Five Women (17 page)

When they walked together, their shadows had only the faintest tinge of colour and dangled loosely at their heels as though incapable of binding their footsteps to the ground they walked on; and the ring of hard earth under their feet was so curt and clipped, and the bare bushes so stared into the sky, that in those hours a-shudder with enormous visibility it was as if all at once all things, the mute and docile objects of this world, had weirdly disengaged themselves from them. And as the light began to fail, they themselves grew tall, towering like adventurers, like strangers, like unreal beings, spellbound by the fading echo of their own existence, knowing themselves to be full of shards of something incomprehensible to which there was nowhere any response and which was rejected by all things, so that only a broken gleam of it fell into the world, forlornly and irrelevantly flickering here and there, now in an object, now in a vanishing thought.

Then she could imagine belonging to another man, and it seemed not like betrayal but like some ultimate marriage, in a realm where they had no real being, where they existed only as music might, a music heard by no one, echoing back from nowhere. For then she felt her own existence merely as a line that she herself incised, gratingly, just to hear herself in the bewildering silence; it was simply something leading from one moment to the next, something in which she became, inexorably and irrelevantly, identical with whatever it was she did—and yet always remained something she could never achieve. And while it suddenly seemed to her as though perhaps they loved each other as yet only with all the loudness of a refusal to hear a faint, frantically intense and anguished call, she had a foreboding of the deeper complications and vast intricacies that came about in the intervals, in the silences, in the moments of awakening out of that uproar into the shoreless world of facts, awakening to stand, with nothing but a feeling, among mindless and mechanical happenings; and it was with the pain of their tall and lonely separateness, standing side by side—something against which all else was no more than an anaesthetising and shutting off and lulling of oneself to sleep with sheer noise—that she loved him when she thought of doing him the final, the mortal injury.

Even weeks after such an experience her love still had this colouring; then that would gradually fade. But often, when she felt the proximity of another man, it would return, though fainter. It sufficed that there should be someone there —a man of no real concern to her, saying something of no real concern to her—and she would feel herself being gazed at as from that other realm, with a look of amazement that held the question: ‘Why are you still here?' She never felt any desire for such outsiders; it was painful to her to think of them; indeed it disgusted her. But all at once there would be that intangible wavering of the stillness around her; and then she would not know whether she was rising or sinking... .

Claudine looked out of the window. Out there it was all just the same as before. But—whether as a result of her thoughts or for some other reason—now it was overlaid by a stale, unyielding resistance, as if she were looking through a film of something milky and repugnant. That restless, volatile, thousand-legged gaiety had become unendurably tense; it was all a prancing and trickling, all feverishly excited and mocking, with something in it of pygmy footsteps, far too lively and yet, for her, dull and dead. Here, there, it flung itself upwards, an empty clatter, a grinding past of tremendous friction.

It was physically painful to gaze out into all that stir, for which she no longer had any feeling. All that life, which only a short while ago had been one with her emotions, was still there outside, overbearing and rigid; but as soon as she tried to draw it to her, the things crumbled away and fell to pieces under her gaze. What came about was an ugliness that twisted and turned in her eyes, as though her soul were leaning outwards there, leaning far out, taut, stretching after something, groping into emptiness.

And all at once it occurred to her that she too just like all that was around her—spent her life passively, a captive in her own being, committed to one place, to a particular city, to one house in that city, one habitation and one sense of herself, year after year within that tiny area; and with that it seemed as though, if she were to stop and linger for one single moment, her happiness might rush past her and away, like this rumbling, roaring mass rushing through the countryside, rushing away from everything.

This, it seemed to her, was no mere random thought. On the contrary, there was in it an element of that unbounded, uprearing blankness in which her feelings groped vainly for any support. She was impalpably assailed by something like what comes upon a climber on the rock-face: an utterly cold, still moment when she could hear herself as an unintelligible small sound on that huge surface and then, in the abrupt silence, realised the faintness of her own existence, creeping along, and how great, in contrast, and how full of dreadful forgotten sounds, was the stony brow of the void.

