Five Women (20 page)

So they strolled along, talking. But her feelings were bending over the brink, and there was dizziness in her, and it made her feel ever more deeply the marvellously incomprehensible nature of belonging to her only beloved. At moments it seemed to her that she was beginning to adapt herself to the man at her side, even though outwardly she might appear unchanged; and then sometimes it was as if repartee, phrases, and gestures from her earlier life were coming back to her, things that she had thought herself grown out of long ago. "The lady has a wit," he said.

When he spoke thus, walking at her side, she observed how his words went out into an utter void, which they gradually populated—first with the houses they were walking past—only these houses were a little different now, askew as one sees them mirrored in window-panes; and then there was the street too, and after a while herself, also a little changed and distorted, though still recognisable. She felt the force, the elemental vitality, emanating from this otherwise unremarkable man—causing a scarcely perceptible displacement of the surrounding world, a shifting and bending of things, flattening them out. It disconcerted her to see her own image too within that mirrorlike sliding world; it was as if she had only to yield a little more and she would be entirely that image.

Then there was a moment when he exclaimed: "Believe me, it's all a matter of habit. If, let's say, at seventeen or eighteen, you had met some other man and married him, today you would find it just as difficult to imagine yourself the wife of the man whom, as it happens, you
have
married."

They came to where the church was. Tall and solitary they stood there in the wide square, and, looking at her companion, Claudine saw his gestures projecting out of him into the emptiness round about. For a moment she felt as if thousand of crystals bound together to form her body were bristling and writhing; a scattered, splintered, restlessly flickering light rose within her, and the man on whom it fell all at once looked quite different in the glitter of it: his outlines shifted closer to her, twitching, jerking like her own heart, and she felt each of his movements inside her, passing through her body. She wanted to cry out, reminding herself who he was; but this feeling was only an insubstantial chaotic gleam floating strangely somewhere within her, as though it had nothing to do with her.

And then everything seemed to disappear in a vortex of misty light. She glanced about her: there were the houses, as before, standing straight and silent around the square. In the tower the clock began to strike. Round and metallic the chimes came bowling through the dream-holes, scattering as they fell, and skimming away over the roofs. Claudine imagined them rolling on over the countryside, far away, resounding.... And all at once, in awe, she felt : voices go through the world, many-towered and massive, clangorous as brazen cities—something that is beyond reason, an independent, incomprehensible world of feeling, combining as it were arbitrarily and at random with the everyday world of reason and then again vanishing into stillness—something that is like those vast abysmal wings of darkness that sometimes move softly across a blank and rigid sky.

It was as if something were standing all around her and gazing at her. She felt the excitement in the man beside her, a surging and billowing, a lashing out, lonely and sombre, in an expanse of futility. And gradually it began to seem to her that what this man desired of her, this act ostensibly so great and important, was something entirely impersonal; it amounted to no more than being gazed at like this, with a gaze all stupor and vacuity just as dots in space, combined into a random pattern, gaze at each other inertly. It made her shrink, compressing her until it seemed that she herself was no more than such a dot. And this gave her a peculiar sense of her own existence: it was remote from normal rationality and self-awareness and yet left her intrinsically unchanged. All at once she ceased to feel how repellently commonplace was the way this man's mind worked. And she felt as if she were standing somewhere in open country, and around her the sounds in the air and the clouds in the sky stood quite still, etched into the surface of this fleeting instant. And she herself was no different from them, a vapour merely, an echoing ... and it seemed to her she could understand the way the animals loved, and the clouds, and the sounds in the air.

She felt the man's eyes searching for hers, and all at once she was frightened and longed for the solid certainty of her own existence. She felt her clothes clinging to her, a husk enclosing the very last of the tenderness she knew to have been her own, and beneath that she felt her blood pulsing, and she could almost smell its quivering pungency. And all she had was this body that she was now to surrender, and this utterly other, spiritual feeling, this yearning beyond all reality—a sense of the soul that was now a sense of the body —ultimate bliss. And she did not know whether now her love was taking the final, most daring step of all, or was already fading and her senses were curiously, inquisitively, opening all their windows... .

