Selected Stories Read online

  He took two sovereigns, which she put in her little black purse. She would go without a word of reconciliation. It made his heart set hard again.

  “You would like me to go away for a month?” he said, calmly.

  “Yes,” she answered, stubbornly.

  “All right then, I will. I must stop in town for tomorrow, but I will sleep at Edmund’s.”

  “You could do that, couldn’t you?” she said, accepting his suggestion, a little bit hesitating.

  “If you want me to.”

  She knitted her brow, and put up her face pathetically.

  “I’m so tired!” she lamented.

  But there was exasperation and hate in the last word, too.

  “Very well,” he answered.

  She finished buttoning her glove.

  “You’ll go, then?” she said, suddenly brightly, turning to depart. “Goodbye.”

  He hated her for the flippant insult of her leavetaking.

  “I shall be at Edmund’s tomorrow,” he said.

  “You will write to me from Italy, won’t you?”

  He would not answer the unnecessary question.

  “Have you taken the dead primroses out of your hair?” he asked.

  “I haven’t,” she said.

  And she unpinned her hat.

  “Richard would think me cracked,” she said, picking out the crumpled, creamy fragments.

  “Lovable and pathetic,” he answered, sarcastic and bitter.

  She strewed the withered flowers carelessly on the table, set her hat straight.

  “Do you want me to go?” he asked, again, rather yearning.

  She knitted her brows. It irked her to resist the appeal. Yet she had in her breast a hard, repellant feeling for him. She had loved him, too. She had loved him dearly. And—he had not seemed to realise her. So that now she did want to be free of him for a while. Yet the love, the passion she had had for him clung about her. But she did want, first and primarily, to be free of him again.

  “Yes,” she said, half pleading.

  “Very well,” he answered.

  She came across to him, and put her arms round his neck. Her hatpin caught his head, but he moved, and she did not notice.

  “You don’t mind very much, do you, my love?” she said caressingly.

  “I mind all the world, and all I am,” he said.

  She rose from him, fretted, miserable, and yet determined.

  “I must have some rest,” she repeated.

  He knew that cry. She had had it, on occasions, for two months now. He had cursed her, and refused either to go away or to let her go. Now he knew it was no use.

  “All right,” he said. “Go and get it from Richard.”

  “Yes.”—She hesitated. “Goodbye,” she called, and was gone.

  He heard her cab whirr away. He had no idea whither she was gone—but probably to Madge, her friend.

  He went upstairs to pack. Their bedroom made him suffer. She used to say, at first, that she would give up anything rather than her sleeping with him. And still they were always together. A kind of blind helplessness drove them to one another, even when, after he had taken her, they only felt more apart than ever. It had seemed to her that he had been mechanical and barren with her. She felt a horrible feeling of aversion from him, inside her, even while physically she still desired him. His body had always a kind of fascination for her. But had hers for him? He seemed, often, just to have served her, or to have obeyed some impersonal instinct for which she was the only outlet, in his loving her. So at last she rose against him, to cast him off. He seemed to follow her so, to draw her life into his. It made her feel she would go mad. For he seemed to do it just blindly, without having any notion of her herself. It was as if she were sucked out of herself by some non-human force. As for him, he seemed only like an instrument for his work, his business, not like a person at all. Sometimes she thought he was a big fountain pen which was always sucking at her blood for ink.

  He could not understand anything of this. He loved her—he could not bear to be away from her. He tried to realise her and to give her what she wanted. But he could not understand. He could not understand her accusations against him. Physically, he knew, she loved him, or had loved him, and was satisfied, or had been satisfied by him. He also knew that she would have loved another man nearly as well. And for the rest, he was only himself. He could not understand what she said about his using her and giving her nothing in return. Perhaps he did not think of her, as a separate person from himself, sufficiently. But then he did not see, he could not see that she had any real personal life, separate from himself. He tried to think of her in every possible way, and to give her what she wanted. But it was no good, she was never at peace. And lately there had been growing a breach between them. They had never come together without his realising it, afterwards. Now he must submit, and go away.

