It was indeed only when they were well beyond York that the question of their relationship might have been resolved, for the gentleman leaned forward and asked, very earnestly, if she was quite comfortable and not tired. And by then there were no other passengers, for the most part had changed trains, or reached their destination at York, and none was proceeding beyond Malton and Pickering, so that the two were alone in the carriage. She looked directly at him then, and said no, she was not in the least tired; she considered for a moment and added precisely that she was not in a state of mind that allowed of tiredness, she believed. Whereupon they did smile at each other, and he leaned forward and possessed himself of one of the little gloved hands, which lay still and then clasped his. There were matters, he said, that they had an urgent need to discuss before they arrived, things which they had had no time or peace to make clear in the haste and turmoil of setting off, things to which there was a degree of awkwardness attached, which he hoped, with resolution, they could overcome.
He had been planning this speech since they left King’s Cross. He had been quite unable to imagine how he would say it, or how she would respond.
She said she was listening attentively. The little hand in his curled and crisped. He gripped it.
“We are travelling together,” he said. “We decided—you decided—to come. What I do not know is whether you would wish—whether you would choose—to lodge and manage yourself separately from me after this point—or whether—or whether—you would wish to travel as my wife. It is a large step—It is attended with all sorts of inconvenience, hazard and—embarrassment. I have rooms reserved in Scarborough where a wife could well—find space. Or I could reserve other rooms—under some false name. Or you may not wish to take this step at all—you may wish to be lodged separately and respectably elsewhere. Forgive this baldness. I am truly trying to discover your wishes. We left in so exalted a state—I wish decisions could arise naturally—but you see how it is.”
“I want to be with you,” she said. “I took a vast step. If it is taken, it is taken. I am quite happy to be called your wife, wherever you choose, for this time. That is what I had understood I—we—had decided.”
She spoke quickly and clearly; but the gloved hands, in their warm kid, turned and turned in his. He said, still in the quiet, dispassionate tone they had so far employed: “You take my breath away. This is generosity—”
“This is necessity.”
“But you are not sad, you are not in doubt, you are not—”
“That doesn’t come into it. This is necessity. You know that.” She turned her face away and looked out, through a stream of fine cinders, at the slow fields. “I am afraid, of course. But that seems to be of no real importance. None of the old considerations—none of the old cares—seem to be of any importance. They are not tissue paper, but seem so.”
“You must not regret this, my dear.”
“And you must not speak nonsense. Of course I shall regret. So will you, will you not? But that, too, is of no importance at this time.”
They were silent, for a time. Then he said, choosing his words carefully, “If you are to come with me as my wife—I hope you will accept this ring. It is a family ring—it belonged to my mother. It is a plain gold band, engraved with daisies.”
“I too have brought a ring. It belonged to a great-aunt, Sophie de Kercoz. It has a green stone—look—jade—a simple stone, with an engraved S.”
“You would prefer not to accept my ring?”
“I did not say that. I was giving proof of foresight and resolution. I shall be happy to wear your ring.”
He peeled off the little white glove, and pushed his ring over her fine one with its green stone, so that the two lay together. It fitted, though loosely. He would have liked to say something—with this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship—but these good and true words were doubly treacherous to two women. Their unspoken presence hung in the air. He seized the little hand and carried it to his lips. Then he sat back and turned the glove reflectively in his hands, pushing its soft leather pockets back into shape, one by one, smoothing their fine creases.
All the way from London, he had been violently confused by her real presence in the opposite inaccessible corner. For months he had been possessed by the imagination of her. She had been distant and closed away, a princess in a tower, and his imagination’s work had been all to make her present, all of her, to his mind and senses, the quickness of her and the mystery, the whiteness of her, which was part of her extreme magnetism, and the green look of those piercing or occluded eyes. Her presence had been unimaginable, or more strictly, only to be imagined. Yet here she was, and he was engaged in observing the ways in which she resembled, or differed from, the woman he dreamed, or reached for in sleep, or would fight for.
As a young man he had been much struck by the story of Wordsworth and his solitary Highland girl; the poet had heard the enchanted singing, taken in exactly as much as he had needed for his own immortal verse, and had refused to hear more. He himself, he had discovered, was different. He was a poet greedy for information, for facts, for details. Nothing was too trivial to interest him; nothing was inconsiderable; he would, if he could, have mapped every ripple on a mudflat and its evidence of the invisible workings of wind and tide. So now his love for this woman, known intimately and not at all, was voracious for information. He learned her. He studied the pale loops of hair on her temples. Their sleek silver-gold seemed to him to have in it a tinge, a hint of greenness, not the copper-green of decay, but a pale sap-green of vegetable life, streaked into the hair like the silvery bark of young trees, or green shadows in green tresses of young hay. And her eyes were green, glass-green, malachite green, the cloudy green of seawater perturbed and carrying a weight of sand. The lashes over them silver, but thick enough to be visibly present. The face not kind. There was no kindness in the face. It was cut clean but not fine—strong-boned rather, so that temples and slanting cheeks were pronounced and solid-shadowed, the shadows bluish, which in imagination he always touched with green too, but it was not so.
