wall, emblazoned in a dazzling brightness, a last hieroglyph of light wrote valedictions. The cups gleamed. I sensed, as one sometimes does in dreams, that an experiential altitude had been reached from which there is nothing to do except cast oneself headlong down. Then her voice took to its wings from that peak and I sat in silence listening.
“My dear love,” she said, “now that you are home again I wish to say to you the things that my loneliness without you has made clearer to me. Because I love you so much I am tempted to make many demands of you, to insist that you do this or that as I would wish you to do. Oh, how deeply I yearn for your absolute truthfulness, for your wholehearted honesty, for your trustworthiness. If I could I would implant these things within you just as you have planted yourself within me. But I do not love you for what you are, I love you because you are. Loving you, I desire to possess you; and possessing you I desire to make you part of me; and this desire is so strong that if it took a viper to its breast it would change it into a virtue.
“No, do not interrupt me. I have a sort of second knowledge about you, for we have known each other so well and so happily. I could believe that I feel it when motor cars only just miss running you over in the street. And when you are in the room with me I understand the absurdity of the outer spaces, for then they are empty. When you are not with me I am like them, empty and absurd.
“I do not want to know why you stayed away, because I think that I already know. I think that I knew this before you had been gone a week. And the first night of this knowledge—you know it was knowledge and not fear or suspicion—I thought that my heart was breaking with every beat. Until, as I seemed to reach the vacuum of anguish, the child inside me kicked and spoke. What it said is what I now say to you. And if, my dear love, you cannot help killing me, I beg you, in the name of my love for you, to kill quickly.”
Her arms unwound themselves from my shoulders; she lifted her head and moved away. If, unlike Orpheus, I could only turn around and stretch out my arms, would we both be saved?
But I sat quite still, feeling the moral paralysis overtaking my emotions, my mind and my body. Now, it seemed to say, now if you so little as lift a finger it will be murder. I heard the door close behind her and her step, heavy with burden, die away down the passage that led to the bedroom. And with the dying away of her going I think that my whole past life died within me. I rose from the chair and took up my mackintosh: I do not think that I was visible to the three men I passed on my way to the little pub in the village.
* * * *
Dark nurse of sleep, star-fingered shepherdess, look in at her window and quieten her restlessness. Is there nothing and no one in her room but the whimpering beast of my infidelity spread over a naked form that is both her dead body and the lineaments of Marsden’s gratified desire? The tighter she closes her eyes the brighter the image of her anguish is. She dreams, perhaps, betrayals of her own, done, in turn, upon me. I can almost pray so.
* * * *
In the Goat and Compass a farm hand named Jim brought his pint across to the window where I sat and lowered himself, giving a puff, onto the seat. “Glad to see you again,” he said, “will you have a drink?” Then he saw that I had my glass. We drank in silence for a time. He pulled occasionally at a pipe. He turned his head as a remark occurred to him. “How’s the wife now?” he asked.
I told him that she was pretty well all right. But from the tone of his question I suspected that his enquiry was more than a casual formality. “Why ‘now’?” I asked him, not expecting a very clear answer.
“Well,” he pulled slowly at his pipe, “I suppose she hasn’t told you. Trust me to go talking out of turn. It wasn’t nothing to worry much about. She was lying out
“My dear love,” she said, “now that you are home again I wish to say to you the things that my loneliness without you has made clearer to me. Because I love you so much I am tempted to make many demands of you, to insist that you do this or that as I would wish you to do. Oh, how deeply I yearn for your absolute truthfulness, for your wholehearted honesty, for your trustworthiness. If I could I would implant these things within you just as you have planted yourself within me. But I do not love you for what you are, I love you because you are. Loving you, I desire to possess you; and possessing you I desire to make you part of me; and this desire is so strong that if it took a viper to its breast it would change it into a virtue.
“No, do not interrupt me. I have a sort of second knowledge about you, for we have known each other so well and so happily. I could believe that I feel it when motor cars only just miss running you over in the street. And when you are in the room with me I understand the absurdity of the outer spaces, for then they are empty. When you are not with me I am like them, empty and absurd.
“I do not want to know why you stayed away, because I think that I already know. I think that I knew this before you had been gone a week. And the first night of this knowledge—you know it was knowledge and not fear or suspicion—I thought that my heart was breaking with every beat. Until, as I seemed to reach the vacuum of anguish, the child inside me kicked and spoke. What it said is what I now say to you. And if, my dear love, you cannot help killing me, I beg you, in the name of my love for you, to kill quickly.”
Her arms unwound themselves from my shoulders; she lifted her head and moved away. If, unlike Orpheus, I could only turn around and stretch out my arms, would we both be saved?
But I sat quite still, feeling the moral paralysis overtaking my emotions, my mind and my body. Now, it seemed to say, now if you so little as lift a finger it will be murder. I heard the door close behind her and her step, heavy with burden, die away down the passage that led to the bedroom. And with the dying away of her going I think that my whole past life died within me. I rose from the chair and took up my mackintosh: I do not think that I was visible to the three men I passed on my way to the little pub in the village.
* * * *
Dark nurse of sleep, star-fingered shepherdess, look in at her window and quieten her restlessness. Is there nothing and no one in her room but the whimpering beast of my infidelity spread over a naked form that is both her dead body and the lineaments of Marsden’s gratified desire? The tighter she closes her eyes the brighter the image of her anguish is. She dreams, perhaps, betrayals of her own, done, in turn, upon me. I can almost pray so.
* * * *
In the Goat and Compass a farm hand named Jim brought his pint across to the window where I sat and lowered himself, giving a puff, onto the seat. “Glad to see you again,” he said, “will you have a drink?” Then he saw that I had my glass. We drank in silence for a time. He pulled occasionally at a pipe. He turned his head as a remark occurred to him. “How’s the wife now?” he asked.
I told him that she was pretty well all right. But from the tone of his question I suspected that his enquiry was more than a casual formality. “Why ‘now’?” I asked him, not expecting a very clear answer.
“Well,” he pulled slowly at his pipe, “I suppose she hasn’t told you. Trust me to go talking out of turn. It wasn’t nothing to worry much about. She was lying out
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