Five Women

  Meanwhile, talk spread like a net among the people in the little sledge. He joined in, making remarks of the tritely well-turned kind that many people make, with a pinch of that spice which is like a sharp, confident aura enveloping a man in a woman's presence. In these moments of male dominance, so much a matter of course, she became uneasy and embarrassed and ashamed at not having effectively rebuffed his earlier insinuating advances to her. And yet when she, in her turn, could not avoid speaking, she felt it came to her all too easily, and she had an awareness of herself as of a feeble, ineffective waving with the stump of an amputated arm.

  Then indeed she observed how helplessly she was being flung this way and that, at each curve in the road being touched now on the arms, now at the knees, sometimes with the whole upper part of her body leaning against some other person's body; and remotely, by some analogy, she experienced it as if this small sledge were a darkened room and these people were seated around her, hot and urgent, and she were timidly a prey to shameless acts that she endured, smiling, as if not noticing anything, her eyes focused straight ahead.

  All this was like feeling an irksome dream in half-sleep, always remaining slightly conscious of its unreality, always marvelling at feeling it so strongly. Then a moment came when that man leaned out, looked up at the sky, and said: "We're going to be snowed up."

  With a start her thoughts leapt into complete wakefulness. She glanced around : the people were exchanging cheerful, harmless pleasantries, as those do who at the end of a long journey through darkness get their first glimpse of light and of tiny figures in the distance. And all at once she had a strangely indifferent, sober sense of reality. But she noticed with astonishment that something nevertheless touched her, moved her intensely. It frightened her a little, for it was a pallid, almost unnatural lucidity, in which nothing could sink into the vagueness of reverie and through which no thought moved and within which nevertheless people now and then became jagged and huge as hills, as if suddenly gliding through an invisible fog where all that was real expanded, taking on a gigantic, shadowy, second outline. Then she felt something that was almost humility and dread of them; yet she never quite lost the awareness that this weakness was only a peculiar faculty: it was as if the frontiers of her being had extended, invisibly and sensitively, and everything came into faint collision with them, setting up tremors. And for the first time she was truly startled by this queer day, the solitariness of which, like a passage leading underground, had gradually sunk with her into the confused whisperings of multitudinous inner twilight and now suddenly, in a distant region, ascended into the midst of inexorably actual events, leaving her alone in a vast, unfamiliar, unwanted reality.

  Furtively she looked across at the stranger. He was striking a match: for an instant his beard was lit up, and one eye. And even this trivial act seemed remarkable; she felt the solidity of it, felt how naturally one thing linked with the next and was merely there, insensate and calm and yet like a simple and tremendous power, stone interlocked with stone. She reflected that he was certainly quite an ordinary person. And at that she had again a faint, elusive, intangible sense of her own existence; she felt herself floating in the dark before him, dissolved and tattered, like pale, frothing foam, and felt an odd stimulus in answering him agreeably. And even while speaking she watched herself and what she was doing, helpless, unmoved in spirit, and yet with an enjoyment that was divided between pleasure and torment, which made her feel as though she were crouching in the innermost depths of some great and ever expanding exhaustion.

  It struck her that this was the way it had sometimes begun in the past. At the thought of such a recurrence her mind reeled with voluptuous, enervated horror as of some still nameless sin. She wondered whether he had noticed her looking at him, and her body filled with a faint, almost docile sensuality—a dark hiding-place for the stealthy urges of the soul within. But the stranger sat there in the darkness, big and calm, merely smiling sometimes—or perhaps even that only seemed so to her.

  So they travelled on into the falling night, at close quarters, facing each other. And gradually her thoughts were again invaded by that softly forward-thrusting unrest. She tried telling herself that all this was nothing but delusions, arising out of the confused inner stillness of this sudden lonely journey amid strangers, and then again she would think it was the wind wrapping her with its stiff, searing cold, petrifying her, robbing her of her will; and then at other times it oddly seemed to her as if her husband were very near to her and all this sensual weakness were some ineffable aspect of their great love. And once—when she had just glanced across at the stranger again and was conscious of this shadowy abandonment of her will, all her firmness and inviolability gone—suddenly there was a radiance high and bright over her past, as over an indescribable, strangely ordered panorama. It was a queer premonition, as if all that seemed long past and gone were still alive. But in the next moment it was no more than a fading streak of intuition in the darkness and all that remained was something faintly reverberating within her, rather as if it had been the never-before-glimpsed landscape of her love, filled with colossal forms and a quiet rushing sound, confused and alien, already beyond her grasp. And she felt herself lingeringly and softly enveloped in her own being, which was full of strange, not yet comprehensible resolutions whose origin was in that other realm.

  She could not help thinking of the days to come, isolated from the rest of her days, lying ahead of her like an enfilade of remote rooms, each one opening into the next. And all this time she heard the beat of the horses' hooves, bearing her—helplessly flung into the meaningless actuality of this situation, these close quarters here in the sledge—nearer to all that was to come. With hasty, nervous laughter she joined in a commonplace conversation; but within her everything was vast and ramified, and she was helpless before the incomprehensibility of all things as under a huge cloak of silence.

