Five Women (19 page)

She took a sheet of paper and wrote a few words to her husband: ‘It's all so odd. It'll only be for a few days, but I feel as if I were somewhere high above myself, involved in something I don't understand. Tell me, what is our love? What is it? I need help, I need to hear you! I know it is like a tower, but what I feel is only the trembling of something rising into the air, slim and tall....'

When she went to the post-office to post the letter, she was told that communications had broken down.

She walked to the edge of the little town. There the plain stretched away into the distance, a wide, white sea all around. Sometimes a crow flew through this whiteness; here and there a bush stood out, black and stiff. Only some small, dark dots strewn along the far skyline were a sign that over there, too, there was human life.

Turning back, she walked through the streets, restlessly, for perhaps an hour. She went through all the sidestreets, after a while finding herself covering the same ground, only in the other direction, and turned aside again, crossing squares where she had the feeling of how she had walked there just a few minutes earlier. Everywhere there was the same white play of reflections from the empty plain, a feverish flicker sliding through this little town that was cut off from all reality. Before the houses there lay high banks of snow. The air was clear and dry. It was still snowing a little, but the flakes were falling thinly—flat, almost shrivelled, glittering little scales—as if it might stop soon. Here and there, from above the shut doors of the houses, windows looked down into the street with a bright blue glassy gaze, and the ground underfoot rang like glass too. Sometimes a piece of hard, frozen snow crashed down through a gully, tearing a jagged hole in the stillness. And suddenly the wall of a house would glow in rosy light, or in delicate canary-yellow.... Then all Claudine did seemed oddly heightened, more intensely alive; and in the hushed silence all things visible seemed to light one another up, as it were echoing one another in a larger visibility. And then it would all withdraw into itself again and in meaningless streets the houses were like little groups of mushrooms in the woods, or like a thicket of wind-bent shrubs on a wide plain, while she still felt a dizziness and an immensity beyond. There was in her some kind of fire, some burning, bitter fluid, and while she walked and mused, she seemed to herself a huge, mysterious vessel that was being carried through the streets—a thin-walled, flaming vessel.

She tore up the letter and went to the school, where she spent the time till midday in discussion with the masters.

The rooms there were quiet. When, from where she sat, she looked through the sombre, heavy vault out into the open, everything seemed remote and muted, veiled in grey, snowy light. Then the men with her seemed too corporeal, oppressively ponderous, like great weights pressing down on hard, sharp ground. Her discussions with them were of the most matter-of-fact kind, but at moments even that seemed almost like abandonment. She wondered at this, for she did not like these men at all. There was not one among them who was in the slightest attractive to her; they all repelled her by their manners, which revealed their lowly origins. Yet she sensed the masculinity, the other sex, in them with an acuteness never experienced before, or at least not for many years. She realised that this was caused by the expression of their faces, which the half-light enhanced by the dull commonness in them that was incomprehensibly transformed by their very ugliness, by a whiff of rutting-time, of enormous, clumsy, troglodyte beasts, that hung about them like an aura. She recognised again, here too, that old feeling of defencelessness which had overcome her time and again since she had been alone. A peculiar submissiveness crept into all she did and said, into every detail, every turn of the conversation. It was there in the attentiveness with which she felt compelled to listen, even in the very fact that she was there, sitting in a chair, talking.

Claudine grew restive. She had lingered much too long, and the atmosphere and the half-darkness of the rooms closed in on her, suffocating and bewildering her. For the first time she was struck by the idea that all that had prevented her from sliding back into her former life was the fact that she had never before been away from her husband, on her own. What she felt now was no longer vague, roving, inscrutable: it was now associated with real people. Yet it was not these men she was afraid of, but her own reactions. While their talk surrounded her, something stirred within her, shook her mysteriously—not one distinct emotion, but the very foundation of all emotions—as it may happen when one walks through other people's homes, places that fill one with distaste, and gradually, insidiously, one begins to think how these other people can live and be happy there, until there comes a moment when it all takes hold of one, as if one were one of those people, and one wants to jump free, but, transfixed, feels on all sides how the world revolves, solidly, quietly, round this centre too.