If he loved the face, which was not kind, it was because it was clear and quick and sharp.
He saw, or thought he saw, how those qualities had been disguised or overlaid by more conventional casts of expression—an assumed modesty, an expedient patience, a disdain masking itself as calm. At her worst—oh, he saw her clearly, despite her possession of him—at her worst she would look down and sideways and smile demurely, and this smile would come near a mechanical simper, for it was an untruth, it was a convention, it was her brief constricted acknowledgement of the world’s expectations. He had seen immediately, it seemed to him, what in essence she was, sitting at Crabb Robinson’s breakfast table, listening to men disputing, thinking herself an unobserved observer. Most men, he judged, if they had seen the harshness and fierceness and absolutism, yes, absolutism, of that visage, would have stood back from her. She would have been destined to be loved only by timid weaklings, who would have secretly hoped she would punish or command them, or by simpletons, who supposed her chill look of delicate withdrawal to indicate a kind of female purity, which all desired, in those days, at least ostensibly. But he had known immediately that she was for him, she was to do with him, as she really was or could be, or in freedom might have been.
The lodgings were kept by a Mrs Cammish, a tall woman with the heavy-browned frown of the Northmen in the Bayeux Tapestry, who had also, in their long ships, settled this coast. She and her daughter carried up the quantities of baggage—hatboxes, tin trunks, collecting boxes, nets and writing-desks—a collection whose very bulk made the enterprise seem respectable. Left in the solidly furnished bedroom to take off their travelling clothes, they were struck dumb, and stood and stared. He held out his arms, and she came into them, saying however, “Not now, not yet.”
“Not now, not yet,” he said agreeably, and felt her relax a little. He led her across to the window, which gave a good view, over
the cliff, of the long sands and the grey sea.
“There,” he said. “The German Sea. Like steel, with life in it.”
“I have often thought of visiting the Breton coast, which is in some sense my home.”
“I have never seen that sea.”
“It is very changeable. Blue and clear one day and the next furiously dun and swollen with sand and everywhere sodden.”
“I—we—must go there too.”
“Ah, hush. This is enough. Maybe more than enough.” They had their own dining-room, where Mrs Cammish served a huge meal that should have fed twelve, on plates rimmed with cobalt blue and spattered with fat pink rosebuds. There was a tureen of buttery soup, there was boiled hake and potatoes, there were cutlets and peas, there were arrowroot moulds and treacle tart. Christabel LaMotte pushed her food across her plate with her fork. Mrs Cammish told Ash that his lady was a bit peaky and clearly in need of sea air and good food. Christabel said, when they were alone again, “It is no good. We eat like two small birds, in our house.”
He watched her remember her home, stricken for a moment, and said easily, “You must not be intimidated by landladies. But she is right. You must enjoy the sea air.”
He watched her. He noted that she assumed no manners that might be thought wifely. She handed him nothing. She did not lean forward intimately, she did not defer. She watched him with her sharp look when she thought herself unobserved, but not with solicitude, nor yet with affection, nor yet with the greedy curiosity he could not suppress in himself. She watched him as a bird watches, the sort that is chained to a stand, some bright-plumed creature of tropical forests, some gold-eyed hawk from northern crags, wearing its jesses with what dignity it could muster, enduring man’s presence with a still-savage hauteur, ruffling its feathers from time to time, to show both that it tended itself with respect, and that it was not quite comfortable. So she pushed back the wrists of her sleeves, so she held herself in her chair. He would change all that. He could change all that, he was tolerably certain. He knew her, he believed. He would teach her that she was not his possession, he would show her she was free, he would see her flash her wings. He said, “I have an idea for a poem about necessity. As you said in the train. So seldom in a life do we feel that what we do is necessary in that sense—gripped by necessity—I suppose death must be like that. If it is given to us to know its approach, we must know we are now complete—do you see, my dear—without further awkward choices, or the possibility of lazy denial. Like balls rolling down a smooth slope.”
“With no possibility of return. Or like armies advancing, which could in fact turn back, but cannot believe it, have wrought themselves to a pitch of singleness of purpose—”
“You may turn back at any point, if—”
“I have said. I cannot.”
They walked by the sea. He watched their footprints, his in a straight line by the water’s edge, hers snaking away and back, meeting his, wandering, meeting again. She did not take his arm, though once or twice, when they coincided, she took hold of it, and stepped along beside him rapidly for a time. They both walked very quickly. “We walk well together,” he told her. “Our paces suit.”
“I imagined that would be so.”
“And I. We know each other very well, in some ways.”
“And in others, not at all.”
“That can be remedied.”
“Not wholly,” she said, moving away again. A seagull shouted. There was a late sun, just going down. A wind ruffled the sea, which was green in places and grey in others. He walked calmly, in his private electric storm.
“Do they have selkies here?” she asked him.
“Seals? I think not. Further north, yes. And many legends, of seal-wives, seal-women, on the Northumberland coast, and in Scotland. Women from the sea, who come for a time and then must leave.”
“I have never seen seals.”