And while she was shrinking from this like a delicate skin, feeling in her very fingertips the voiceless fear of thinking about herself, and while her sensations clung to her like granules and her emotions trickled away like sand, she again heard that peculiar sound: a mere point it seemed, like a bird hovering high in the empty air.

She was overwhelmed by a sense of destiny. It lay in her having set out on this journey, in the way nature was withdrawing before her, in her having been so scared and huddled and timid even at the very beginning of the journey —scared of herself, of others, and of her happiness. And all at once her past seemed the imperfect expression of something that was yet to come.

She continued to gaze anxiously out of the window. But gradually, under the pressure of the huge strangeness out there, her mind began to be ashamed of all its protestation and struggle, and it seemed to pause. And now it was becoming imbued with that very subtle, final, passive strength which lies in weakness, and it grew thinner and slighter than a child, softer than a sheet of faded silk. And it was only now with a mildly looming delight that she experienced this ultimate human ecstasy in being a stranger in the world, in seeming to take leave ofit, a sense of being unable to penetrateinto the world, of finding, among all her decisions, none that was meant for herself; and, being forced by them to the very edge of life, she felt the moment before the plunge into the blind vastness of empty space.

She began obscurely to yearn for her past, wasted and exploited as it had been by people who were strangers to her —yearning for it as for the pale, weak wakefulness there was in the depths of illness, when in the house the sounds moved from one room to another and she no longer belonged anywhere, but, relieved of the pressure of her own personality, continued to lead another life, floating somewhere else.

Outside, the landscape stormed soundlessly by. In her thoughts people grew very tall and loud and confident, and she huddled into herself, escaping from that, until there was nothing left of her but her nullity, her imponderability, a drifting somewhere towards something. And gradually the train began to travel very quietly, with long, gently rocking movements, through country that still lay under deep snow, and the sky came lower and lower until it seemed only a few paces ahead, trailing along the ground in grey, dark curtains of slowly drifting flakes. Inside the train twilight gathered, yellowish, and the outlines of her fellow-passengers were only vaguely visible : they swayed to and fro, slowly and spectrally. She was no longer aware of what she was thinking, and pleasure in being alone with strange experiences now took a quiet hold of her: it was like the play of very faint, scarcely tangible inquietudes and of great shadowy stirrings of the soul, groping for them. She tried to remember her husband, but all she could find of her almost vanished love was a weird notion as of a room where the windows had long been kept shut. She made an effort to get rid of this, but it yielded only a very little and remained lurking nearby. And the world was as pleasantly cool as a bed in which one stays behind alone... .

Then she felt as if she were about to be faced with a decision, and she did not know why she felt this, and she was neither glad nor resentful; all she felt was that she did not want either to act or to prevent action. And her thoughts slowly wandered into the snow outside, without a backward glance, always deeper and deeper into the snow, as when one is too tired to turn back and so walks on and on.

Towards the end of the journey the man opposite said: "An idyll, an enchanted island, a lovely woman at the centre of a fairy-tale all white
dessous
and lace ..." and he made a gesture towards the landscape. ‘How silly,' Claudine thought, but she could not think of anything to say.

It was like someone knocking at the door and a big dark face floating behind pale window-panes. She did not know who this person was; she did not care who he was. All she felt was that here was someone wanting something. And now something was beginning to take on shape and become real.

As when a faint wind rises among clouds, ordering them in a row, and slowly passes away, so she felt the motion of this materialising reality stirring the still, soft cloudiness of her feelings—insubstantial, passing through her, passing her by.... And, as with many sensitive people, what attracted her in the unintelligible passage of events was all there was in it that did not pertain to herself, to the spirit: what she loved was the helplessness and shame and anguish of her spirit—it was like striking something weaker than oneself, a child, a woman, and then wanting to be the garment wrapped about its pain, in the darkness, alone.