  And her quilted dressing gown—it was a little bit torn, like most of her things—and her pearl-backed mirror, with one of the pieces of pearl missing—all her untidy, flimsy, lovable things, hurt him as he went about the bedroom, and made his heart go hard with hate, in the midst of his love.

  2

  Instead of going to his brother-in-law’s, he went to an hôtel for the night. It was not till he stood in the lift with the attendant at his side that he began to realise that he was only a mile or so away from his own home, and yet further away than any miles could make him. It was about nine o’clock. He hated his bedroom. It was comfortable, and not ostentatious: its only fault was the neutrality necessary to an hôtel apartment. He looked round. There was one semi-erotic, Florentine picture of a lady with cats’ eyes, over the bed. It was not bad. The only other ornament on the walls was the notice of hours and prices of meals and rooms. The couch sat correctly before the correct little table, on which the writing sachet and inkstand stood mechanically. Down below, the quiet street was half illuminated, the people passed sparsely, like stunted shadows. And of all times of the night, it was a quarter past nine. He thought he would go to bed. Then he looked at the white-and-glazed doors which shut him off from the bath. He would bath to pass the time away—in the bath-closet everything was so comfortable and white and warm—too warm: the level, unvarying heat of the atmosphere, from which there was no escape anywhere, seemed so hideously hôtel-like; this central-heating forced a unity into the great building, making it more than ever like an enormous box with incubating cells. He loathed it. But at any rate the bath-closet was human, white and business-like and luxurious.

  He was trying, with the voluptuous warm water, and the exciting thrill of the shower-bath, to bring back the life into his dazed body. Since she had begun to hate him, he had gradually lost that physical pride and pleasure in his own physique which the first months of married life had given him. His body had gone meaningless to him again, almost as if it were not there. It had wakened up, there had been the physical glow and satisfaction about his movements, of a creature which rejoices in itself; a glow which comes on a man who loves and is loved passionately and successfully. Now this was going again. All the life was accumulating in his mental consciousness, and his body felt like a piece of waste. He was not aware of this. It was instinct which made him want to bathe. But that, too, was a failure. He went under the shower-spray with his mind occupied by business, or some care of affairs, taking the tingling water almost without knowing it, stepping out mechanically, as a man going through a barren routine. He was dry again, and looking out of the window, without having experienced anything during the last hour.

  Then he remembered that she did not know his address. He scribbled a note and rang to have it posted.

  As soon as he had turned out the light, and there was nothing left for his mental consciousness to flourish amongst, it dropped, and it was dark inside him as without. It was his blood, and the elemental male in it, that now rose from him: unknown instincts and unperceived movements out of the depths of his physical being rose and heaved blindly. Th
e darkness almost suffocated him, and he could not bear it, that he was shut in this great, warm building. He wanted to be outside, with space springing from him. But again, the reasonable being in him knew it was ridiculous, and he remained staring at the dark, having the horrible sensation of a roof low down over him; whilst that dark, unknown being, which lived below all his consciousness in the eternal gloom of his blood, heaved and raged blindly against him.

  It was not his thoughts that represented him. They spun like straws or the iridescence of oil on a dark stream. He thought of her, sketchily, spending an evening of light amusement with the symbolical Richard. That did not mean much to him. He did not really speculate about Richard. He had the dark, powerful sense of her, how she wanted to get away from him and from the deep, underneath intimacy which had gradually come between them, back to the easy, everyday life, where one knows nothing of the underneath, so that it takes its way apart from the consciousness. She did not want to have the deeper part of herself in direct contact with or under the influence of any other intrinsic being. She wanted, in the deepest sense, to be free of him. She could not bear the close, basic intimacy into which she had been drawn. She wanted her life for herself. It was true, her strongest desire had been previously to know the contact through the whole of her being, down to the very bottom. Now it troubled her. She wanted to disengage her roots. Above, in the open, she would give. But she must live perfectly free of herself, and not, at her source, be connected with anybody.——She was using this symbolical Richard as a spade to dig him away from her. And he felt like a thing whose roots are all straining on their hold, and whose elemental life, that blind source, surges backwards and forwards darkly in a chaos, like something which is threatened with spilling out of its own vessel.

