Catherine made much of Virginia’s fainting.
‘What she want to faint for?’ asked Christopher sceptically. ‘A great
girl like that.’
‘Well, she <i>did</i>. So of course I couldn’t leave her sooner.’
But when she was saying this sort of thing she felt uncomfortable. Such
tiresome almost lying, such petty almost truth. She seemed now to walk
continually in small deceits. It was as though her feet couldn’t move a
step without getting into a tangle of repulsive little cobwebs. Nothing
much really; nothing more than she supposed most women, whom she began
to think of as creatures necessarily on the defensive, had to wade
through; but so different from the clean-swept path along which she had
all her life till then proceeded. All her life? All her death. That
hadn’t been life. Up to her marriage with Christopher she had merely
been dead. Now she was alive; and mustn’t she take the stings and the
pains and even the pettiness of life gladly, in return for its
beatitudes?
But they worried her, the stings and the pains and the pettiness. Also,
beatitudes were expensive. They forced her to go oftener to Maria Rome,
and the oftener she went the more she needed her. It was like
drug-taking. And suppose there should come a point--in her heart she
knew it must come--when Maria’s ministrations would merely accentuate
what they were intended to hide? Once or twice lately she had fancied
they had been less successful; or was it that there was more to do to
her the deeper she sank in this business of being young and happy? She
led a racked life, an uneasy mixture of fears and blisses. And the grey
in her hair seemed to multiply, and it too had to be treated by Maria
Rome, and she began to look more and more like somebody
adventurous,--she who was really the most unadventurous of
perch-clinging doves.
The thought of Virginia’s life,--Virginia, so young, so needing to do
nothing to herself, so completely at ease with her elderly husband--made
her sigh as the overheated and overtired sigh at the thought of cool
shadows and clear waters. There <i>was</i> a difference, and it was simply
all the difference in the world, between their two cases. She had been
horribly right when at the beginning she snubbed Christopher for
declaring there wasn’t. Stephen didn’t need to watch Virginia as she
watched Christopher, anxiously on the alert for the least sign of change
in her, in what she did, what she said, in the very tone in which she
said it. Stephen was safe, was at rest; Virginia would never, never do
anything but love him. He was the father of her child, the authority she
looked up to, the intelligence she adored. But Catherine--she wasn’t
going to be the mother of any child of Christopher’s, she hadn’t got any
intelligence for him to adore, and wouldn’t have wished to have
authority, even if she could have, for him to look up to. For her there
was nothing but strain and effort, with the tormenting knowledge that
her very strain and effort were bound to bring about what she dreaded.
It was a terrible business, this business of bliss. She clung to him,
clung to him, tighter and tighter, as if his youth must somehow get
through and make her young to match.
Now nobody can be clung to tightly for any length of time without
presently feeling that they would like a little air; and soon after the
return from Chickover, when he had got over his anxiety at her absence
and his joy at her return, Christopher began to have this feeling. It
was gorgeous to love and be loved as he and Catherine loved, but it was
a patent and acknowledged fact, and he gradually now began to want to
talk about something else. Catherine apparently never wanted to. She
loved, he couldn’t but notice, anxiously. She seemed to have very little
of the repose of real faith, and she needed an incredible amount of
reassuring. And when he had reassured her, and got her quiet and placid
as he supposed, there she was needing it all over again.
Marriage being mainly repetition, and Christopher now being a husband,
he presently began to make fewer rapturous speeches. It was quite
unconscious, but as the weeks passed it became natural to love with
fewer preliminary cooings--to bill, as it were, without remembering
first to coo.
He wouldn’t have noticed it if Catherine hadn’t noticed it and said
something about it. Whereupon he began to meditate on this, as he
recognised, undoubted fact, and came to the following conclusions:
A husband cannot go on cooing after he has ceased to thrill, but he can
go on very happily billing. Only mystery thrills, and only the unknown
is mysterious. It wasn’t reasonable for the dear explored one to want
still to be mysterious, for the so felicitously known to want still to
be unknown. Catherine was the darlingest love of a wife, and every
night when he went to sleep with his arms round her he thanked God he
had got her, but she was no longer mysterious; his heart would never
give great choking bumps again when he came near her. Yet that, it
seemed, was what she wanted and expected. And she had a really
remarkable love-memory, and never forgot a single love-look or love-word
or love-vow or love-action of his, and had taken to comparing him with
himself,--which was rather awkward, for unconsciously at the beginning,
it appeared, he had been creating precedents and setting a standard; and
the standard, it appeared, was a very high one, and the precedents were
difficult to follow in calmer blood.
What he now wanted, thought Christopher, reflecting on these things, was
to lead a happy, healthy, lovemaking life, in which all the speeches
were taken for granted. Was that out of the way at all? Didn’t married
people inevitably get into this condition after a bit? He supposed that
the difference between himself and Catherine--he hated to admit there
could be such a thing--was their several attitude towards billing and
cooing. He wanted--and he imagined most husbands at last wanted--to bill
without cooing, and she wasn’t happy in any billing that hadn’t been
preceded by coos. Loud coos, too; loud and long ones.
Well, no man can coo for ever. Christopher was convinced of that. Not
with spontaneity, anyhow. He tried to once or twice just to please her,
but she instantly found him out and was tremendously upset. He then
tried to laugh about it and tease her; but she wouldn’t laugh and be
teased. She took everything that had to do with love very seriously. Her
view was that love was like God, and couldn’t be joked about without
profanity.
She told him this used to be his view too. Was it? He couldn’t remember,
but didn’t tell her he couldn’t, for a certain amount of caution, highly
unnatural to him, began to creep into what he said. The expression ‘used
to be’ seemed to recur rather a lot, he thought. He had heard tell of
one’s evil past dogging one’s footsteps, but fancy being dogged by one’s
alleged satisfactory past, and having it shake its fists at one!
He told her this one morning, waking up in the jolly, careless mood when
he would have tickled a tiger; but she only looked thoroughly alarmed,
and said he never used to talk like that.
What a frightened, nervy little thing she was. What was she frightened
of? He couldn’t imagine; but he only had to look at her eyes to see she
<i>was</i> frightened. She was happiest and most content when they didn’t go
anywhere, and didn’t do anything but just sit in the flat together, she
curled up close to him on the sofa, and he reading aloud. They spent
evening after evening this way. About every third evening or so she
would suddenly get into a panic lest he found it boring, and would start
making eager plans about things they would do next week: they would go
to the play, and have supper afterwards, or motor down into the country
and drift round on the river and come home by moonlight.
When the time came she would cling to him and beg him to let her off.
Let her off! What a funny way of putting it, he would tell her, laughing
and kissing her. Was she going to have a baby, he began to wonder? And
he asked her so one evening, when she was wriggling out of a plan they
had made that involved exertion.
She seemed thunderstruck. ‘Chris!’ she cried, staring at him.
Well, why not? he asked. People did. Especially women, he said, trying
to make her laugh, because her face had gone so very tragic. They had
babies much more often than they had husbands, anyhow. She must have
noticed that.
‘But not if--not if----’ she stammered, her eyes full of tears.
Oh Lord--he had forgotten that age-complex of hers. He never thought of
her age. She was as old to him as she looked, and she looked the same
age as himself. He never could remember that she was convinced she was a
little Methuselah.
‘After all,’ he said cheerfully, still trying to make her laugh, ‘there
was Sarah. I don’t see why you----’
‘Sarah!’
She stood looking at him a moment, and then ran out of the room.
Horrified, he ran after her; but she had locked herself into the
bedroom, their bedroom--locked herself in, and him out.
This was their first scene. And it was peculiarly distressing, because
nobody was angry, only sorry.