Her voice had become again quite impersonal, as if she were talking to herself.
"At any rate," he said, "it is your triumph."
She gave a sudden, bitter-contemptuous laugh.
"Ha!" she said. "What is triumph to me, you fool! You can have your triumph. I should be only too glad to give it you."
"And I to take it."
"Then take it," she cried, in hostility. "I offer it you often enough."
"But you never mean to part with it."
"It is a lie. It is you, you, who are too paltry to take a woman. How often do I fling myself at you--"
"Then don't--don't."
"Ha!--and if I don't--I get nothing out of you. Self! self! that is all you are."
His face remained set and expressionless. She looked up at him. Suddenly she drew him to her again, and hid her face against him.
"Don't kick me off, Pietro, when I come to you," she pleaded.
"You don't come to me," he answered stubbornly.
She lifted her head a few inches away from him and seemed to listen, or to think.
"What do I do, then?" she asked, for the first time quietly.
"You treat me as if I were a piece of cake, for you to eat when you wanted."
She rose from him with a mocking cry of scorn, that yet had something hollow in its sound.
"Treat you like a piece of cake, do I!" she cried. "I, who have done all I have for you!"
There was a knock, and the maid entered with a telegram. He tore it open.
"No answer," he said, and the maid softly closed the door.
"I suppose it is for you," he said, bitingly, rising and handing her the slip of paper. She read it, laughed, then read it again, aloud:
"'Meet me Marble Arch 7.30--theatre--Richard." Who is Richard?" she asked, looking at her husband rather interested. He shook his head.
"Nobody of mine," he said. "Who is he?"
"I haven't the faintest notion," she said, flippantly.
"But," and his eyes went bullying, "you must know."
She suddenly became quiet, and jeering, took up his challenge.
"Why must I know?" she asked.
"Because it isn't for me, therefore it must be for you."
"And couldn't it be for anybody else?" she sneered.
"'Moest, 14 Merrilies Street,'" he read, decisively.
For a second she was puzzled into earnestness.
"Pah, you fool," she said, turning aside. "Think of your own friends," and she flung the telegram away.
"It is not for me," he said, stiffly and finally.
"Then it is for the man in the moon--I should think his name is Moest," she added, with a pouf of laughter against him.
"Do you mean to say you know nothing about it?" he asked.
"Do you mean to say," she mocked, mouthing the words, and sneering; "Yes, I do mean to say, poor little man."
He suddenly went hard with disgust.
"Then I simply don't believe you," he said coldly.
"Oh--don't you believe me!" she jeered, mocking the touch of sententiousness in his voice. "What a calamity. The poor man doesn't believe!"
"It couldn't possibly be any acquaintance of mine," he said slowly.
"Then hold your tongue!" she cried harshly. "I've heard enough of it."
He was silent, and soon she went out of the room. In a few minutes he heard her in the drawing-room, improvising furiously. It was a sound that maddened him: something yearning, yearning, striving, and something perverse, that counteracted the yearning. Her music was always working up towards a certain culmination, but never reaching it, falling away in a jangle. How he hated it. He lit a cigarette, and went across to the sideboard for a whisky and soda. Then she began to sing. She had a good voice, but she could not keep time. As a rule it made his heart warm with tenderness for her, hearing her ramble through the songs in her own fashion, making Brahms sound so different by altering his time. But to-day he hated her for it. Why the devil couldn't she submit to the natural laws of the stuff!
In about fifteen minutes she entered, laughing. She laughed as she closed the door, and as she came to him where he sat.
"Oh," she said, "you silly thing, you silly thing! Aren't you a stupid clown?"
She crouched between his knees and put her arms round him. She was smiling into his face, her green eyes looking into his, were bright and wide. But somewhere in them, as he looked back, was a little twist that could not come loose to him, a little cast, that was like an aversion from him, a strain of hate for him. The hot waves of blood flushed over his body, and his heart seemed to dissolve under her caresses. But at last, after many months, he knew her well enough. He knew that curious little strain in her eyes, which was waiting for him to submit to her, and then would spurn him again. He resisted her while ever it was there.
"Why don't you let yourself love me?" she asked, pleading, but a touch of mockery in her voice. His jaw set hard.
"Is it because you are afraid?"
He heard the slight sneer.
"Of what?" he asked.
"Afraid to trust yourself?"
There was silence. It made him furious that she could sit there caressing him and yet sneer at him.
"What have I done with myself?" he asked.
"Carefully saved yourself from giving all to me, for fear you might lose something."
"Why should I lose anything?" he asked.
And they were both silent. She rose at last and went away from him to get a cigarette. The silver box flashed red with firelight in her hands. She struck a match, bungled, threw the stick aside, lit another.
"What did you come running back for?" she asked, insolently, talking with half-shut lips because of the cigarette. "I told you I wanted peace. I've had none for a year. And for the last three months you've done nothing but try to destroy me."
"You have not gone frail on it," he answered sarcastically.
