pollás d'odous èlthonta phrontidos planois [Transliterated from
the Greek]
THERE came a letter from Joe to say that he had obtained work with a
good firm within a week of landing, and would soon be able to save or
borrow enough to pay for his wife and children to join him. Rita, who
had sunk into a despondent lethargy, was roused to excitement and
began to thrill the children with tales of the adventure before them.
She quickly recovered her health and energy, and wrested the control
of her affairs from Ann, who did not like it. Feeling ran high, and
things came to such a pass that the two women quarreled, and Rita so
far forgot herself as to fling a sneer about marriage-lines at her
friend. Ann came running to René for comfort, and tried to enrage him
at the tale of such base ingratitude. He was not to be enraged,
however, for he had been pondering the subject of gratitude and come
to the conclusion that he who lays claim to it forfeits it. He tried
to explain to Ann that she had overdone her kindness and should have
known the moment to withdraw. She was dismayed.
"Of course," she cried, "you would take her side against mine."
"It isn't a question of sides. You couldn't expect her to let you go
on running her house forever."
"A shiftless little fool like that! I wouldn't have minded if she'd
only said 'Thank you.' Not a word did she say, but just flung you in
my face. And now you say she's right! I wish you'd never come, I do."
"Ann, dear, don't be silly."
"I do wish it with all my heart and soul. You've made me be different.
You've made me want to do good things, and then you're nothing but a
shadow slipping away. And, oh! it does hurt so."
"Dear, dear Ann, don't you see that Rita wanted to get rid of you and
didn't know how to without a quarrel?"
"Why should she want to get rid of me? Nice mess she'd have been in
without you and me."
"You go and see her to-morrow, and you'll find her all right."
"I don't want to see her ever again, nasty ungrateful rubbish!"
"Then I'll go and see her."
"You won't see me again if you do. I can up and off when I like. We're
not married, remember."
"You leave me nothing to say. I've learned a good deal from the people
in the mews, but not their way of quarreling."
He had been irritated into the reproof and was sorry as soon as it was
uttered. She was furious. Never before had she lost her temper with
him, though they had had wordy passages. Now she turned and rent him:
"I don't believe you're a man at all, and I don't believe you've got a
heart. Squabble, you call it? I wish you would. You sit there with
your fishy eyes staring at nothing, thinking, thinking, thinking.
What's the good of it all? Who's right and who's wrong? What's it
matter? If you loved me I'd be right whatever I did. Go on! Look at
me! You don't know me, don't you? I'm the woman you've been living
with these last two years. That's who I am. If you're sick of me, why
don't you say so? I'm no lady, thank God. I do know when I'm not
wanted. I'm not going to stay with any man on God's earth when he
doesn't want me. I've nearly left you time and time again, when you've
looked at me like that."
He brushed his hand across his eyes. He was feeling sick and dazed.
She looked so ugly.
She went on:
"I've put up with things because of you, I have. You don't know what
people say, or care. You won't never know what they say, you're that
blooming innocent, thinking everybody means well. I've put up with
things, and been glad of 'em, and I've put up with things from you
that I couldn't have believed any woman would ever have to put up
with----"
He said quietly:
"Have you done?"
She gasped at him, tried to stop, but because she had begun to enjoy
her fury, she forced the note and screamed at him:
"You want a virgin saint to live with you, not a woman."
Now she stopped, aghast at herself, horrified by the pain and disgust
she had brought into his eyes. He could hardly speak, and jerked out:
"I didn't know. . . . I didn't know I'd done all that to you, Ann. I'm
so terribly sorry. I seem to make a mess of things always."
She had turned her back on him, and he knew that she was weeping. He
had no desire to console her. He wished only to get away. Neither
could break the heavy silence that followed the storm. He left her,
though he could hardly move, so acute was his physical exhaustion.
Groping his way along the wall of the mews, he counted the doors until
he came to Kilner's. The rooms were empty. He flung himself on the bed
and lay chilled and racked, thinking only of Ann weeping, unmoved,
detached, feeling neither sorrow nor hate. She had robbed him of all
capacity of emotion, all power of thought. The storm had been so
unlocked for. Rita was so remote from them. Why should Rita and
anything she said or did have let loose upon them so violent a
convulsion?
Ann weeping, Ann silent, so appallingly silent. Her silence weighed on
him more than her words. Desire grew in him slowly and painfully, a
desire to understand. He remembered exactly what he had said to her,
and the words seemed meaningless. Her silence had killed them. They
were genuine as he spoke them. Speaking them, he had surmounted his
disgust and horror at her rage. Yet there was an even more burning
fury in her silence. She was weeping; Ann, the gay little comrade, was
weeping, and her tears had moved him not at all.
