Five Women (24 page)

But Johannes did not understand.

Then she suddenly began to change, like something sinking away from him, and even her features seemed to blur, growing smaller here and larger there. Although it seemed there was something else she might have said, it was as if she no longer felt herself to be the person who had just been speaking. And only hesitantly, as if down some long and unaccustomed road, her words then came: " ... What do you think? . . . To me it seems no human being could be so impersonal... . Only an animal could.... Oh, help me! Why does it always make me think of an animal...?"

And Johannes tried to find some way of recalling her to herself. All at once he began to speak, for now he wanted to know more about it.

But she only shook her head.

From that time on Johannes realised how terrifyingly easy it would be to stretch out his hand for what he wanted and miss it by a hair's breadth. Sometimes a man does not recognise what it is he wants in the darkness, only knowing that he will fail to grasp it; and then he lives his life as in a locked room, alone with fear. At times Johannes was afraid, as though he might suddenly begin to whimper and run on all fours and sniff at Veronica's hair. Such impulses assailed him. But nothing happened. They passed each other by. They looked at each other. They spoke to each other about trifles, or sometimes spoke as though questingly. So it was day after day.

Yet once he suddenly felt this to be like an encounter in the midst of solitude, when a vague, haphazard proximity all at once arches like a solid vault. Veronica was coming down the stairs, and he was waiting at the foot: there they paused, each standing alone in the twilight. It was not that he wanted anything of her, it was merely as if the two of them, standing there separately, were no more than a delirious fantasy in a sick person's brain. So it was a sense of quite another necessity that made him say to her: "Come, let's go away together."

But of what she said in reply he understood only: "... no love ... not marry ... I can't go away and leave Aunt." And once again he tried, saying: "Veronica, a human being—sometimes indeed a word, a sudden warmth, a breath of air—is like a pebble in an eddy, revealing the centre on which you turn.... If we set about it together, perhaps we might find it...."

Yet her voice had an even deeper sensual undertone now than it had had that other time when she gave him the same answer: "Surely no human being can be so impersonal, only an animal ... yes, perhaps if you were going to die...." And then she said: "No." And at that he was once again overwhelmed by something that was not so much a resolve as a vision, something that had no bearing on reality but was self-contained, like music. And he said: "I am going away. Certainly—perhaps I shall die." But even while saying this he knew it was not what he had meant to say.

And there was no hour, during all that time, when he did not try to work it out, asking himself what she must really be like that there was such power in her. Sometimes he would say: "Veronica ..." and feel the sweat that clung to her name, the humble and irrevocable submissiveness of being an attendant shadow and that moist and chilly resignation contenting itself with reality at second hand. And he could not help thinking of her name whenever he saw those two little curls that were so carefully stuck to her forehead as if they did not belong to her, or when he saw her smiling the way she sometimes did when they were sitting at table together and she was waiting on Aunt. And he could not help looking at her whenever Demeter spoke. But there was always some impediment, something that prevented him from being able to understand how a person like her could have become the central point of his passionate resolve. And when he thought about it all he found that even in his earliest memories there was something hovering about her like the faint acrid smoke of candles that have guttered out, an aura of things to be shunned—like the drawing-rooms of this house, motionless, asleep under dust-covers and behind drawn blinds. And only when he heard Demeter talking, saying things that were as ghastly, commonplace and colourless as that furniture which no one ever used, did he feel as if it were all like some vicious practice involving all three of them.

And for all this, whenever he thought of her in later days, he could not help hearing only one thing: how she had said ‘no'. Three times she had said ‘no', quite suddenly, and it made her an utter stranger to him. The first ‘no' had been spoken softly, and yet it had been queerly as though detached from all that had gone before, floating through the house and away; and the second had been like the crack of a whip or like a panic-stricken clutching at something; and the third had been very quiet again, a sort of collapse, and almost like anguish in the awareness of inflicting pain.

