Five Women (25 page)

And it was only when this strange emotion began to work in her, which had reached its peak today, that she had begun to wonder whether everything might not yet be again the way it had once been. And later she had even wondered whether this might not be love. Love? A long time it would have been on the way, and slow in coming; slow it would have been on its way. And yet even such slowness was too swift for the rhythm of her life; for the rhythm of her life was slower still, it was very slow, it was now no more than a languid opening and closing of the eyes, with, in the interval, a momentary glance that could not focus on things, that slid off and away from them, slid slowly away, untouched by anything. It was with such a gaze that she had seen it coming, and that was why she could not believe it was love.

She dreaded him as obscurely as she dreaded all things alien to her, an aversion without the sharp edge of hatred, merely as if he were a distant country beyond the frontier where one's own land merges softly and mournfully with the sky. But since that time she realised that all happiness had gone out of her life because something made her feel abhorrence of all that was not herself; and whereas formerly she had felt like someone who does not know the inner meaning of her own actions, now it seemed to her that she had merely forgotten that meaning and might perhaps begin to remember it. And the notion of something marvellous that would then come about tormented her like a memory drifting just below the surface of consciousness—a sense of something important she had forgotten. And all this began at the time of Johannes' return, when in the very first instant she recalled, without knowing why, how Demeter had once struck him and how Johannes had smiled.

Since then she felt as if someone had come who possessed whatever it was she lacked, carrying it with him as he went quietly on his way through the twilit wilderness of her life. It was simply that he was there, going on his way, and that as he looked at things they slowly and falteringly began to fall into a pattern before her eyes. It seemed to her sometimes, when he smiled in a startled way at himself, that it was as if he were breathing the world in and holding it in his body, feeling it within him, and then when he set it down before him again, very gently and carefully, he appeared to her like a circus-performer juggling with his hoops all alone, just for himself; it was no more than that. And yet it was anguish to her, in the intensity of her own unseeing imagination, to think how beautiful everything might well be for him; she was jealous of something she merely imagined he might be feeling. For although the ordered picture of the world continually crumbled away under her gaze, and although what she felt for things was only the avid love that a mother feels for a child she lacks the strength to guide, still, at times now her languor would begin to vibrate like a string, like a note sounding at once deep within the ear and somewhere in the world, rising in a great vault, kindling a light ... a light and people whose gestures were a long-drawn yearning, lines extending far, far away and meeting far, far away in the infinite.

He said these were ideals, and that gave her the courage to believe it might all come true. And perhaps all she was doing was trying to stand up straight: but it was still painful, as if her body were sick and incapable of supporting her.

And it was then too that all her other memories began to come back to her, all except one. They all came, and she did not know why, and only had a vague sense that one was still missing and that it was only for the sake of that one missing memory that all the others had come. And the idea grew in her that Johannes might be able to help her to find it, and that her whole life depended on remembering this one forgotten thing. And she also realised that what gave her the feeling was not some strength in him, but his quietness, his weakness, that quiet invulnerable weakness of his that was a vast background to all he did, an empty landscape where he was alone with whatever happened to him. But that was as far as her understanding would take her, and she was perturbed and she suffered because whenever she thought herself close to recovering that memory, all she remembered was an animal. What often came to her mind when she thought ofJohannes was animals—or Demeter—and she obscurely felt that he and she had a common enemy and tempter in Demeter. For her he was like a huge, rampant growth overshadowing her memory, sucking the strength out of it. And she did not know whether all this was caused by the thing she had forgotten or whether it was a hint of some meaning that must yet take on shape. Was
this
love? Something in her was on the move; something was drawing her onward. She herself did not know what it was. It was like walking along a road apparently towards a destination, but with a premonition that gradually made one's footsteps falter—a premonition that at some point before the end one would suddenly find an entirely different road and recognise it for one's own.

But he did not understand that; he did not know how difficult it was for her, this wavering sense of a life that was to arise for him and her, based on something still quite unknown to her, whereas he desired her in all simple reality as his wife or lover. She could not comprehend that; to her it seemed meaningless and at that moment almost vile. She had never experienced any direct and simple desire; but never at any other time had men seemed to her so absolutely a mere pretext, one that no time should be wasted on, a token of something else that was no more than elusively embodied in them. And suddenly she withdrew into herself and crouched there in her own darkness, staring at him, an& with amazement, for the first time, felt this withdrawal to be like a sensual contact and abandoned herself to it with a lecherous awareness of doing so right before his eyes and yet out of his reach. Something in her bristled, soft and electric as a cat's fur—bristled with antagonism to him. And she let her ‘no' roll out of her hiding-place, right to his feet, following it with her eyes as if it were a little glittering marble... . And then, when he was about to crush it under his heel, she screamed.

And now, when there at last the leave-taking was, erect and inexorable between them, walking between them as they walked together for the last time, all at once it happened: suddenly, fully defined and clear, that utterly lost, forgotten thing came back to Veronica's memory. She recognised it only with her feelings, without knowing how she did so, and she was a shade disappointed because there was nothing in it to tell her why it mattered; but it was like entering into a refreshing coolness.