In the grey gloom here these black, bearded men became giant shapes inside twilit bubbles, alien worlds, and she wondered what it would feel like to be enclosed in such a world. Her thoughts seemed to sink deep into soft, swampy ground; and then there was only a voice, roughened by smoking, and words, muffled in a haze of cigarette-smoke, that constantly brushed against her face, and after that another voice, high and tinny, and she tried to imagine this second voice breaking and deepening in sexual excitement. Then again clumsy gestures caught her attention, drawing her feelings after them in weird convolutions. There was one ludicrous Olympian whom she tried to regard as would a woman who took him seriously. Something strange that had nothing to do with her own life rose up before her, casting its shadow on her, too close, too big, like a shaggy animal that gave off an overpowering smell. She felt for a moment as if all she wanted were a whip to lash it with, and then, suddenly checked, but without really understanding, she caught the play of expressions intimately known of old in a face that somehow resembled her own.

Then she thought secretly: ‘People like us might even be able to live with men like these....' And in this thought there lay a queerly tormenting fascination, an expanding titillation of the brain; and there was something like a thin pane of glass before it, against which her thoughts pressed painfully to stare through it into a vague murkiness. She enjoyed looking into these men's eyes meanwhile with a limpid, innocent gaze. Then she tried to picture her husband, estranged and as though seen from that murky region beyond. She succeeded in thinking of him quite calmly: he remained a wonderful, an incomparable person, but something imponderable, something that reason could not grasp, had left him, and he seemed somehow faded and not so close to her as before. Sometimes, when an illness reaches its last critical stage, one's experiences have that cool, detached lucidity. How odd that once it had been possible really to experience these things with which she was now toying, that there had been a time when, undisturbed by any questionings, she would undoubtedly have felt about him just as she had been trying to feel about him now! All at once everything seemed very strange.

One moves, day in, day out, among the same people: one walks through the same countryside, through the same town, the same house; and his landscape, these people, go along with one, always, every day, at every step, in every thought, unresistantly. Then one day, with a faint jolt, they stop: and there they stand, incomprehensibly stark and still, aloof, in some alien, stubborn atmosphere. And when one turns to look back at oneself, there is a stranger standing there with them. And so one has a past. ‘But what is it?' Claudine asked herself. And there was no seeing what could have made the difference.

There was nothing simpler than the answer that it was oneself that had become different. But she began to feel a peculiar resistance to granting that possibility. And perhaps one does experience all that is great and fateful in the pattern of one's life only in some oddly reversed state of mind? While at one moment she could not understand the ease with which she felt a stranger to a past that once had been as close to her as her own body, and at the next moment could not understand how anything could ever have been different from the way it was now, something else occurred to her: now and then it happens that one sees something in the distance, an unfamiliar thing, and walks towards it, and at a certain point it enters into the circle of one's own life; but the place where one was before is now strangely empty. Or one has only to reflect : yesterday I did this, did that.... A moment always comes that is like an abyss, and, left behind at its brink, there stands a sick person whom one does not know and who is gradually fading from sight. Only one does not often think of it. And in a flash of illumination she saw her whole life dominated by this inexplicable, unremitting betrayal that one commits in every instant, by cutting loose from oneself without knowing why and nevertheless sensing in it an ultimate, inexhaustible tenderness far removed from conscious thought, a tenderness through which one is more intimately linked with oneself than with any of one's actions. And while this is going on, for everyone else one remains always one and the same person.

