Most Loving Mere Folly Page 8

  If she turned up the light on his unspeakable humiliation he thought he would die of shame; but she did not. She stood there in the darkness, quite still, her hand on the lamp, her eyes upon him, but she did not turn on the light. All she could see of him was the broken look of his body as he gathered himself up slowly by the failing gleams of the firelight, and dragging himself to the settee where her small, helpless feet had rested, put his arms down there, and his head in them, and crouched shuddering, wishing to melt into the merciful impersonal dimness of the air.

  What use was it now if they were alone in the house, what use if he knew himself the stronger? That was not at all what he had wanted. She need only bend a finger against him, and she could make him do whatever she pleased. She had only to laugh like that, and he was at her mercy. She had only to despise him, for him to be utterly despicable.

  ‘My poor child! My dear child! You forget the effect years of this life can have on the muscles. Really, did you think you could just gather me up when you pleased? Ought I to be afraid of you? Or was I supposed to be waiting for this? Did you imagine I had you cast for this part? My poor child, you’ve been reading too many novelettes! And what should I do now? Run out of the house and stop some car on the road, for help? I would, but it’s really a little too cold to carry on with the game. And then, you were not very convincing yourself – so naïve and harmless, much too tame for a wolf. Do get up! I’m quite worried about you.’

  But she did not put on the light. Her voice had gathered into its tone a scarifying mockery; if she had not actually been frightened, not for a moment, she had certainly been startled and outraged, or why should she want to flay him like this for a mere clumsy stupidity? He had never been dangerous in his life, to her or to anyone. His poor little gesture had been all a mistake. Why should she want to make him writhe for it?

  Dennis lifted his head, and looked wide-eyed into the darkness where she was. She had moved a little nearer, and he could feel the weight of her gaze crushingly upon him. There was nothing he could say that would mean anything. He couldn’t come here again, he had thrown everything away. The ache inside his body was pounding through him with the heavy beat of a gigantic heart, because she cared nothing for him, and he had made an image of her which was a childish distortion, and abandoned the reality for it.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ he said almost inaudibly. ‘I thought—I’ll go!’ He got to his feet, slowly and painfully.

  ‘You thought I was waiting to be taken, and wondering what took you so long. I’m sorry, I didn’t realise how very simple your view of life could be, my poor Dennis. You should have given me some hint beforehand, I might have put up a better show.’

  ‘Don’t!’ he said, almost crying. ‘I made a ghastly mistake. It wasn’t your fault, I know. Please forget about it – I’m going, you won’t have to see me again.’

  He was standing, now, and probably as near to being presentable as he would ever be again. She could see the crushed carriage of his shoulders, the shrinking turn of his head away from her. It was then that she put on the light. He shied at it still as at a blow, but she had to know what she was doing. His voice was not as it should have been, nor had he made the defence she had expected from him. She knew of no reason on earth why she should pity him, still less why she should feel in some way guilty towards him. Everything she had ever offered him had been offered openly; if he had been too clever, or too big a fool, to know what it was, or to take her inviolable word for it, was that her fault? But perhaps the guilt was not for the past, but for the present and the future, for what she was doing to him now, and what would follow from it all through his life.

  She had realised, from time to time, that she had assumed a responsibility for him. She could hardly be comfortably rid of it now, just because he made a foolish mistake about the nature of her alliance with him. That wasn’t her fault; no, but this could be. If he crept away like this, repulsed with the most cruel ease and lightness, utterly despised, how could he ever again believe that he could be acceptable to anyone? A poor little half-man, creeping jealously through a poor little half-life, afraid to present his slighted masculinity to any woman, and turning his fear into a perpetual grudge against them for being unable to take what they had never been offered! She saw this horrifying vision of frustration rolling outward before Dennis’s stumbling feet, waiting to receive him. It was more than she could bear.

  ‘Don’t go!’ she said, suddenly and urgently.

  Out of sheer astonishment he turned, with his hand already on the latch, and looked full at her. It was a poor, silly, bewildered face, maybe, it was not a bad or a fundamentally stupid one. She stood staring back at him, suddenly intent and grave, studying passionately the young, wounded, wary features, the lips still set rather hard for fear of trembling, the hot, bitter flush on the cheeks, the humiliated but direct grey eyes, so wide and light with surprise, and so unguardedly full of desperate love. No, it had not been quite such a simple, quite such a greedy piece of conceit. Perhaps she had known it when her tongue, looking for spears to throw, could find only, again and again, the piteous: ‘My poor child – my poor child—’

  ‘Don’t go – not yet!’

  She went towards him, putting back her head with a deliberate and decisive authority. There was nothing of hers she could not give away if she chose, without asking the permission of any man living. Her respectability was a small thing to give to anyone, she valued it so little, and her integrity was involved now rather with giving than with keeping. It did not seem to her a particularly desperate step to throw her chastity into his arms, if it were done of her own will, and if it could make a whole man of him instead of a maimed one. No amount of free giving could make her less than whole.

  He stood looking at her mutely, until she put up her hand, and wiped a splash of blue from his cheek with her handkerchief. The faintest and most preoccupied of smiles touched her lips.