So they arrived, late in the afternoon, the train almost empty. One by one people had trickled away out of the compartments; station after station had sifted them out from among the other travellers. And now they were swept swiftly together, for there were only three sledges available for the hour's trip from the station to the township, and these had to be shared. Before Claudine knew where she was, she found herself seated with four other people in one of these small conveyances. From in front there came the unfamiliar smell of the horses steaming in the cold, and ripples of scattered light from the lanterns. But at times, too, darkness came flooding right up to the sledge, and away over it, and then she realised they were travelling between two ranks of tall trees, as though along a dark corridor that grew ever narrower the closer they came to their goal.

Because of the cold she sat with her back to the horses. Opposite her was that man—big, bulky, encased in his fur coat. He blocked the way along which her thoughts strove to travel back home. Suddenly, as though a door had slammed, every glance of hers encountered his dark figure there before her. She was aware of glancing at him several times in order to make sure what he looked like, as though that were all that mattered now and everything else were long settled. She was excited to find that he remained entirely vague: he might have been anyone; he was no more than a sombre bulk of alien being. And sometimes this seemed to be drawing nearer to her, like a moving forest with its mass of tree-trunks. And it was like a weight upon her.

Meanwhile, talk spread like a net among the people in the little sledge. He joined in, making remarks of the tritely well-turned kind that many people make, with a pinch of that spice which is like a sharp, confident aura enveloping a man in a woman's presence. In these moments of male dominance, so much a matter of course, she became uneasy and embarrassed and ashamed at not having effectively rebuffed his earlier insinuating advances to her. And yet when she, in her turn, could not avoid speaking, she felt it came to her all too easily, and she had an awareness of herself as of a feeble, ineffective waving with the stump of an amputated arm.

Then indeed she observed how helplessly she was being flung this way and that, at each curve in the road being touched now on the arms, now at the knees, sometimes with the whole upper part of her body leaning against some other person's body; and remotely, by some analogy, she experienced it as if this small sledge were a darkened room and these people were seated around her, hot and urgent, and she were timidly a prey to shameless acts that she endured, smiling, as if not noticing anything, her eyes focused straight ahead.

All this was like feeling an irksome dream in half-sleep, always remaining slightly conscious of its unreality, always marvelling at feeling it so strongly. Then a moment came when that man leaned out, looked up at the sky, and said: "We're going to be snowed up."

With a start her thoughts leapt into complete wakefulness. She glanced around : the people were exchanging cheerful, harmless pleasantries, as those do who at the end of a long journey through darkness get their first glimpse of light and of tiny figures in the distance. And all at once she had a strangely indifferent, sober sense of reality. But she noticed with astonishment that something nevertheless touched her, moved her intensely. It frightened her a little, for it was a pallid, almost unnatural lucidity, in which nothing could sink into the vagueness of reverie and through which no thought moved and within which nevertheless people now and then became jagged and huge as hills, as if suddenly gliding through an invisible fog where all that was real expanded, taking on a gigantic, shadowy, second outline. Then she felt something that was almost humility and dread of them; yet she never quite lost the awareness that this weakness was only a peculiar faculty: it was as if the frontiers of her being had extended, invisibly and sensitively, and everything came into faint collision with them, setting up tremors. And for the first time she was truly startled by this queer day, the solitariness of which, like a passage leading underground, had gradually sunk with her into the confused whisperings of multitudinous inner twilight and now suddenly, in a distant region, ascended into the midst of inexorably actual events, leaving her alone in a vast, unfamiliar, unwanted reality.

Furtively she looked across at the stranger. He was striking a match: for an instant his beard was lit up, and one eye. And even this trivial act seemed remarkable; she felt the solidity of it, felt how naturally one thing linked with the next and was merely there, insensate and calm and yet like a simple and tremendous power, stone interlocked with stone. She reflected that he was certainly quite an ordinary person. And at that she had again a faint, elusive, intangible sense of her own existence; she felt herself floating in the dark before him, dissolved and tattered, like pale, frothing foam, and felt an odd stimulus in answering him agreeably. And even while speaking she watched herself and what she was doing, helpless, unmoved in spirit, and yet with an enjoyment that was divided between pleasure and torment, which made her feel as though she were crouching in the innermost depths of some great and ever expanding exhaustion.