  This tremendous swaying of the most elemental part of him continued through the hours, accomplishing his being, whilst superficially he thought at random of the journey, of the Italian he would speak, how he had left his coat in the train, and the rascally official interpreter had tried to give him twenty lire for a sovereign—how the man in the hat-shop in the Strand had given him the wrong change—of the new shape in hats, and the new felt—and so on. Underneath it all, like the sea under a pleasure-pier, his elemental, physical soul was heaving in great waves through his blood and his tissue, the sob, the silent lift, the slightly-washing fall away again. So his blood, out of whose darkness everything rose, being moved to its depths by her revulsion, heaved and swung towards its own rest, surging blindly to its own re-settling.

  Without knowing it, he suffered that night almost more than he had ever suffered during his life. But it was all below his consciousness. It was his life itself at storm, not his mind and his will engaged at all.

  In the morning he got up, thin and quiet, without much movement anywhere, only with some of the clearness of after-storm. His body felt like a clean, empty shell. His mind was limpidly clear. He went through the business of the toilet with a certain accuracy, and at breakfast, in the restaurant, there was about him that air of neutral correctness which makes men seem so unreal.

  At lunch there was a telegram for him. It was like her to telegraph.

  “Come to tea, my dear love.”

  As he read it, there was a great heave of resistance in him. But then he faltered. With his consciousness, he remembered how impulsive and eager she was when she dashed off her telegrams, and he relaxed. It went without saying that he would go.

  3

  When he stood in the lift going up to his own flat, he was almost blind with the hurt of it all. They had loved each other so much, in this his first home. The parlour-maid opened to him, and he smiled at her, affectionately. In the golden-brown and cream-coloured hall—Paula would have nothing heavy or sombre about her—a bush of rose-coloured azaleas shone, and a little tub of lilies twinkled naïvely.

  She did not come out to meet him.

  “Tea is in the drawing-room,” the maid said, and he went in while she was hanging up his coat. It was a big room, with a sense of space, and a spread of whitey carpet—almost the colour of unpolished marble—and grey and pink border; of pink roses on big white cushions, pretty Dresden China, and deep, chintz-covered chairs and sofas which looked as if they were used freely. It was a room where one could roll in soft, fresh comfort, a room which had not much breakable in it, and which seemed, in the dusky spring evening, fuller of light than the streets outside.

  Paula rose, looking queenly and rather radiant, as she held out her hand. A young man, whom Peter scarcely noticed, rose on the other side the hearth.

  “I expected you an hour ago,” she said, looking into her husband’s eyes. But though she looked at him, she did not see him. And he sank his head.

  “This is another Moest,” she said, presenting the stranger. “He knows Richard, too.”

  The young man, a German of about thirty, with a clean-shaven aesthetic face, long black hair brushed back a little wearily or bewildered from his brow, and inclined to fall in an odd loose strand again, so that he nervously put it back with his fine hand, looked at Moest and bowed. He had a finely cut face, but his dark blue eyes were strained, as if he did not quite know where he was. He sat down again, and his pleasant figure took a self-conscious attitude, of a man whose business it was to say things that should be listened to. He was not conceited or affected—naturally sensitive and rather naïve; but he could only move in an atmosphere of literature and literary ideas; yet he seemed to know there was something else, vaguely, and he felt rather at a loss. He waited for the conversation to move his way, as inert an insect waits, for the sun to set it flying.

  “Another Moest,” Paula was pronouncing emphatically. “Actually another Moest, of whom we have never heard, and under the same roof with us.”