And while these feelings were still shining clearly in her, their very depths revealed, it seemed to her as if the certainty that bore her outer life along, making it revolve round her, had all at once ceased to work. Her life began to fan out into a multitude of possibilities, unfolding, one behind the other, like stage-scenery of many different lives; and, in a pallid, empty, unquiet area between, the schoolmasters loomed up, obscure, floating shapes, and sank as though in search of something, gazing at her, until, heavily, they fell into place again. She felt a quaint and melancholy pleasure in being the strange lady, sitting here before them with an unapproachable smile, entrenched behind her physical appearance, while within herself she was merely a haphazard being, separated from them only by a deciduous husk, the fabric of chance and actuality. And while talk issued from her lips, fast and meaningless, soulless, facile, unwinding like thread from a spool, she was slowly becoming bewildered by the thought that if the atmosphere peculiar to any of these men were to close around her, all she would do then would be just as truly herself as if any given ‘reality' were something without significance, merely something that comes spouting up through an indifferent crack in the surface of things, while far below, out of one's own reach, one's solitary self floats along in a stream of unborn realities whose otherworldly, gentle music no one else can hear. All her security, all her anxious clinging to the one beloved, now suddenly appeared arbitrary, irrelevant, and merely superficial, compared with her apprehension—almost beyond the grasp of mind—of the utterly other communion of their beings at that depth of solitude, in boundless, final, immutable inwardness.

And there was the lure when now she suddenly remembered the stranger. She realised that, since he desired her, all that was here still a mere toying with possibilities would, with him, become reality.

Something in her shuddered, something warned her. Sodomy, she thought. That is what it would amount to. But behind that there lay her love's ordeal: ‘So that in the realm of reality you shall feel it is I ... I ... here under this beast! The unimaginable thing! So that, over there, you can never again believe in me,
me
solidly and simply. So that I shall become a mirage beyond your grasp, a fading glimmer as soon as you let go of me. Only a mirage, which means you will know : I am only something within you and by virtue of your own existence, as long as you hold me fast, and am something different—anything—when you let go of me, my beloved, with whom I am so strangely united....'

She was overtaken by the quiet, fickle sadness of the adventurer, that mournfulness attaching to things one does not for their own sake but for the sake of having done them. She felt that somewhere the stranger was now standing, waiting for her. Her shrunken field of vision was already dense with his breathing, and the air close to her seemed filled with the smell of him. Growing uneasy, she prepared to take her leave. She knew that her way was leading her straight to him, and the thought of the moment when it would have happened was like a cold hand gripping her body. It was as if something had taken hold of her and were dragging her towards a door. And she knew this door would slam behind her, and she struggled, and yet she was already craning forward, all her senses reaching out ahead.

When she encountered the man again he was no longer someone she was just beginning to know: the whole thing had become imminent. She realised that in the meantime he had been thinking about her too and had laid his plans.

She heard him say: "I have reconciled myself to the thought that you reject me. But never again will any man venerate you as unselfishly as I do."

Claudine did not answer. His words had come slowly, emphatically; they did not affect her, but she could imagine what it would be like if they did.

After a while she said: "Did you know?—we
are
snowed up!"

Everything seemed as if she had experienced it once before; her words seemed to drag in the groove of words she had surely spoken once before. She paid no heed to her actions as such; what interested her was simply the distinction between what she was doing now and something identical in the past—the arbitrariness of it, this sense of something very intimate and yet accidental that went with the experience. And she had a vast, immobile awareness of her own existence with past and present rippling over it, ever recurrent, in little waves.

After a while he said abruptly: "I can feel there is something in you that hesitates. I know that hesitation. Every woman is faced with it at some point in her life. You respect your husband, you certainly don't wish to hurt him, and so you put up a barrier. But actually, you know, you ought to shake all that off; for a while at any rate, and let the great storm sweep over you."

Again Claudine remained silent. He was bound to misinterpret her silence, and that gave her an odd sense of relish. And in her silence she realised more profoundly that there was something in her that could not express itself through any action, that could not be harmed by any action, that could not defend itself because it lay below the realm of words: something that, in order to be understood, had to be loved as it loved itself, something that she shared with no one but her husband. That was the inward communion; and what she was about to abandon to this stranger, for him to ravage, was only the surface of her being.