  ‘You can’t go home like that! And think,’ she said reproachfully, ‘of all that good blue you’ve wasted! Bend your head a little, you’ve got a lock of blue hair.’

  Now he did not know where he was, nor what to expect from her next moment. Probably it was only a new way of making angry fun of him, and in a moment more he would be turned out of the house, having first been tidied contemptuously, comforted briefly, put into his coat like a bad child being efficiently but severely packed off home from school. He could not help himself now; whatever she did to him, all he could do was accept it, make no complaint, and go.

  She had imagined him as taking heart again rather quickly, and readily becoming voluble in his own defence, and here he stood waiting, silently and patiently, for her to hit him again. It startled her to realise how fastidiously, in her own flesh, she could feel his acute expectation of pain, and how deeply it astonished her that he was doing nothing to ward it off. He was far too healthily fond of himself to make it secretly welcome, or had been until she and Theo between them had upset once for all the innocent and limited equilibrium of his life. ‘Maybe we both owe him this,’ she thought, contemplating with resolute serenity what she was about to do.

  ‘I’m sorry if I hurt your pride,’ she said, very gently, ‘but you hurt mine. I’m not good at having things snatched from me.’ Her eyes were large with his nearness, and wonderfully green. He wondered for a terrible, mistaken moment if she could still be making game of him, but instantly caught himself back from a gross folly of distrust. If there was one thing she had more magnificently than any other creature he had ever known, it was her terrifying honesty. His coldness began to be filled with a living and devouring heat. He lifted his hands a little towards her, cupping them achingly to the littleness of her body; but he was afraid to touch her because everything was so inexplicably changed.

  ‘And then,’ she said, ‘people are apt to resent it when you try to snatch at things they would prefer to give.’

  She raised her arms to him, seeing him lean to her, and the sudden tremulous wond
er and joy of his face vanished into the darkness of her closed eyelids. She felt his hands enfold her body for a moment with the inseparable delight and pain he had felt when he touched the purple jar, then she was caught up in his arms tightly, his cheek was cold against her cheek, his mouth kissing and sighing and whispering brokenly against her throat, and she felt her own unimagined passion and delight breaking in little, wordless, fierce cries into his ear. It was not a gift, after all, it was a natural cataclysm, a flash of lightning splitting both their hearts, irrecoverably mingling body into body and blood into blood. No, it was not a gift, unless the smaller word will do for a sacramental vastness and violence hitherto unknown, and therefore without a name.

  Afterwards the light was out again, and there was nothing in the silence but the soft, silting fall of a few embers in the fire, and her own astonished voice, heavy with tenderness, whispering in a deep, drowned lassitude of delight: ‘Oh, my heart – my sweet child – my beloved little heart—’

  3

  She was thirty-six years old, and she had lived a full and satisfying and rewarding life, uncomplicated by any adherence to conventions, undistorted by any reaction against them; she had had successes, not only in the world’s eyes, but even in her own, she had made things she was still proud and glad to remember as hers, and knew that she could make as many more, and the best of the new would always be a little more complete and intact than the best of the old; she had the reputation of a fulfilled and justified artist, and what was better still, the conviction of her own justification; she had liked a man enough to marry him, and live with him in a loose but assured harmony for ten years, and they had had every kind of fun together, and no regrets at all. And yet she had never known love, and never missed it, until now.

  Christmas was like a carnival of stars, and the fugitive glimmerings of the aurora which lit in the New Year, faint, fabulous pulses of gold, and rose, and icy blue, were like the monstrous late blossoming of her life, too large for any other garden. She had felt ample enough before to hold every gesture her spirit ever required her to make, there had seemed plenty of room for every impulse and every speculation; but now she was enlarged so exultantly that she felt the warmth of her own joy reflected back upon her from the confines of the night, and the whole house and the arching wood and the open fields were filled with her happiness. Who could have guessed that there remained anything like this still undiscovered, when the world had always already produced so many satisfactions? In the middle of her forever experimental and exploratory content, the limitations of experience suddenly burst, suddenly vanished.

  She never questioned what had happened; it was so obviously authentic, so profoundly and intensely right that it would have seemed to her a kind of abortion to examine it critically, much less try to place any restrictions upon it. It was not as if she had gone looking for it. All she had meant to do was to make a single generous gesture towards Dennis’s threatened self-esteem, and set him up firmly in his own manhood, against the time when his fancy would incline towards some girl, some contemporary, and leave her behind, scarcely ruffled, certainly no way wronged or guilty of wrong. She had never gone out of her way to appease the conventions, nor even to flout them; usually she was oblivious of them, they seemed to her so irrelevant to all her ideas of responsible human behaviour. Only the little moment of deliberate, cocksure kindness had exploded, and set the world on fire.