Later, that evening, in the dining-room, she felt lonely. A woman spoke to her across the table: "I saw your little girl waiting for you this afternoon. What a charming child! She must be a great joy to you."

Claudine had not been to the school again and she had nothing to say to this. She felt as if only some insensitive part of herself were present here among these people—her hair or nails, or a body that was all of horn. Then she did make some non-committal reply, and even while she spoke it seemed that her words became entangled in something, caught in something that was like a sack or a net. Her own words seemed alien among the alien words of others, like fishes struggling and jerking among the moist, cold bodies of other fishes, in the incoherent mesh of opinions.

She was overcome by disgust. Once again she felt that what mattered was not what she could say about herself, what she could explain in words, but that all justification lay elsewhere—in a smile, in a way of falling silent, in listening to oneself within. Suddenly she felt an ineffable longing for that one and only man who was as solitary as she and whom nobody here would understand either—for him who had nothing but that soft tenderness filled with floating pictures, a tenderness that like the veils of fever absorbed the hard thrust of material things, leaving all outer happenings behind in vast, dim flatness, while within everything remained secure in the eternal, mysterious balance of self-awareness.

But whereas at other times, in similar moods, a room crowded like this would be a solid, heavy, hot mass revolving round her, enveloping her, here and now it was different and there was at times some furtive standstill, a dislocation of the things—a sideboard, a table, that then jumped into place again—an atmosphere of sullen rejection. Discord grew between her and these familiar objects; there was something uncertain, wavering, about them. All of a sudden there was again that ugliness which she had experienced on the journey, not a plain, straightforward ugliness, but something that made her perceptions, when they reached out like a hand for solid things, go right through them and come out the other side. Gaps opened up, as if—since that ultimate certainty within her had dreamily begun to contemplate itself—something in the order of things, at other times impalpably embedded in her, had worked loose, and where there had been a coherent chain of impressions, a world of harmony, now everything was rent and riven, the surrounding world turned into mere unceasing uproar.

Gradually it made her feel as someone might who walks at the edge of the sea. One cannot make any impression on this roaring that tears away every thought and every act down to the bare bones of the very instant. And gradually there comes uneasiness, an increasing sense of overflowing one's limits, of losing one's identity and pouring away: an urge to shout, a yearning for incredible, enormous gestures, a soaring flash of will, action without end—action with the sole purpose of making one's own existence real. There was a ravening, devouring, annihilating force in this sense of dissolution, and every second of it was wild, irresponsible solitude, cut off from everything, staring at the world in oblivious stupor. And it wrenched gestures and words from her, which seemed to rush past her, coming from somewhere else, and which yet were part of herself. And there before her sat that stranger, that man, and could not fail to notice how this was drawing her body closer to him, like a vessel containing all her longing and desire, all the deepest love she knew. Then she no longer saw anything but his beard going up and down as he talked, monotonously, lulling her to sleep, going up and down like the beard of some horrible he-goat that sat there muttering, slowly munching wisps of words.

She felt very sorry for herself. Everything turned into a rocking sing-song of grief at the thought that all this could really happen.

He said: "I can tell—you are one of those women whose destiny it is to be swept away by a storm. Oh yes, you have your pride—and so you try to deny it. But believe me, a man who understands women is not deceived."

It was as if she were sinking, irresistibly, back into her past. But when she gazed around her, as she sank through aeons of the soul's life, which were like layer upon layer of deep water, what struck her was the random nature of her surroundings: not the fact that everything looked the way it did, but that this appearance persisted, adhering to things as if it were part of them, perversely holding on to them as with claws. It was like an expression that has remained on a face long after the emotion has gone. And oddly—as though a link had snapped in the silently unwinding chain of events and swivelled out of its true position, jutting out of its dimension—all the people and all the things grew rigid in the attitude of that chance moment, combining, squarely and solidly, to form another, abnormal order. Only she herself went sliding on, her swaying senses outspread among these faces and things—sliding downwards—away.

