But the bed I made up for myself was sufficiently uncomfortable to give
me a wakeful night, and I thought a good deal of what the unlucky
Dutchman had told me. I was not so much puzzled by Blanche Stroeve’s
action, for I saw in that merely the result of a physical appeal. I do
not suppose she had ever really cared for her husband, and what I had
taken for love was no more than the feminine response to caresses and
comfort which in the minds of most women passes for it. It is a passive
feeling capable of being roused for any object, as the vine can grow on
any tree; and the wisdom of the world recognises its strength when it
urges a girl to marry the man who wants her with the assurance that
love will follow. It is an emotion made up of the satisfaction in
security, pride of property, the pleasure of being desired, the
gratification of a household, and it is only by an amiable vanity that
women ascribe to it spiritual value. It is an emotion which is
defenceless against passion. I suspected that Blanche Stroeve’s violent
dislike of Strickland had in it from the beginning a vague element of
sexual attraction. Who am I that I should seek to unravel the
mysterious intricacies of sex? Perhaps Stroeve’s passion excited
without satisfying that part of her nature, and she hated Strickland
because she felt in him the power to give her what she needed. I think
she was quite sincere when she struggled against her husband’s desire
to bring him into the studio; I think she was frightened of him, though
she knew not why; and I remembered how she had foreseen disaster. I
think in some curious way the horror which she felt for him was a
transference of the horror which she felt for herself because he so
strangely troubled her. His appearance was wild and uncouth; there was
aloofness in his eyes and sensuality in his mouth; he was big and
strong; he gave the impression of untamed passion; and perhaps she felt
in him, too, that sinister element which had made me think of those
wild beings of the world’s early history when matter, retaining its
early connection with the earth, seemed to possess yet a spirit of its
own. If he affected her at all, it was inevitable that she should love
or hate him. She hated him.
And then I fancy that the daily intimacy with the sick man moved her
strangely. She raised his head to give him food, and it was heavy
against her hand; when she had fed him she wiped his sensual mouth and
his red beard. She washed his limbs; they were covered with thick hair;
and when she dried his hands, even in his weakness they were strong and
sinewy. His fingers were long; they were the capable, fashioning
fingers of the artist; and I know not what troubling thoughts they
excited in her. He slept very quietly, without a movement, so that he
might have been dead, and he was like some wild creature of the woods,
resting after a long chase; and she wondered what fancies passed
through his dreams. Did he dream of the nymph flying through the woods
of Greece with the satyr in hot pursuit? She fled, swift of foot and
desperate, but he gained on her step by step, till she felt his hot
breath on her neck; and still she fled silently, and silently he
pursued, and when at last he seized her was it terror that thrilled her
heart or was it ecstasy?
Blanche Stroeve was in the cruel grip of appetite. Perhaps she hated
Strickland still, but she hungered for him, and everything that had
made up her life till then became of no account. She ceased to be a
woman, complex, kind and petulant, considerate and thoughtless; she was
a Maenad. She was desire.
But perhaps this is very fanciful; and it may be that she was merely
bored with her husband and went to Strickland out of a callous
curiosity. She may have had no particular feeling for him, but
succumbed to his wish from propinquity or idleness, to find then that
she was powerless in a snare of her own contriving. How did I know what
were the thoughts and emotions behind that placid brow and those cool
gray eyes?
But if one could be certain of nothing in dealing with creatures so
incalculable as human beings, there were explanations of Blanche
Stroeve’s behaviour which were at all events plausible. On the other
hand, I did not understand Strickland at all. I racked my brain, but
could in no way account for an action so contrary to my conception of
him. It was not strange that he should so heartlessly have betrayed his
friends’ confidence, nor that he hesitated not at all to gratify a whim
at the cost of another’s misery. That was in his character. He was a
man without any conception of gratitude. He had no compassion. The
emotions common to most of us simply did not exist in him, and it was
as absurd to blame him for not feeling them as for blaming the tiger
because he is fierce and cruel. But it was the whim I could not
understand.
I could not believe that Strickland had fallen in love with Blanche
Stroeve. I did not believe him capable of love. That is an emotion in
which tenderness is an essential part, but Strickland had no tenderness
either for himself or for others; there is in love a sense of weakness,
a desire to protect, an eagerness to do good and to give pleasure—if
not unselfishness, at all events a selfishness which marvellously
conceals itself; it has in it a certain diffidence. These were not
traits which I could imagine in Strickland. Love is absorbing; it takes
the lover out of himself; the most clear-sighted, though he may know,
cannot realise that his love will cease; it gives body to what he knows
is illusion, and, knowing it is nothing else, he loves it better than
reality. It makes a man a little more than himself, and at the same
time a little less. He ceases to be himself. He is no longer an
individual, but a thing, an instrument to some purpose foreign to his
ego. Love is never quite devoid of sentimentality, and Strickland was
the least inclined to that infirmity of any man I have known. I could
not believe that he would ever suffer that possession of himself which
love is; he could never endure a foreign yoke. I believed him capable
of uprooting from his heart, though it might be with agony, so that he
was left battered and ensanguined, anything that came between himself
and that uncomprehended craving that urged him constantly to he knew
not what. If I have succeeded at all in giving the complicated
impression that Strickland made on me, it will not seem outrageous to
say that I felt he was at once too great and too small for love.
But I suppose that everyone’s conception of the passion is formed on
his own idiosyncrasies, and it is different with every different
person. A man like Strickland would love in a manner peculiar to
himself. It was vain to seek the analysis of his emotion.