, all a craning and a peering, which, withdrawing always and never fulfilled, had long lost its content and was like the entrance to a dark tunnel in her dreams.

But perhaps it was some other, solitary happiness, much more wonderful than everything else—something loose, limber, and obscurely sensitive at a point in their relationship where in other people's love there is nothing but a solid substructure, bony and inanimate. There was a faint unrest in her, an almost morbid yearning for extreme tension, the premonition of an ultimate climax. And sometimes it was as though she were destined to suffer some unimaginable sorrow in love.

Now and then when she was listening to music this premonition touched her soul secretly, somewhere a long way out.... She would feel a start of terror, suddenly aware of her soul's existence in the realm of the undefined. But every year, as winter passed away, there came a time when she felt nearer to those outermost frontiers than at other times. During those naked, strengthless days, suspended between life and death, she felt a melancholy that could not be that of ordinary craving for love; it was almost a longing to turn away from this great love that she possessed, as though faintly glimmering ahead of her there were the road of an ultimate destiny, leading her no longer to her beloved but away from him, defenceless, out into the soft, dry, withered expanses of some agonising desert. And she realised that this came from a distant place where their love was no longer solely between the two of them, but was something with pallid roots insecurely clutching at the world.