"Nevertheless," she said, "I am ill inside me. I am sick of you--sick. You make an eternal demand, and you give nothing back. You leave one empty." She puffed the cigarette in feminine fashion, then suddenly she struck her forehead with a wild gesture. "I have a ghastly, empty feeling in my head," she said. "I feel I simply must have rest--I must."
The rage went through his veins like flame.
"From your labours?" he asked, sarcastically, suppressing himself.
"From you--from you?" she cried, thrusting forward her head at him. "You, who use a woman's soul up, with your rotten life. I suppose it is partly your health, and you can't help it," she added, more mildly. "But I simply can't stick it--I simply can't, and that is all."
She shook her cigarette carelessly in the direction of the fire. The ash fell on the beautiful Asiatic rug. She glanced at it, but did not trouble. He sat, hard with rage.
"May I ask how I use you up, as you say?" he asked.
She was silent a moment, trying to get her feeling into words. Then she shook her hand at him passionately, and took the cigarette from her mouth.
"By--by following me about--by not leaving me alone. You give me no peace--I don't know what you do, but it is something ghastly."
Again the hard stroke of rage went down his mind.
"It is very vague," he said.
"I know," she cried. "I can't put it into words--but there it is. You--you don't love. I pour myself out to you, and then--there's nothing there--you simply aren't there."
He was silent for some time. His jaw set hard with fury and hate.
"We have come to the incomprehensible," he said. "And now, what about Richard?"
It had grown nearly dark in the room. She sat silent for a moment. Then she took the cigarette from her mouth and looked at it.
"I'm going to meet him," her voice, mocking, answered out of the twilight.
His head went molten, and he could scarcely breathe.
"Who is he?" he asked, though he did not believe the affair to be anything at all, even if there were a Richard.
&nbs
p; "I'll introduce him to you when I know him a little better," she said. He waited.
"But who is he?"
"I tell you, I'll introduce him to you later."
There was a pause.
"Shall I come with you?"
"It would be like you," she answered, with a sneer.
The maid came in, softly, to draw the curtains and turn on the light. The husband and wife sat silent.
"I suppose," he said, when the door was closed again, "you are wanting a Richard for a rest?"
She took his sarcasm simply as a statement.
"I am," she said. "A simple, warm man who would love me without all these reservation and difficulties. That is just what I do want."
"Well, you have your own independence," he said.
"Ha," she laughed. "You needn't tell me that. It would take more than you to rob me of my independence."
"I meant your own income," he answered quietly, while his heart was plunging with bitterness and rage.
"Well," she said, "I will go and dress."
He remained without moving, in his chair. The pain of this was almost too much. For some moments the great, inflamed pulse struck through his body. It died gradually down, and he went dull. He had not wanted to separate from her at this point of their union; they would probably, if they parted in such a crisis, never come together again. But if she insisted, well then, it would have to be. He would go away for a month. He could easily make business in Italy. And when he came back, they could patch up some sort of domestic arrangement, as most other folk had to do.
He felt full and heavy inside, and without the energy for anything. The thought of having to pack and take a train to Milan appalled him; it would mean such an effort of will. But it would have to be done, and so he must do it. It was no use his waiting at home. He might stay in town a night, at his brother-in-law's, and go away the next day. It were better to give her a little time to come to herself. She was really impulsive. And he did not really want to go away from her.
He was still sitting thinking, when she came downstairs. She was in costume and furs and toque. There was a radiant, half-wistful, half-perverse look about her. She was a beautiful woman, her bright, fair face set among the black furs.
"Will you give me some money?" she said. "There isn't any."
He took two sovereigns, which she put in her little black purse. She would go without a word of reconciliation. It made his heart set hard again.
"You would like me to go away for a moment?" he said, calmly.
"Yes," she answered, stubbornly.
"All right, then, I will. I must stop in town for to-morrow, but I will sleep at Edmund's."
"You could do that, couldn't you?" she said, accepting his suggestion, a little bit hesitating.
"If you want me to."
"I'm so tired!" she lamented.
But there was exasperation and hate in the last word, too.
"Very well," he answered.
She finished buttoning her glove.
"You'll go, then?" she said suddenly, brightly, turning to depart. "Good-bye."
He hated her for the flippant insult of her leave-taking.
"I shall be at Edmund's to-morrow," he said.
"You will write to me from Italy, won't you?"
He would not answer the unnecessary question.
"Have you taken the dead primroses out of your hair?" he asked.
"I haven't," she said.
And she unpinned her hat.
"Richard would think me cracked," she said, picking out the crumpled, creamy fragments. She strewed the withered flowers carelessly on the table, set her hat straight.
"Do you want me to go?" he asked, again, rather yearning.
She knitted her brows. It irked her to resist the appeal. Yet she had in her breast a hard, repellent feeling for him. She had loved him, too. She had loved him dearly. And--he had not seemed to realise her. So that now she did want to be free of him for a while. Yet the love, the passion she had had for him clung about her. But she did want, first and primarily, to be free of him again.
"Yes," she said, half pleading.
"Very well," he answered.
She came across to him, and put her arms round his neck. Her hatpin caught his head, but he moved, and she did not notice.