  In the night she woke up: it was as though little bells had been jingling. She knew at once it was snowing. She looked towards the window; there it was in the air outside, soft, and heavy as a wall. Barefoot, she tiptoed to the window. It was all a matter of an instant. Darkly she sensed that she put her naked feet to the ground like an animal. Then, with her face close to the glass, she stared numbly out into the dense trellis-work of the snowflakes. She did all this as one may, starting up from sleep, with a consciousness so narrowly confined that it is like a little uninhabited island emerging from the sea. It was as if she were standing a long way off from herself. And all at once she remembered, and remembered even the emphasis with which he had said it: ‘We're going to be snowed up.'

  She tried to collect herself. Turning round, she saw how small and cramped the room was. And there was something strange in this smallness, as of being caged, of being beaten.

  She lit a candle and held it high, moving its light over the things. Slowly the sleep began to ebb from them, but they were still as though they had not yet quite found their way back into themselves. Wardrobe, chest of drawers, and bed, there they were, and yet there was somehow either too much or too little, a mere shadowy nothing, a harsh whispering shadow of nothingness. Blank and sunken they stood in the bleak half-light from the flickering candle, and over table and walls there lay an endless feeling of dust, and of walking, walking barefoot through an infinity of dust. Outside the room there was a narrow passage with a wooden floor and whitewashed walls; at the top of the stairs, she knew, there was a dim lamp hanging in a wire ring, casting five pale, swaying circles on the ceiling, and beyond that the light trickled away on the chalky walls, like marks left by the fumbling of greasy hands. Five pale, inanely swaying circles were like five sentries guarding a strangely excited emptiness.... All around were people she did not know, all asleep. She felt a wave of sudden unreal heat and she almost began to scream, faintly, the way cats sometimes scream in fear and desire, as she stood there, wide awake in the night, while soundlessly the last shadow of her actions, strange even to herself, slip
ped back behind the walls of her inner being and these grew smooth again. And suddenly she thought: ‘Supposing he came now ... and just did what I know he wants to....'

  She was more startled than she realised. Something rolled away over her like a glowing ball. For minutes there was only this wild panic and behind it the constriction of the room, a soundless strait, tense as a cracked whip. She tried to form a mental image of the man. But she failed; all she could feel was the warily prowling, beast-like tread of her own thoughts. Only now and then she caught a partial glimpse of him as he was in reality—his beard, one eye lit up.... And she was sickened. She could never again belong to a stranger. And precisely there, precisely coincident with this abhorrence of all other men that rose in her body, with its mysterious yearning only for the one, she felt—as though on some other, deeper plane—a leaning over, a vertigo, and had a sense of all human insecurity. And with it went something like dread of herself, something that was perhaps also an intangible, irrational, groping desire that the stranger should really come. Fear swept through her like the biting cold that comes as though driven by the current of some destructive lustful urge.

  Somewhere a clock began placidly talking to itself. Footsteps passed under her window and faded away. Quiet voices.... The room was chilly; the warmth of sleep slipped away from her skin, and vaguely, unresistingly, she swayed to and fro with it in the dark as in a cloud of faintness. The things around her made her feel ashamed, hard and straight as they were—once again disengaged, once again entirely themselves, blankly staring at nothing, while she was confusedly conscious of standing there, waiting for a stranger. And yet she realised obscurely that it was not the stranger who tempted her, but simply this standing and waiting, a fine-toothed, savage, abandoned ecstasy in being herself, in being alive, awake here among these lifeless objects—ecstasy that had opened like a wound. And while she felt her heart beating, like some frenzied wild creature trapped within her breast, her body in its quiet swaying drew itself up, like a great exotic, nodding flower that suddenly shudders with the infinitely expanding rapture of mysterious union as it closes round its captive. And softly, far off, she could hear the beloved's heart wandering unquiet, restless, homeless, chiming through the stillness like the lilt of some wind-blown, remote music, flickering as starlight; and she was moved by the haunting loneliness of those chords that were in quest of her, moved as by some vast diapason resounding far beyond the limits of the human soul.