And at times now, when he thought of her, it seemed to him she was beautiful: of a very complex beauty, the kind one may easily forget to admire and even fall back into regarding as ugliness. And whenever she appeared before him, looming up out of the darkness of the house, which closed again behind her and lay there strangely immobile; or whenever she glided past him with that extraordinary sensuality of hers which was a sort of authority, an aura like that of some mysterious illness—he could never help remembering that she had told him he was an animal for her. This was incomprehensible and how terrifying, much bigger and more real than it had been in the past. And even when he did not see her, he conjured up her image with piercing clarity: her tall figure with the broad, rather flat breast; her low straight brow and the dense, gloomy mass of hair high-piled over those two irrelevant, gentle curls; her large, voluptuous mouth; her bare arms shadowed with faint, black down; and the way she bore her head bowed, as though that fragile neck could not support the load of it without bending, and the peculiar gentleness, at once negligent and almost shameless, with which she thrust her belly a little forward as she walked. But they hardly ever spoke to each other any more.

Veronica had suddenly heard a bird call, and another call in answer. And that was the end of it. With that little chance happening—as it so often is with these things—there was an end to what had been; and what began now had its existence solely for her.

For then, cautiously, hastily, like the quick touch of a soft, slightly hairy, pointed tongue, the fragrance of the tall grass and the wild flowers came flitting past their faces. And their last conversation, which had gone on and on, lingeringly, like something one has ceased to pay attention to and yet goes on turning over between one's fingers, here broke off. Veronica had felt a shock, and it was only afterwards that she realised what a strange shock it had been, recognising it by the flush in her face and by a memory that all at once came back to her across an expanse of years: there it was, all unforeseen, hot, and alive. True, a great many memories had come back to her recently, and it seemed to her she must have heard that bird-call even the previous night, and in the night before that, and one night two weeks earlier. And it seemed to her too that she had been tormented by that touch before, she did not know when, perhaps in her sleep. Recently these weird memories had been coming to her time and again, falling into her mind in droplets, falling to left and to right of something, before it and behind it: they were like swarms of birds winging towards a roosting place, her whole childhood. But this time she knew with uncanny certainty: it was the right thing, the real thing, the thing itself. It was a memory that she all at once recognised, even across that expanse of years: there it was at last, in incoherent fragments, hot, and still alive.

In those days, so long ago, she had loved the hair of a big St. Bernard dog, especially the hair in front where the big chest-muscles rose like two hillocks over the curving bones, protruding at every step the dog took. The mass of that thick coat, and the intense golden-brown of it, overwhelmed her; it was like a treasure beyond counting and like some serene infinitude, so that whenever she tried to keep her eyes fixed on one spot her vision blurred. What she felt was no more or less than the strong, simple, inarticulate affection, the tender companionship that a fourteen-year-old girl will feel for a possession whether animate or inanimate; and yet at this point it was sometimes almost like being in a landscape. It was like walking—here were the woods and the meadow, and here the hill and the field, and in the order of it all each thing was no more than as a little stone simply and perfectly locking into a great pattern, though each, when looked at for its own sake, was seen to be terrifyingly complex and pulsating with repressed life, so marvellous that one had to pause in awe as before an animal crouching tense and still, about to spring.

But once, when she was lying beside her dog like that, it struck her: giants must be like this, with mountains and valleys and forests of hair on their chests, and songbirds among the trees in those hairy forests, and tiny lice on the songbirds, and ... she could not follow the thought any further, but it might go on like that for ever, here too each thing fitting within the other, so tightly fitted into it that the only reason it stayed still, it seemed, was that it was under the pressure of such great and potent order. And secretly she thought : if the giants grew angry, all this would suddenly fly apart in all directions, screaming, overwhelming one, over-brimming like some terrifying cornucopia ... and if it were to fall upon her, raging with love, it would be like thundering mountains and roaring trees, and tiny windblown hairs would grow on her body, crawling with tiny insects, and there would be a voice shrieking in ecstasy because of the ineffable wonder of it all, and her breath would be like a multitude of animals enveloping everything, engulfing the world.