"You don't mind very much, do you, my love?" she said caressingly.
"I mind all the world, and all I am," he said.
She rose from him, fretted, miserable, and yet determined.
"I must have some rest," she repeated.
He knew that cry. She had had it, on occasions, for two months now. He had cursed her, and refused either to go away or to let her go. Now he knew it was no use.
"All right," he said. "Go and get it from Richard."
"Yes." She hesitated. "Good-bye," she called, and was gone.
He heard her cab whirr away. He had no idea whither she was gone--but probably to Madge, her friend.
He went upstairs to pack. Their bedroom made him suffer. She used to say, at first, that she would give up anything rather than her sleeping with him. And still they were always together. A kind of blind helplessness drove them to one another, even when, after he had taken her, they only felt more apart than ever. It had seemed to her that he had been mechanical and barren with her. She felt a horrible feeling of aversion from him, inside her, even while physically she still desired him. His body had always a kind of fascination for her. But had hers for him? He seemed, often, just to have served her, or to have obeyed some impersonal instinct for which she was the only outlet, in his loving her. So at last she rose against him, to cast him off. He seemed to follow her so, to draw her life into his. It made her feel she would go mad. For he seemed to do it just blindly, without having any notion of her herself. It was as if she were sucked out of herself by some non-human force. As for him, he seemed only like an instrument for his work, his business, not like a person at all. Sometimes she thought he was a big fountain-pen which was always sucking at her blood for ink.
He could not understand anything of this. He loved her--he could not bear to be away from her. He tried to realise her and to give her what she wanted. But he could not understand. He could not understand her accusations against him. Physically, he knew, she loved him, or had loved him, and was satisfied by him. He also knew that she would have loved another man nearly as well. And for the rest, he was only himself. He could not understand what she said about his using her and giving her nothing in return. Perhaps he did not think of her, as a separate person from himself, sufficiently. But then he did not see, he could not see that she had any real personal life, separate from himself. He tried to think of her in every possible way, and to give her what she wanted. But it was no good; she was never at peace. And lately there had been growing a breach between them. They had never come together without his realising it, afterwards. Now he must submit, and go away.
And her quilted dressing-gown--it was a little bit torn, like most of her things--and her pearl-backed mirror, with one of the pieces of pearl missing--all her untidy, flimsy, lovable things hurt him as he went about the bedroom, and made his heart go hard with hate, in the midst of his love.
II
Instead of going to his brother-in-law's, he went to an hotel for the night. It was not till he stood in the lift, with the attendant at his side, that he began to realise that he was only a mile or so away from his own home, and yet farther away than any miles could make him. It was about nine o'clock. He hated his bedroom. It was comfortable, and not ostentatious; its only fault was the neutrality necessary to an hotel apartment. He looked round. There was one semi-erotic Florentine picture of a lady with cat's eyes, over the bed. It was not bad. The only other ornament on the walls was the notice of hours and prices of meals and rooms. The couch sat correctly before the correct little table, on which the writing-sachet and ink-stand stood mechanically. Down below, the quiet street was half illuminated, the people passed sparsely, like stunted shadows. And of
all times of the night, it was a quarter-past nine. He thought he would go to bed. Then he looked at the white-and-glazed doors which shut him off from the bath. He would bath, to pass the time away. In the bath-closet everything was so comfortable and white and warm--too warm; the level, unvarying heat of the atmosphere, from which there was no escape anywhere, seemed so hideously hotel-like; this central-heating forced a unity into the great building, making it more than ever like an enormous box with incubating cells. He loathed it. But at any rate the bath-closet was human, white and business-like and luxurious.
He was trying, with the voluptuous warm water, and the exciting thrill of the shower-bath, to bring back the life into his dazed body. Since she had begun to hate him, he had gradually lost that physical pride and pleasure in his own physique which the first months of married life had given him. His body had gone meaningless to him again, almost as if it were not there. It had wakened up, there had been the physical glow and satisfaction about his movements of a creature which rejoices in itself; a glow which comes on a man who loves and is loved passionately and successfully. Now this was going again. All the life was accumulating in his mental consciousness, and his body felt like a piece of waste. He was not aware of this. It was instinct which made him want to bathe. But that, too, was a failure. He went under the shower-spray with his mind occupied by business, or some care of affairs, taking the tingling water almost without knowing it, stepping out mechanically, as a man going through a barren routine. He was dry again, and looking out of the window, without having experienced anything during the last hour.
Then he remembered that she did not know his address. He scribbled a note and rang to have it posted.
As soon as he had turned out the light, and there was nothing left for his mental consciousness to flourish amongst, it dropped, and it was dark inside him as without. It was his blood, and the elemental male in it, that now rose from him; unknown instincts suffocated him, and he could not bear it, that he was shut in this great, warm building. He wanted to be outside, with space springing from him. But, again, the reasonable being in him knew it was ridiculous, and he remained staring at the dark, having the horrible sensation of a roof low down over him; whilst that dark, unknown being, which lived below all his consciousness in the eternal gloom of his blood, heaved and raged blindly against him.