He began to think again, and to think with a new power. His body was
cold and aching. His mind seemed to leave it. His mind played about
Ann, the figure of Ann, weeping in silence. It played maliciously
about her, stripped her, let down her hair, revealed her nakedly as
woman, short-legged, wide-hipped, small-breasted, not so unlike a boy
save for the excrescences and distortions created by her physical
functions. That was too horrible. With an effort of will he brushed it
aside, wrenched away from its fascination. Her individuality was
restored to her and a little warmth crept into his vision of her. He
was not sensible of her charm, and he was free of all lover's memory
of her attraction. His mind went probing into hers, saw how it
delighted in impressions, but could make no store of them; how her
delight had been increased by love and how she had used her love to
aggravate her sensibility to the point of intoxication; how the fierce
hunger for intoxication had desired to feed on him, and how her love
for him had made her desire to bring him to the same condition. He saw
her innocence; how free she was of deliberate purpose and set greed;
how animal and yet how little sensual; and how she was snared in her
own ignorance of love and its ways. Trapped she was and baffled. She
could have been so happy with a mate as ignorant as herself, as
willing to be snared. They could so easily have perished together, and
sunk into resignation, she and such a mate. And inexorable nature had
made her fruitful, to bring forth in her rage, when she would be spent
with tearing at the meshes that had caught her. She would go on
tearing, tearing, and he could spare her nothing. His strength could
not sustain her. She desired only his weakness, to have him with her,
caught and struggling; to have him by her side, spent and broken, to
take comfort in the child.
He seemed to himself to be so near this fate, so nearly caught, that
he cried out:
"I will not! I will not!"
For a moment the words startled him and shook him out of his stupor.
Then his agony came back with a redoubled fury, and in the desperate
hope of fighting it back he let words come tumbling out, hurling them
from him:
"I will not be used for a creation in which I know no joy. I will not
cloak brute creation with a seeming joy distilled by mind and time and
custom. I will not be used up and broken and cover indecency with
false decency, nor be comforted with the life that has stolen my own.
My life shall give life, and for the giving have only the more to
give. That which I have done with the spirit not awakened in me is
done and no longer a part of me. That which the spirit does in me
lives on forever and ever."
Kilner found him lying in the darkness, staring with vacant eyes. He
was terrified. René looked so deathly. He sat by his side and chafed
his hands, and caressed him tenderly, soothed him, spoke to him in
little staccato phrases, and went on with them until he seemed to
listen:
"The lamps aren't lit to-night. It's very dark. Do you hear? Stars
shining. Wonderful stars. Better than lamps. I say, stars are better
than lamps."
At length René said:
"Yes. Stars are much better than lamps. Lamps are only to prevent
people committing a nuisance. Stars don't give a damn if they do."
"I quite agree," said Kilner. "Drink this brandy."
When he had drunk, René said:
"Women ought to be like stars."
"Rubbish!" grunted Kilner. "Women ought to be like women."
"I've been trying to understand things."
"Awful mistake. A fellow like you can't understand things. He can only
live them. That's why you have such a rotten time. No power of
expression. If only you could write or draw, or play some
instrument--though I hate music. But if you could, you wouldn't be
you."
"You're a clever fellow, Kilner. I wish you'd tell me what's the
matter with me."
"Too much vitality for a society which dislikes it, as it always will
as long as it prefers the shadow to the substance, bad art to good,
and imitations of things to the things themselves."
René looked disappointed. Kilner patted his hand.
"Too intellectual! Personal, then. What's wrong with you, my friend,
is that you are out for the grand passion. It doesn't happen more than
about once in two hundred years. Why? I don't know. It depends on two
people, you see, and I suppose two first-rate people don't often meet.
The rest of us lie about our love affairs to make them tolerable. I
lied that night when I first met you. I wanted to make an impression.
The only reason for lying I ever knew. I told you my one decent love
affair lasted for five weeks. It didn't. It lasted for exactly five
seconds, the time of the kiss under the almond-tree in which it was
born and died. Nothing more was possible, she being she and I being I.
It was a decent business because we didn't try to pretend it was
anything else. So far as it went, it was so true as to make falseness
impossible. We shall both live on that for the rest of our lives. Just
enough to make marriage impossible for us. We shall both marry someone
else for company, and as a defense against a growing tendency to
promiscuity. You don't seem to have that tendency. Life's too serious
for you. You are incapable of a love affair without an attempt to make
it a spiritual thing. Where we get excited, you get exalted, which is
infernally bad luck on the average woman. Feelin' better?"
"Yes," said René, "but you do talk a lot of drivel."
"Hurray!" cried Kilner. "He's beginning to find himself. I wonder if
you'll ever see how funny you are?"
"I wonder?" said René, and he turned over, and in one moment was fast
asleep.