 She could feel that once before in her life something about Johannes had given her a sudden fright just like this; but she could not understand what the connection was, why it should have meant so much to her, or what it was to mean for the future—only it all at once seemed as if she were again in the same point on her road, at the very place where she had lost him once before. And she realised that here and now, at this moment, the real experience, her experience of the real Johannes, had passed its zenith and was over. At this moment she felt as if everything were falling apart. Although they were standing close together, for her things were all at a slant, so that he and she seemed to be sliding further and further away from each other. Veronica looked at the trees by the side of the road, and they seemed to be standing straighter and stiffer than was natural. And only now did she feel the full weight of the ‘no' she had uttered in bewilderment and merely in premonition of all this, and realised that it was because of that ‘no' that he was going away, without wanting to go. And for a while she felt inwardly as deep and heavy as if there were two bodies lying beside each other, each body separate and sad, and each of them merely what it was in itself; and she knew it was because what she felt had almost turned into abandonment after all. And something came over her that made her small and weak, reducing her almost to nothingness, until she was like a small dog whimpering and limping on three legs, or like a tattered pennant fluttering but droopingly in a very faint breath of wind: so utterly did it dissolve her. And there was a yearning in her to hold him—a yearning that was like the softness of a broken-shelled snail faintly twitching in its search for another, yearning to stick to it tightly even as it dies.

But then she looked at him, and she herself hardly knew what she was thinking, except for an inkling that the only thing she did know about it all—this sudden memory that was there now, lying in her all shining, solitary—was very far from being anything that had a meaning in itself: it was something that some great fear had once prevented from coming to perfection, and since then it had lain within her, hardened and encapsulated, blocking the way for something that might have developed in her, and it must fall out of her like a foreign body. For even now her feeling for Johannes was beginning to ebb and flow away from her—something that had long lain as though dead, impotent, captive beneath that feeling, had broken loose, a broad liberating flood that swept the feeling away with it. And instead of her feeling for Johannes, something else, far in the distances at last revealed within her, grew like a dome, a radiance floating into the heights, effortlessly, unendingly exalted, a random glitter apprehended as if through webs of dream.

And the talk that was going on between their outer selves grew halting, their interchanges briefer. And while they were still struggling with it, Veronica could feel how in the gaps between their words it was turning into something else, and she realised with finality that he had to go away, and she said no more. All they had been saying and trying to say seemed to her futile, since it was decided that he must go and would never return. And because she realised that she no longer had any wish at all to do what she might perhaps otherwise even now have done, whatever was left of it all abruptly assumed a rigid and incomprehensible look. She knew of no meaning and no reason for this sudden change; it was a quick, hard fact, definite as a cast die.

And as he was still standing there before her amid the tangle of his words, she began to feel how inadequate his presence was, how irrelevant it was that he was really there with her. The reality of it weighed heavily on something in her that was striving to soar and bear away with it the memory of him. At every point she was impeded by his living presence as one might stumble against a dead body, stiff and hostile in its resistance to any effort to shift it. And when she noticed how intently he was still gazing at her, Johannes seemed like a big animal that was lying upon her in exhaustion and which she could not shake off. And once more she felt that memory of hers within her like a small hot object that she clutched tight in her hands, and suddenly something almost made her put out her tongue at him—a sensation strangely midway between flight and enticement, almost like a she-animal's reaction when, hard-pressed, she snaps at her pursuer.

Now the wind began to rise again, and on it her feelings widened out, floating free of all that was hard, resistant, and full of hate—not that she abandoned that, but it went deep down into her, drawn in like something very soft, until there was nothing left of it but a forlorn dismay in which she seemed to be wrapped: and it was as if in leaving it behind she also left herself behind. And everything else, all around her, was tremulous with premonitions. The opacity that had hitherto lain heavily upon her life, like a dark mist, was now stirring. It was as if the outlines of objects long sought in vain had become recognisable through a veil, only to vanish again. And although nothing of this appeared so clearly that her fingers could have grasped it, everything sliding away elusively between the quiet, fumbling words she and Johannes spoke while here was nothing really to say, yet all the words that must now remain unspoken seemed already visible from a long way off, like things in a landscape seen from a high promontory, and all shone with that queerly vibrant meaning which condenses everyday events into significance when they are re-enacted on a stage, rising up as pointers along some road not delineated on flat and stony ground. What had spread over the world was like a very sheer silken mask, bright and silver-grey, flickering as though at any moment it might tear. And she kept her gaze fixed on it until her eyes dazzled, unable to focus, as if she were being shaken by gusts of some invisible force.

So they stood side by side. And as the wind came blowing more and more strongly along the road and was like some marvellously soft and fragrant animal laying itself upon things, on her face, on the nape of her neck, in her armpits . . . breathing everywhere, its soft velvety fur overlaying everything and, at every breath she drew, pressing tighter on her skin ... both her horror and her expectation dissolved in a languid warmth that began to circle round her, mute and blind and slow, like blood blown by the wind. And suddenly she could not help thinking of something she had once been told: that millions of infinitesimal living entities have their habitation on every human being and that with every drawn breath and every breath exhaled there are incalculable rivers of life that come and go. She lingered for an instant in astonishment at this thought, feeling a warmth and a darkness as though being borne along in a huge crimson wave. But then she sensed another presence within this sweltering bloodstream.

She looked up, and there he stood before her, his hair blown towards her in the wind, the quivering tips of it almost touching her own. And now she was overtaken by a wild, shrieking desire that was like two swarms of birds plunging and intermingling as they fly, and she would gladly have torn her life out of her body and poured it all over him out of the sheltering, burning darkness of drunken turmoil. But their bodies stood there stiff and unyielding, with closed eyes, merely allowing it all to happen secretly, as though they must not know of it. And they grew more and more tired and empty, stooping slightly, and then it was all very gentle and quiet and there was a deep and tender hush as though they were silently bleeding to death, the blood running into each other's veins.

And as the wind rose it seemed to her as though his blood were mounting from the earth on which they stood, mounting under her skirts, filling her body with stars and chalices, blue and yellow, and there was a light touch as of delicate tendrils and a very still, voluptuous delight such as flowers may feel when they conceive by the wind.