The whole complex pattern of her emotions, interwoven with the years of her life, was momentarily visible in the distance behind all this, isolated, dreary, and almost of no account. She thought: ‘One digs a line in the ground, any unbroken line by which to keep one's bearings among the silent, towering things that tilt
in
all directions. That is our life. It's like talking on and on and deceiving oneself into believing that every word relates to the word before and demands the next, because one dreads to think how, if the thread broke, if words failed, one would sway and stagger and be swallowed up by the silence. But that's only weakness, only fear of the horribly gaping contingency of all one does....'

"It's a matter of destiny," he went on. "There are men whose destiny it is to bring unrest with them wherever they go, and it's no good barricading oneself in—there's no defence against it."

But she scarcely heard what this stranger said. Her thoughts were moving in queer, aloof, contradictory ways. She wanted to free herself with one single phrase, with one wild gesture, to take refuge at her beloved's feet: there was still time. But something restrained her, made her shrink from the mere thought of such screaming, panic-stricken flight. She did not want to turn from the great river's bank for fear of being swept away, to hug her life to herself for fear of losing it, to sing merely for fear of falling into bewildered silence. She rejected that. She groped for hesitant, meditative words. She did not want to shriek, as all the others did for fear of the silence around them. Nor did she want to sing. What she longed for was a whispering, a falling silent ... nothingness, the void... .

And then there came a slow, soundless edging forward, a bending over the brink. "Don't you love the theatre, the illusion of the stage?" she heard him say. "What I value in art is the subtlety of the right ending, which consoles us for the humdrum of everyday life. Life is disappointing, so often depriving us of the effect on which the curtain should fall. If we were to leave it at that, wouldn't it mean accepting the bleak matter-of-factness of things?"

And suddenly she heard it quite distinctly, very close to her. Somewhere there was still that other hand, that faint warmth reaching out for her, a conscious flash: You. .. . And she let go of herself, borne up by an inner certainty that even now for each other they were all that counted, that they belonged together, wordless, incredulous, a fabric light and slight as the sweetness of death, an arabesque belonging to a style not yet evolved, each of them a note resounding meaningfully only in the other's soul and ceasing to exist when that soul no longer listened.

Her companion straightened up and looked at her. And then she realised she was here with him, and how far from her was that other man, her beloved. What was he thinking now? Whatever it was, she would never know. And she herself? Hidden in the darkness of her body there was a swaying, aimless urge. At this moment she felt her body—that sheltering home and hedge around its own feelings—as a vague and formless obstacle. She recognised its independent existence and how its feelings and urges shut her in, closer than anything else—recognised in it the inevitable act of betrayal separating her from her beloved. And in a darkening of her senses such as she had never known before, she felt as if, suddenly, in some uncanny innermost depth, her ultimate fidelity, which she still preserved in her body, were turning into its opposite.

Perhaps all she wished now was to yield this body to her beloved, but the profound spiritual uncertainty with which it trembled somehow turned that impulse into desire for this stranger here with her. She faced the possibility that, even while she was being ravaged in her body, this body might still give her the sense of being herself, and she shuddered, as at a darkness, a void, into which she was being locked, at the body's autonomy and its mysterious power to disregard all decisions of the mind. And a blissful bitterness tempted her to disown, to abandon this body, to feel it in its sensual forlornness dragged down by a stranger and as though slashed open with knives, filled to the brim with the helpless twitchings of horror, violence, and disgust—and yet to feel queerly, and as in ultimate truthfulness and constancy, its presence round this nothingness, this wavering, shapeless omnipresence, this certainty of sickness that was the soul—feeling it in spite of everything as in a dream the edges of a wound are felt, striving in endlessly renewed, agonising endeavour to close, each torn part vainly searching for the other.