Five Women

  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.

  As a light rises behind a delicate network of veins, out of the expectant darkness of the years the mortal nostalgia of her love rose up among her thoughts, gradually enveiling her. And then all at once, from a long way off, from some radiant expanse, and as though she had only now understood the implication of the stranger's words, she heard herself say: "I don't know whether he could bear it...."

  It was the first time she had spoken of her husband. She was startled: it did not seem part of this reality. But she instantly saw the meaning in the words she had just uttered, and their inevitable consequence.

  Seizing upon this, her companion said : "Do you mean to say you love him?"

  She did not miss the absurdity of the assurance with which he flung this at her. Trembling but determined, she said: "No, no, I don't love him at all."

  When she was upstairs again, in her room, she wondered how she could have uttered such a lie; but she relished the masked, enigmatic fascination of it. She thought of her husband. Now and then in her mind's eye she caught a glimpse of him—it was like standing in the street, looking through a window at someone moving about in a brightly lit room. Only then did she really grasp what she was doing.

  He seemed beautiful in that light and she wanted to be there with him, for then she too would partake of the radiance about him.

  But she shrank back into her lie again, and once more it was like being outside in the street in darkness. She shivered with cold; it was anguish merely to be alive—anguish to look at things, to breathe. The feeling that bound her to her husband was like a globe of warm light into which she could easily slip back. There she was safe; there the things could not thrust at her like the sharp prows of ships looming up out of the night; there everything was softly padded and the things were warded off. And yet she rejected that.

  She remembered that she had lied once before. Not in her earlier life, for then the lie had been simply part of herself. But once in this second life of hers she had told a lie, even though what she had actually said was true enough—that she had been out for a walk, in the evening, for two hours. She suddenly realised that that was the first time she had told a lie. Just as she had sat among the people downstairs tonight, so at that time she had walked about in the streets, forlorn, restless as a stray dog, and had gazed into the windows of the houses. And somewhere somebody opened his front door, letting a woman in, smugly satisfied with his own affability, his gestures, the style of his welcome. And somewhere else a man walked arm in arm with his wife, going out for the evening, filled with dignity from head to toe, smug in the security of wedlock. And everywhere, as in a broad river that placidly shelters multifarious life, there were small whirling eddies, each revolving on its own centre, gazing inwards, blind and windowless, closed to the indifferent world. And within, in everyone, there was the same feeling of being held in balance by one's own echo in a narrow space that catches every word and keeps it ringing until the next is uttered, so that one does not hear the insufferable interval, the chasm between the impact of one action and the next, the chasm between two sounds, where one drops away from the sense of one's own identity, plunging into the silence between two words, which might just as well be the silence between the words of somebody utterly different.

  And then she had been assailed by the secret thought: ‘Somewhere among all these people there is someone—not the right one, someone else—but still, one could have adjusted oneself even to him, and then one would never have known anything of the person that one is today. For every feeling exists only in the long chain of other feelings, each supporting the next; and all that matters is that one instant of life should link up with the next without any lacuna, and there are hundreds of different ways in which it can do so.' And for the first time since the beginning of her love the thought had flashed through her mind: ‘It is all chance—by some chance something becomes reality, and then one holds on to it, that's all.'

  For the first time she had felt her being, down to its very foundations, as something indeterminate, had apprehended this ultimate faceless experience of herself in love as something that destroyed the very root, the absoluteness, of existence and would always have made her into a person that she called herself and who was nevertheless not different from everyone else. And it was as if she must let go, let herself sink back into the drift of things, into the realm of unfulfilled possibilities, the no-man's-land. And she hurried through the mournful, empty streets, glancing in through windows as she passed, wanting no other company than the clatter of her heels on the cobbles—reduced to that last sign of physical existence, hearing nothing but her own footsteps echoing now in front of her and nOw behind her.

  At that time all she had been able to grasp was the dissolution, the ceaselessly shifting background of shadowy unrealised feelings that frustrated any power by which one might have held on to another human being—that, and the devalued, undemonstrable, and incomprehensible nature of her own life. She had almost wept with confusion and fatigue, entering that realm of utter isolation.

  But now, in this moment when it all came back to her, it carried her right to the end of whatever possibilities of real love, real union, there were in this transparently thin, glimmeringly vulnerable world of illusion—of illusions without which life could not be maintained: all the dream-dark straits of existing solely by virtue of another human being, all the island solitude of never daring to wake, this insubstantiality of love that was like a gliding between two mirrors behind which nothingness lay. And here in this room, hidden behind her false confession as behind a mask, and waiting for the adventure that she would experience as though she were someone else, she knew the wonderful, dangerous intensification of feeling that came with lying and cheating in love. She felt herself stealthily slipping out of her own being, out into some territory beyond anyone else's reach, the forbidden territory, the dissolution of absolute solitude—entering, for the sake of greater truthfulness, into the void that sometimes gapes for an instant behind all ideals.

  And then suddenly she heard a furtive tread, a creaking first of the stairs and then of the floorboards outside her door, a faint creaking under the weight of someone who had stopped there.

  Her eyes turned towards the door. How strange that there outside, behind those thin panels, there was another human being, standing motionless.... And on each side of this indifferent, this accidental door tension rose high as behind a dam.

  She had already undressed. Her clothes lay on the chair by the bed, where she had just flung them, and from them the vague scent of what had been next to her body rose and mingled with the air of this room that was let one day to this person, the next day to another. She glanced round the room. She noticed a brass lock hanging loose, on a chest of drawers. Her gaze lingered on a small threadbare rug, worn thin by many footsteps, at the side of her bed. Suddenly she could not help thinking of all the bare feet that had stepped on this rug, permeating
it with their smell, and how this smell was given off again and entered into other people's being, a familiar, protective smell, somehow associated with childhood and home. It was an odd, flickering, double impression, now alien and abhorrent, now fascinating, as if the self-love of all those strangers were a current flowing into her and all that was left of her own identity were a passive awareness of it.

  And all the while that man was there, standing on the other side of her door, his presence known to her only through the faint, hardly detectable sounds that he could not help making.

  Then she was seized by a wild urge to throw herself down on this rug and kiss the repulsive traces of all those feet, exciting herself with their smell like a bitch on heat. But this was no longer sexual desire; it was something crying within her like a small child, howling like a high wind.

  Suddenly she knelt down on the rug. The stiff flowers of the pattern loomed larger, spreading and intertwining senselessly before her eyes, and over them she saw her own heavy thighs, a mature woman's thighs, hideously arched and without meaning, yet tense with an incomprehensible gravity. And her hands lay there before her on the floor, two five-limbed animals staring at each other.

  All at once she remembered the lamp in the passage there outside and the horribly silent moving circles it cast upon the ceiling, and the walls, the bare walls, remembered the emptiness out there and then again the man who was standing there, faintly creaking sometimes as a tree creaks in its bark, his urgent blood in his head like the thicket of the leaves. And here she was on her hands and knees, only a door between her and him. And still she felt the full sweetness of her ripe body, felt it with that imperishable remnant of the soul that stands quietly, unmoved, beside the ravaged body even when it is broken open and disfigured by the infliction of devastating injuries—that stands beside it, in grave and constant awareness and yet averted from it, as beside the body of a stricken beast.