As usual, at a level far below the probings of self-disgust or humiliation, he was writing, swiftly and smoothly in his clear mind. He was covering sheet upon sheet of paper. For so many years now he had taken to writing out his life in his own mind — the living and the writing were simultaneous. He transferred the moment bodily to paper as it was lived, warm from the oven, naked and exposed….
‘Now’ she said angrily, determined not to lose the piastres which in her imagination she had already spent, already owed, ‘now I will make you La Veuve’ and he drew his breath in an exultant literary thrill to hear once more this wonderful slang expression stolen from the old nicknames of the French guillotine, with its fearful suggestion of teeth reflected in the concealed metaphor for the castration complex. La Veuve! The sharkinfested seas of love which closed over the doomed sailor’s head in a voiceless paralysis of the dream, the deep-sea dream which dragged one slowly downwards, dismembered and dismembering
… until with a vulgar snick the steel fell, the clumsy thinking head (‘use your loaf) smacked dully into the basket to spurt and wriggle like a fish…. ‘Mon coeur’ he said hoarsely, ‘mon ange’; simply to taste the commonest of metaphors, hunting through them a tenderness lost, torn up, cast aside among the snows.
‘Mon ange.’ A sea-widow into something rich and strange!
Suddenly she cried out in exasperation: ‘Ah God! But what is it? You do not want to?’ her voice ending almost in a wail.
She took his soft rather womanish hand upon her knee and spread it out like a book, bending over it a despairing curious face. She moved the candle the better to study the lines, drawing up her thin legs. Her hair fell about her face. He touched the rosy light on her shoulder and said mockingly ‘You tell fortunes.’ But she did not look up. She answered shortly ‘Everyone in the city tells fortunes.’ They stayed like this, like a tableau, for a long moment.
‘The caput mortuum of a love-scene’ he thought to himself. Then Melissa sighed, as if with relief, and raised her head. ‘I see now’ she said quietly. ‘You are all closed in, your heart is closed in, completely so.’ She joined index finger to index finger, thumb to thumb in a gesture such as one might use to throttle a rabbit. Her eyes flashed with sympathy. ‘Your life is dead, closed up. Not like Darley’s. His is wide … very wide … open.’ She spread her arms out for a moment before dropping them to her knee once more.
She added with the tremendous unconscious force of veracity:
‘He can still love.’ He felt as if he had been hit across the mouth.
The candle flickered. ‘Look again’ he said angrily. ‘Tell me some more.’ But she completely missed the anger and the chagrin in his voice and bent once more to that enigmatic white hand. ‘Shall I tell you everything?’ she whispered, and for a minute his breath stopped. ‘Yes’ he said curtly. Melissa smiled a stranger, private smile.
‘I am not very good’ she said softly, ‘I’ll tell you only what I see.’ Then she turned her candid eyes to him and added: ‘I see death very close.’ Pursewarden smiled grimly. ‘Good’ he said. Melissa drew her hair back to her ear with a finger and bent to his hand once more. ‘Yes, very close. You will hear about it in a matter of hours. What rubbish!’ She gave a little laugh. And then, to his complete surprise she went on to describe his sister. ‘The blind one — not your wife.’ She closed her eyes and spread her repellent arms out before her like a sleepwalker. ‘Yes’ said Pursewarden, ‘that is her. That is my sister.’ ‘Your sister?’ Melissa was astounded.
She dropped his hand. She had never in playing this game made an accurate prediction before. Pursewarden told her gravely: ‘She and I were lovers. We shall never be able to love other people.’ And now, with the recital begun he suddenly found it easy to tell the rest, to tell her everything. He was completely master of himself and she gazed at him with pity and tenderness. Was it easy because they spoke French? In French the truth of passion stood up coldly and cruelly to the scrutiny of human experience. In his own curious phrase he had always qualified it as ‘an unsniggerable language’. Or was it simply that the fugitive sympathy of Melissa made these events easy to speak of? She herself did not judge, everything was known, had been experienced. She nodded gravely as he spoke of his love and his deliberate abandoning of it, of his attempt at marriage, of its failure.
Between pity and admiration they kissed, but passionately now, united by the ties of recorded human experience, by the sensation of having shared something. ‘I saw it in the hand’ she said, ‘in your hand.’ She was somewhat frightened by the unwonted accuracy of her own powers. And he? He had always wanted someone to whom he could speak freely — but it must be someone who could not fully understand! The candle flickered. On the mirror with shaving soap he had written the mocking verses for Justine which began: Oh Dreadful is the check!
Intense the agony.
When the ear begins to hear And the eye begins to see!
He repeated them softly to himself, in the privacy of his own mind, as he thought of the dark composed features which he had seen here, by candlelight — the dark body seated in precisely the pose which Melissa now adopted, watching him with her chin on her knee, holding his hand with sympathy. And as he went on in his quiet voice to speak of his sister, of his perpetual quest for satisfactions which might be better than those he could remember, and which he had deliberately abandoned, other verses floated through his mind; the chaotic commentaries thrown up by his reading no less than by his experiences. Even as he saw once again the white marble face with its curling black hair thrown back about the nape of a slender neck, the ear-points, chin cleft by a dimple — a face which led him back always to those huge empty eye-sockets — he heard his inner mind repeating: Amors par force vos demeine!
Combien durra vostre folie?
Trop avez mene ceste vie.
He heard himself saying things which belonged elsewhere. With a bitter laugh, for example: ‘The Anglo-Saxons invented the word
“fornication” because they could not believe in the variety of love.’ And Melissa, nodding so gravely and sympathetically, began to look more important — for here was a man at last confiding in her things she could not understand, treasures of that mysterious male world which oscillated always between sottish sentimentality and brutish violence! ‘In my country almost all the really delicious things you can do to a woman are criminal offences, grounds for divorce.’ She was frightened by his sharp, cracked laugh. Of a sudden he looked so ugly. Then he dropped his voice again and continued pressing her hand to his cheek softly, as one presses upon a bruise; and inside the inaudible commentary continued:
‘What meaneth Heaven by these diverse laws?
Eros, Agape — self-division’s cause?’ Locked up there in the enchanted castle, between the terrified kisses and intimacies which would never now be recovered, they had studied La Lioba! What madness! Would they ever dare to enter the lists against other lovers? Jurata fornicatio — those verses dribbling away in the mind; and her body, after Rudel, ‘gras, delgat et gen’. He sighed, brushing away the memories like a cobweb and saying to himself: ‘Later, in search of an askesis he followed the desert fathers to Alexandria, to a place between two deserts, between the two breasts of Melissa. O morosa delectatio.