“I have seen them on the other side of this sea—when I was travelling in Scandinavia. They have human eyes, very liquid and intelligent, and sleek round bodies.”
“They are wild but kindly.”
“In the water they move like huge lithe fish. On land they have to creep and haul themselves, as though maimed.”
“I wrote a tale about a seal and woman. Metamorphoses interest me.”
He could not say to her, you will not leave me, like the seal-wives. Because she could and must.
“Metamorphoses,” he said, “are our way of showing, in riddles, that we know we are part of the animal world.”
“You believe there is no essential difference between ourselves and a seal?”
“As to that, I don’t know. There are immense numbers of similarities. Bones in hands and feet, even those uncouth flippers. Bones in skulls and vertebrae. We all begin as fish.”
“And our immortal souls?”
“There are creatures whose intelligence is hard to distinguish from what we call the soul.”
“Yours is lost, I think, from want of being valued and nourished.”
“I stand reproved.”
“No reproof was intended.”
The time came nearer. They returned to The Cliff and sat in their dining-room, to which a tea tray was brought. He poured the tea. She sat and watched him. He was like a blind man moving in a cluttered and unfamiliar room; half-sensed hazards made their presence felt. There were rules of courtesy for honeymoons which were passed on from father to son, or from friend to friend. As with the ring and wedding words, his purpose faltered, when he thought of them. This was no honeymoon, though it had the impenetrable respectability of one.
“Will you go up first, dear?” he said, and his voice, which he had kept light and kind through that long, extreme day, sounded grinding to him. She stood looking at him, strained but mocking, and smiled. “If you wish,” she said, not submissively, not at all submissively, but with some amusement. She took a candle and left. He poured himself more tea—he would have given much for cognac, but Mrs Cammish had no concept of such things, and he himself had not thought to include it in his necessities. He did light a long thin cigarillo. He thought of his hopes and expectations and the absence of language for most of them. There were euphemisms, there were male group brutalities, there were books. He did not want, above all, to think at this time of his own previous life, so he thought about books. He walked up and down by that sharp-smoky fire of seacoals and remembered Shakespeare’s Troilus:
What will it be
When that the wat’ry palate tastes indeed
Love’s thrice-repured nectar?
He thought of Honoré de Balzac, from whom he had learned much, some of it erroneous, some of it simply too French to be useful in the world he still lived in. The woman upstairs was part French and a reader. It might explain her lack of diffidence, her surprising matter-of-fact directness. Balzac’s cynicism was always nevertheless romantic—such greed, such gusto. “Le dégoût, c’est voir juste. Après la possession, l’amour voit juste chez les hommes.” Why should that be so? Why was disgust any clearer-eyed than desire? These things have their rhythms. He remembered, as a small boy, quite a small boy, just, though hardly, aware that he must willy-nilly become a man—he remembered reading Roderick Random, an English work, full of robust and genial disgust at the human condition and its failings, but with none of Balzac’s fine dissection of mentalities. There had been a happy ending. At the end, the hero had been left at the bedroom door by the writer, and then let in, as a kind of post scriptum. And She—he forgot her name, some Celia or Sophia, some characterless embodiment of physical and spiritual perfection, or more accurately of the male imagination—She had appeared in a silk sack with her limbs glimmering through it, and had then lifted this over her head and had turned to hero and reader, and had left the rest, the promise, to them. This moment had been his touchstone. He had not known, as a little boy, what a Sack was, and still did not, and had had at best an inaccurate imagination of rosy limbs etc etc etc. But he had been stirred. He
walked to and fro. And how, up there, did she see him, for whom she waited? He walked.
The staircase was very steep, polished and wooden, with a plum-red runner. Mrs Cammish’s house was well kept. The wood smelled of beeswax and the brass carpet-fittings gleamed.
The bedroom was papered with trellises of monstrous roses on a cabbage-green ground. There was a dressing-table, a wardrobe, a curtained alcove, one armchair with upholstered arms and curly legs, and a huge brass bed on which several feather mattresses lay majestically, as though separating a princess from a pea. On top of all this she sat waiting, under a stiff white crocheted bedspread and a patchwork quilt, holding these high to her chest, peering over. No “sack” here, but a high-necked white lawn nightdress, covered at neck and wrists with intricate goffering and pin-tucks and lacy edges, buttoned with a row of minute linen buttons. Her face was white and sharp and slightly gleaming in the candlelight, like bone. No hint of pink. And the hair. So fine, so pale, so much, crimped by its plaiting into springy zigzag tresses, clouding neck and shoulders, shining metallic in the candlelight, catching a hint, there it was, of green again, from the reflection of a large glazed cache-pot containing a vigorous sword-leafed fern. She watched him in silence.
She had not, as many women might have done, strewn the room or covered the surfaces with female things. On one chair stood a kind of trembling collapsed cage, the crinoline, with its steel hoops and straps. Under it, the small green boots. Not a hairbrush, not a bottle. He put down his candle with a sigh, and undressed briskly, out of its light, in the shadows. She watched him. When he looked up, he caught her eye. She might have lain with her face turned away, but did not.