  And now it was too late to turn back, even if she would have considered retreat for a moment. A reality is a reality. When the constellations turn within its arm, and every hour of the day and night is timed by the incidence of its visitations, it may well be accepted as the only reality. She loved him, and was loved by him. There was no speculation about it, and no room for argument; it flamed through everything she did and thought, it flowered in every clay shape that burst into life under her fingers, and coloured every glaze that came out of her glost kiln elate and radiant in beauty. Nor had it happened only to him, and to her. Every particle of matter in the world about them glowed in the reflections of its splendour, so that every night was a renewal in secret, and every morning a revelation.

  Colours had never been so bright and subtle as they were for her that winter, forms so supremely confident in their own beauty, snow so white, people so recognisably significant and immortal, nor herself so ready to meet them and acknowledge them. It did not even matter that love itself was confined to a few rare and brief meetings; the illumination of love continued undimmed between the moments of union, and sustained them in a certainty of its durability and permanence which left no room at all for doubt. So there was no haste, and no greed, even for delight of which there could never be enough.

  Day after day through December and January she watched Dennis grow. It was as if all the tautness and suspicion and reserve in him began to melt from the time that he possessed her, as if the warmth of her body and the conviction of her arms accepting him had thawed his defensive coldness, and softened him to stretch out his young length beside her with a relaxed and grateful sigh. Sometimes he seemed to her already taller, as if the release of a spiritual constriction had also set his body at liberty. The lines of his face seemed to lose their sharpness without losing their form. His eyes had a deep, wondering quietness, and when he was not directly troubled by the effort of reconciling backgrounds which must have seemed to him still quite incompatible, he spoke to her in an instinctive way which would have been impossible to the boy whom she had known in the autumn. The voice which had first lost its difficult tensions in the husky, breathless dark, moaning blind, tender endearments into her cheek, and silencing itself against her mouth, could not regain its old habit even in the daylight and the street. He asked her things he could not have asked a few weeks ago, admitted with an open and unpretending humility failures and lacks which he would have fought jealously to cover from sight. She would almost have believed it a recoil into innocence, if she could have credited such a thing; but she did not believe that anyone’s life could turn back on itself, nor that recovered ease, supposing it were possible, would ever again fit easily. He had gone forward, because nobody can go back.

  She wondered that no one saw how they had expanded, how they shone, how the overflow of their joy in each other was spilled resplendently into all their relations with other people, gilding everything they touched with the reflection of their own unimaginable happiness.

  4

  They were painting tiles, and had brought them into the living-room and spread themselves and all their paraphernalia upon newspapers on the rug, because the night was glittering with frost, and the workshop was too cold to give their fingers properly fluent play. Dennis had a smooth white tile in one hand, a loaded brush of blue-black in the other, and Suspiria’s spare and rapid design before him, a swallow in flight. He was frowning at it with intense concentration, and out of the heart of his need for knowledge he asked without any preliminaries, as he asked her everything now:

  ‘What is a work of art?’

  It was something which could not have happened a few weeks before; he would have assumed that this was something everyone about her claimed to know, and that he must on no account emphasise his singularity by admitting his ignorance. Now he asked it without any concealment, looking up at her suddenly across the littered hearth, where only a few minutes before they had leaned suddenly to each other with a mutual impulse of longing, and kissed, and clung.

  Suspiria held her cold hands to the fire, and turned to look at him with an alert and startled smile. ‘I don’t know how to define it. I never tried. I don’t suppose anyone ever has, properly.’

  ‘Well, try now! It must be something!’

  She shut her eyes for a moment, to see in another plane of consciousness. ‘I think – a work of art is an image of truth, which somebody has been able to discover and reduce to a form in which it can be –’ she hesitated upon the word ‘intelligible’, but it seemed to her to smell too academically of formulae and the mind �
�– apprehensible to everybody.’

  ‘And what is truth, then?’ he asked, after pondering this definition for a minute or two in silence. ‘Because you mean a lot more by it than just the ordinary literal truth, don’t you? If you don’t know what it is, you can’t recognise it in its images, can you?’

  This time she did not close her eyes, but continued looking at him steadily with a shining, meditative look. ‘I think it’s the full realisation of one’s own identity, first. And after that, the right relation of oneself to everything else there is to be realised.’ She frowned a little, because it did not satisfy her, but: ‘That’s the best I can do offhand,’ she said.

  ‘It doesn’t help to give you a quick test for what’s really a work of art and what isn’t, though, does it? How can you tell, if there isn’t any means of measuring it up?’

  ‘With your blood, and your body, and your imagination. Don’t trust anyone who tries to tell you there are fixed rules, like certain proportions that you can check up on with callipers. If he tells you that, he doesn’t know anything, he hasn’t any blood – nor any imagination. I’ve seen works of art that broke all the rules, and broke them with such authority that you knew at once they were right. The real test is in the full contact with your own personality, and if it rings right, it is right. You know it in things as you know it in people’s lives – they can be works of art, too, only not enough of them are. People absolutely authentic, absolutely themselves, without any cant, or pretensions, or sidelong approaches. Part of the way of recognising them is in the way you approach them. It must be dead straight – no preconceptions and no timidity.’ She sat with her hands coiled in her lap upon the tile she had forgotten she held. ‘You make me talk too much. I can only express myself with my hands.’