And then, when she noticed that her own breathing made her small pointed breasts rise and fall in the same rhythm as the rising and falling of the shaggy chest beside her, suddenly she felt a sharp dismay and held her breath lest something happen, she did not know what. But when she could not maintain the effort any longer and had to let her breath continue to rise and fall that way, as though that other living creature were slowly drawing it out of her, breath after breath, she closed her eyes and returned to thinking of the giants : it was an uneasy procession of images behind her shut eyelids, but now much nearer to her, and warm as though low clouds were passing over her.

And when she opened her eyes again, much later, everything was just as it had been, only that the dog was now standing beside her, looking at her. And now she suddenly became aware of something protruding from under his meerschaum-yellow coat, a pointed thing, red and crooked as though in voluptuous pain, and in the moment when she tried to get up she felt the warm, flickering caress of his tongue on her face. And then she had been so strangely paralysed, as though . . . as though she were an animal herself, and in spite of the ghastly fear that came upon her something in her cringed and was burning hot, as though now, at any moment ... like the crying of birds and a fluttering of wings in a hedge, and then a quieting down, soft as the sound of feathers sliding upon feathers... .

That was how it had been, that time long ago, and this now was just the same strangely hot shock of fear, so that she recognised it for what it was. For hard though it is to know what a feeling is, this at least she could tell: now, after so many years, she had felt exactly the same fear as then.

And there stood Johannes, who was going away this very day. And here she stood. It was thirteen or fourteen years since all that had happened, and her breasts were no longer so pointed, so inquisitively red-beaked; they had dropped a little and were now faintly mournful, like two paper hats abandoned on a wide floor—for her chest had broadened and it was as though the very space surrounding her had grown away from her. But she was aware of this less from seeing it in the looking-glass—for it was a long time since, being naked, in her bath or changing her clothes, she had done anything but mechanically go through the necessary motions —than from a feeling. It seemed to her that formerly she had been able to lock herself tight in her clothes, armouring herself on every side, whereas now she merely covered herself with them. And when she thought about her sense of her bodily self; she realised that in earlier days she had had an awareness of herself emanating from within, a sense of being something like a round, tense drop of water; and now for a long time she had been like a small puddle, soft-edged, on the ground. So flattened, so slack and inelastic this feeling was that it would have amounted to no more than sluggishness and torpor had it not been for something else, something incomparably soft in her that very slowly, and with a thousand gingerly caressing folds, clung to her from within.

Surely there had been a time when she had been closer to life and had felt it more distinctly, as though touching it with her own hands, feeling it bodily. But for a long time now she had ceased to know what it was like; all she knew was that at some point in time something had come between her and life, leaving a barrier between. And she had never known what it was, whether a dream or some day-time sense of creeping anxiety, whether there had been something she had seen that had frightened her or if it was just that she was afraid of seeing things with her own eyes. She had not known it until today. For in the meantime her dim everyday existence had overlaid those old impressions and blurred them as even a light persistent breeze blots out traces in sand. Only the monotony of it had been with her, a sort of humming within her, now fainter, now louder. She no longer knew any intense pleasure or intense suffering; there was nothing that stood out in relief from the rest of her life, and gradually it had all become a mere blur. The days went by one like the other; and, one like the other, the years advanced. She still could feel that each year took something away from her and added something to her and that she was slowly changing with them; yet none of them stood out distinct from the others. Her sense of herself was now vague and fluid, and when she probed her own being all she could discover was the shifting of veiled, indefinite forms, as if she were touching something that stirred under a blanket, without being able to identify it. Gradually it became more and more as though she were living under a woollen blanket herself, or under a bell-shaped cover made of thin horn, which was becoming more and more opaque. Things around her were retreating further and further into the distance, losing their individual features, and her sense of herself seemed to be sinking into the distance too. Between her feelings and herself there was now a vast empty space, and in this void her body lived; it recognised the things around it, it smiled, it was animate, but whatever happened was without coherence or meaning, and often now a gluey disgust oozed soundlessly through this world of hers, smearing all sensations as with a mask of pitch.