  Now it seemed to her that something was about to reach fulfilment and, standing there, she lost all count of time. Minutes ... hours ... time lay motionless around her, fed by invisible springs, a shoreless lake, without beginning or end. Only once, at some moment she was but vaguely aware of, something slid darkly across the outermost reaches of her mind: a thought, a notion.... And as it passed, she recognised it as the memory of dreams long lost, of dreams belonging to her former life, in which she thought herself enslaved by enemies and was compelled to perform humiliating acts; but even as she recognised it, it began to diminish and disappear. One last time it rose out of the hazy distance, phantom-clear, sharply outlined against the background like the rigging of a ship, masts and tackle . . . and she remembered how she had always been defenceless, remembered her own shrieks waking her from sleep, and how she had struggled in dull despair until her strength gave out and her senses reeled—all the shapeless, boundless misery of that earlier life.... Then it was gone. In the stillness that closed in round her again there was only a radiance, a last receding wave, a lull, as though something unutterable had happened. And then from there beyond just as once, behind her dreams, this terrible helplessness of hers had lived another, second life, remote, intangible, imaginary—suddenly she was overtaken by a sense of promise, a glimmer of longing, and knew a surrender such as she had never known before, a naked, bare self-awareness that the irrevocability of her fate had stripped of anything personal and which, while driving her towards ever deeper frenzies of exhaustion, yet weirdly bemused her, as though it were, far within her, the stray tender particle of a love in quest of its own perfection—a love for which .there are still no words in the language of day, that language with its heavy upright gait on solid ground.

  She did not know whether it had been only a short time ago, just before waking, that she dreamt that dream once more. For years she had not dreamt it, had not even thought of it, and now all at once this dream and the time to which it belonged seemed to be quite close, hovering just behind her. It was like turning round and suddenly staring into a face. How strange it was !—as if here in this lonely room her life were turning back upon itself like tangled traces going round and round in an enormous plain.

  Behind her back there shone the little light that she had lit; her face was in darkness. Gradually she lost the feeling of her own shape, and her outlines seemed to become the limits of some monstrous cavity in this darkness, in this lingering moment that enveloped her. She began to feel as if she were not really here at all, as if merely something of herself had long ago set out and had been travelling ever since through space and through the years, and were now wakening here, alone and lost, at an infinite remove from that real self which she was, she herself standing still somewhere in the sunken realm of her old dream. Somewhere .. . a place she lived in ... people ... a dreadful maze of fear... . The blood shot into her face, her lips grew soft, and she realised: it was going to happen all over again ... another of them.... And the feeling of her loosened hair, her open arms, was different and as of long ago, as if all she had done then were an act of unfaithfulness here and now. And as in dismay she clung to the wish to keep herself for her beloved—her raised, imploring hands now slowly tiring—there came the thought:

  ‘We were unfaithful to each other before we knew each other....'

  It was the mere gleam of a thought, hardly more than a tremor—an exquisite and lovely bitterness, just as in the wind that rises from the sea there is sometimes a whiff of keener freshness, an intenser presence that lingers fleetingly and then drifts away—almost the thought: ‘we loved each other before we knew each other'. And it was as if the infinite tension of their love all at once expanded far beyond the present into that earlier unfaithfulness from which it had first come to them, as though deriving from some older form of its eternal existence between them.

  She sank down and for a long time, as though stunned, was aware of nothing except of sitting on a hard chair at a bare table. Her thoughts strayed to the talk they had had before her journey, about the man G., that figure in a novel —the veiled words and the words never uttered. And then she realised that through a chink in the window there came the moist, mild air of the snow-laden night, faintly caressing her bare shoulders. And remotely, mournfully, as a wind blows over rain-darkened fields, she began to think it would be a delight like quiet rain, like a sky over-arching a landscape, to be unfaithful—a mysterious, last, deathly delight.

  With the morning there came a queer atmosphere of the past, pervading everything.

  Claudine intended going to the school. She had woken early and it had been like rising out of heavy, clear water. She remembered nothing of all that had stirred her during the night. She moved the looking-glass to the window and began to put her hair up. It was still dark in the room. But while she was doing her hair, straining her eyes to see herself in the small, tarnished glass, she was overcome by a feeling that, somehow, here was a peasant girl beautifying herself for her Sunday outing. She felt quite strongly that it was all for the benefit of the schoolmasters who would see her, or perhaps for the stranger. She could not rid herself of this senseless notion. It did not spring from her inner being, but it clung to everything she did: all her movements took on something of oafishly sensual affectation, at once straddling and mincing, and slowly, disgustingly, irresistibly, it seeped from the surface down into the depths. For a while she paused to rest her arms. All this was really quite silly and could not prevent what was bound to happen. But while the fancy remained—mer
ely swinging to and fro, with an intangible suggestion of things forbidden and things desired and undesired, all part of another chain of events that was mistier and less corporeal than that of real decisions, yet remotely accompanying all she did—and while her fingers slid through her soft hair, the sleeves of her wrap slipping up her bare arms, it seemed to her again that at some point in time—once? always?—it had all been like this before. And it struck her as odd that now when she was awake, here in the emptiness of the morning, her arms were moving up and down as though subject not to her own will but to some other, alien, indifferent power. And then slowly the mood of the past night began to reassert itself; and memories rose almost to the surface of her mind, only to sink away again. A tension lay between her and those half-remembered experiences, like a quivering curtain.

  Outside the windows day was breaking, bright and uneasy. Looking out into the monotonous, blank light, Claudine felt a stirring like the voluntary loosening of her fingers' grasp, a slow, alluring sensation of gliding down among silvery shining bubbles and motionless fishes, strange and goggle-eyed. The day began.

  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.