I do not know how far you are prepared to follow me in my attempt to leave nothing out. I am an inexperienced writer, a new hand at this business of depicting life. However that may be, I knocked at Sylvia’s door. There was no answer. I went in. And there was no one there.
I caught the scent of Cœur de Jeanette, and of powder. Here I sat in Sylvia’s room, looked at her girlish books, her girlish things. And I grew sad, sad at my departure. For some reason this insistent passage from Maupassant, which I had run across in Arnold Bennett, clung to my brain and would not let go—‘How I have wept, the long night through, over the poor women of the past, so beautiful, so tender, so sweet, whose arms have opened for the kiss, and who are dead!’ And it seemed as though Sylvia were already dead, ruined, gone — the way of all damnation!
I stood up. I saw my face in the glass. I combed my black mop of hair back from the forehead with her comb: it gave me a secret thrill of pleasure to do so. The comb sparkled. How exquisite, how overwhelmingly happy was life! The big bird had stirred its wings in me, ready to fly. I looked round. I could wish I had flowers — to invade our room with flowers, as in Le Lys Rouge. But now there was no time. On the stained and tattered wall there was a copy of an English oleograph — heaven knows how it had found its way here, and why Sylvia had not had the impulse to remove it — of a young woman in wedding dress and a bouquet of roses in her white-gloved hand, bearing the inscription: ‘An anxious moment — waiting for the bridegroom.’ And I thought: ‘Our roles are reversed.’ I looked out of the window, my brow pressed against the chilly glass, wondering, hoping, doubting, the town eclipsing into darkness, the growing string of lights winking steadily, demurely. The flowers on the wallpaper. How they complement each other in making figures! Tick-tick, tick-tick — this is æon beating upon æon, time receding into the past, life running down. On the table was a bronze bust of Sylvia done by a young sculptor of our acquaintance. What beckoned those shoulders, those breasts? What raptures did they cajole? Suddenly I felt that I was basking in the heat of the sun, bathing in empyrean anticipations: this beauty I had always looked for and somehow always missed was mine — to be mine almost any minute. It was as if the future and the past had merged into one vast vague dream; but the present has come to stay, has become momentary and eternal, and intolerable enough on that account. And I thought of how, when all this tribulation and excitement should be over, I would return once more to my peaceful, sober treatise in connexion with the evolution of an attitude.
Then she came. She did not speak; she only looked anxiously at the door. I went immediately and locked it, once, and then again, thus feeling that we were doubly secure. She put her finger to her lips: ‘S — sh! — If — if anyone should knock you’ll have to go into that cupboard, darling, because I’ll have to open the door.’
‘All right, I’ll go into the cupboard, my sweet — I’ll go into the cupboard,’ I said in tender acquiescence. For more than ever before she was in my soul.
We live in an Anglo-Saxon world. Now, had I been writing these pages in the language of beautiful France, I would have written with a Maupassantian, an incredible, candour. But we live, as I said, in an Anglo-Saxon world — a world of assumed restraint. However that may be, I felt the sharp thrill of the first touch. A vaster power than ourselves threw us together: a combustion of elements outside our ken. We were awed, breathless. Standing behind her, her lovely weight against me, I kissed her in the warm hollow of the shoulder, and she threw back her head. Whimsically:
‘I’m your wife?’
‘Yes.’
Her eyes gleamed darkly as I leaned over her, like pools in the evening; and I could even see myself in them, my khaki collar and my tie pulled crooked in the eagerness of our embrace: and the pools reminded me of Oxford, though what I really pictured were not pools at all, but the dark canal that runs outside the wall of Worcester, where I had walked in days gone by. Why should the image of these things thrive to life even as we kiss? Why should our imagination roam so heedlessly? Shall we ever capture anything wholly and completely, and hold it, hold it fast?
I knelt and kissed her knees. ‘And these lovely little Chinamen!’ I felt as I might feel if I had been privileged to attend a private view of the Royal Academy. I felt elated. I forgave Gustave. I forgave the whole world. ‘It must be all handwork, I imagine.’
‘But of course.’
‘Why of course?’
‘You are so stupid, darling.’
‘Why?’
‘The General got them in Tokyo.’
‘God bless the General!’ I cried, embracing her. I felt full of an uncontrollable gratitude. I felt grateful to the world at large. Gustave had been relegated to his appointed place. All was well in this best of all possible worlds! There was a God in heaven after all.
‘They have lasted a long time,’ I remarked.
‘They are durable.’
‘God bless him — the General,’ said I, with redundant heartiness.
‘Maman’s are without Chinamen; but they have flowers also embroidered.’
‘I know them,’ I said; and, stupidly enough, I blushed — as though I had given myself away. So stupid, since no one in his right mind could suspect that my relations with my aunt could be anything else but cordial.
‘Who would have thought — that other pair—maman’s — had seen different days?’
I bent my head in mute homage. The still angel flew by. ‘Ah, well!—’
But when she came to me with her real ruby lips and in the unstained whiteness of her skin, I thought — I thought of strawberries and cream. And there rose in my breast an overwhelming feeling of gratitude, gratitude for her old trustfulness. She came to me as my long-awaited bride, without sham protests, taking as it were the implications of our love for granted. What struck me especially was that she yielded herself to me gaily, laughingly, as if indeed the nature of the pleasure was gaiety. She looked felicitous — she wore a holiday air. She smiled all the time. I expect she was having the time of her life: and not the least so because she thought she was the cause of my having it, too. And I loved her.
Those magical mysteries: the convexities and concavities of the eternally alluring feminine form! A whirl, a dream, a trance. Her warm soft tresses fell round her neck on the white pillow; they were dark brown gold in the moonlight. I am a serious young man, an intellectual, but I confess I felt the savour of existence. She was beautiful, passionate. And I am not a Diabologh for nothing. My uncle married thrice, and could not count his children on the fingers of both hands. My father, Aunt Teresa tells me, had had innumerable love affairs. You know the record of Uncle Emmanuel. Uncle Nicholas was born in circumstances of romance. I admit I haven’t all their blood. However that may be, I felt proud and glad beyond measure. To hold in one’s arms the quivering young body, the warm soft ivory of a woman whom one knows beyond any shadow of a doubt to be a beauty is a pleasure, I can tell you, not to be despised even by an intellectual.
‘Isn’t it lovely?’ she purled.
Well, it was. Very much so.
And now already there was something tragic in this our attainment of happiness, as though we had reached the end of a long and steep lane, behind which loomed a precipice. Now there was nowhere farther to go, and we halted, and wept. ‘Darling!’ I kissed her, and my kisses were not what they should have been — not at all what they should have been. And she felt it.