  The stranger laughed, his lips moving nervously over his teeth.

  “You are in this house?” Peter asked surprised.

  The young man shifted in his chair, dropped his head, looked up again.

  “Yes,” he said, meeting Moest’s eyes as if he were somewhat dazzled. “I am staying with the Lauriers, on the second flat.”

  He spoke English slowly, with a quaint, musical quality in his voice, and a certain rhythmic enunciation.

  “I see, and the telegram was for you?” said the host.

  “Yes,” replied the stranger, with a nervous little laugh.

  “My husband,” broke in Paula, evidently repeating to the German what she had said before, for Peter’s benefit this time, “was quite convinced I had an affaire”—she pronounced it in the French fashion—“with this terrible Richard.”

  The German give his little laugh, and moved, painfully self-conscious, in his chair.

  “Yes,” he said, glancing at Moest.

  “Did you spend a night of virtuous indignation,” Paula laughed to her husband, “imagining my perfidy?”

  “I did not,” said her husband. “Were you at Madge’s?”

  “No,” she said. Then, turning to her guest: “Who is Richard, Mr Moest?”

  “Richard,” began the German, word by word, “is my cousin.” He glanced quickly at Paula, to see if he were understood. She rustled her skirts, and arranged herself comfortably, lying, or almost squatting, on the sofa by the fire. “He lives in Hampstead.”

  “And what is he like?” she asked, with eager interest.

  The German gave his little laugh. Then he moved his fingers across his brow, in his dazed fashion. Then he looked, with his beautiful blue eyes, at his beautiful hostess.

  “I—” he laughed again nervously—“He is a man whose parts—are not very much—very well known to me. You see,” he broke forth, and it was evident he was now conversing to an imaginary audience; he grasped at the air with his hand, and his eyes had the blind look of one thinking hard—“I cannot easily express myself in English.—I—I never have talked it. I shall speak, because I know nothing of modern England, a kind of Renaissance English.”

  “How lovely!” cried Paula
. “But if you would rather, speak German. We shall understand sufficiently.”

  “I would rather hear some Renaissance English,” said Moest.

  Paula was quite happy with the new stranger. She listened to descriptions of Richard, shifting animatedly on her sofa. She wore a new dress, of a rich red tile colour, glossy and long and soft, and she had threaded daisies, like buttons, in the banded plait of her hair. Her husband hated her for these familiarities. But she was beautiful too, and warm-hearted. Only, through all her warmth and kindliness, lay, he said, at the bottom, an almost feline selfishness, a coldness.

  She was playing to the stranger—nay, she was not playing, she was really occupied by him. The young man was the favorite disciple of the most famous present-day German poet and ‘Meister’. He himself was occupied in translating Shakspere. Having been always a poetic disciple, he had never come into touch with life save through literature, and for him, since he was a rather fine-hearted young man with a human need to live, this was a tragedy. Paula was not long in discovering what ailed him, and she was eager to come to his rescue.

  It pleased her, nevertheless, to have her husband sitting by, watching her. She forgot to give tea to anyone. Moest, and the German, both helped themselves, and the former attended also to his wife’s cup. He sat rather in the background, listening, and waiting. She had made a fool of him with her talk to this stranger of “Richard”; lightly and flippantly she had made a fool of him. He minded, but was used to it. Now she had absorbed herself in this dazed, starved, literature-bewildered young German, who was, moreover, really lovable, evidently a gentleman. And she was seeing in him her mission—“Just as,” said Moest bitterly to himself, “she saw her mission in me, a year ago. She is no woman. She’s got a big heart for everybody, but it must be like a common room: she’s got no private, sacred heart, except perhaps for herself, where there’s no room for a man in it.”

  At length the stranger rose to go, promising to come again.

  “Isn’t he adorable!” cried Paula, as her husband returned to the drawing-room. “I think he is simply adorable.”