And—simultaneously—not to care if she did tell him. Her confession would force me into action. If he divorced her, I would marry her. If he killed her, I would kill him. To be forced to act, to do something—anything! At times I thought that this would be deliverance.
What did it matter to me whether she told him or not? I was living so “outside” myself, so divorced from my centre, that all my actions were unreal to me. What gave them a ghostly appearance of reality was Rosalie’s belief in my strength. That belief almost enabled me to believe in the Ivor Trent whom she loved. And, every day, my desire to believe in him deepened, for—every day—the alternative became clearer and clearer.
The alternative was to enter a desert—not unlike the one which surrounded Denis Wrayburn. But of him—later.
Did I love Rosalie? The question is meaningless. When a man is desperately at odds with himself, others do not exist. He is a battlefield of principalities and powers. His relations with others are a caricature of that conflict. He is alone. And the more people he knows, and the more famous he is, the greater is that solitude.
To me, Rosalie was something rare, something unexpected in the modern world—a work of art in a factory. Sometimes I forgot my falsity, my emptiness, in watching her. (Usually, I watched her. I seldom listened to what she said.) At times I felt that she was my childhood—the childhood of which I had been robbed. But, had she guessed that the only link between us was weakness, she would have turned to ice in my arms. For she needed strength, and she believed that I was strong. She needed two types of strength: Vivian’s—and what she believed was mine. Vivian’s, because the actual world was so shadowy to her that she needed the companionship of one to whom it was overwhelmingly real. And she needed the strength she believed was mine—that is, psychic strength—in order to stabilise her imagination.
She needed the physical proximity of Vivian—and the psychic proximity of the type she imagined me to be. It was because she realised this unconsciously that she longed for Vivian to share our secret.
It never occurred to her that she was separated from me by a gulf as wide and as deep as that which divided her from Vivian.
She did not know that Ivor Trent was a ghost. She thought he was a giant.
G
During the three years we were lovers, Rosalie believed she was the only woman with whom I was intimate. Actually, during the first year, Vera Thornton visited me frequently. . . .
One afternoon—a few days before my first meeting with Rosalie at the Laidlaws’—I was alone in my flat, reading, when I was disturbed by a long peal from the bell.
I went to the door and found myself confronted by a woman of about twenty-one, who was trembling with excitement. She stood, speechless, staring at me with dark fanatical eyes, as if I were an idol in a shrine. She held a bulging bag which was clearly very heavy, for she stood obliquely, so that the pull of her body balanced its weight.
“I’m Vera Thornton,” she announced at last, in a voice resembling a gasp.
The name was vaguely familiar, but I failed to place her.
“I wrote to you, if you remember, and—and you answered my letter.”
For some reason these simple statements made her blush crimson.
“I remember,” I replied. “You wrote telling me about your family. Won’t you come in?”
We went to the sitting-room. I was about to suggest she should sit down, when I noticed the absence of the bag.
“Where’s your bag?” I asked.
“I—I left it outside.”
“Do you mean—outside the front door?”
She nodded, so I went to fetch it, half convinced that I had a lunatic on hand, and half interested.
I struggled back with the bag—which must have been filled with lead to its uttermost capacity—and had scarcely entered the room when she began to speak in a nervous staccato manner, but with great rapidity.
In broken, intense sentences, she literally hurled her history at my head. She told me about her home: her father’s promiscuity: the pleasure-frenzied lives of her brothers and sisters: hinted darkly at infamies: described the pandemonium which raged perpetually in the house. Then, with the briefest of pauses, she raced on to detail her scholastic achievements, her sufferings, and the shame she had endured at being connected with such a family.
Exclamations, blushes, angry gestures, served as punctuation in this passionate recital. She emphasised her isolation from this family of hers with ever-increasing intensity. She went on and on. She related her conflicts with her brothers and sisters; their contempt for her standards; her loathing of theirs; and the coarse jokes with which her father had countered her protests.
Finally, she explained that for the last year she had read only my books, knew whole passages by heart, and that they had inspired her to leave her family and come to London.
During the whole of this explosion she did not look at me. When its echoes had trembled into silence, I asked her what she proposed to do in London.
A long tortuous explanation followed, during which she writhed with embarrassment to such an extent that she maintained only a precarious balance on her chair. Nevertheless, I gathered from hints, innuendoes, and side-long glances that she regarded me as a god who would provide her with a destiny—of a highly-spiritual order.
I lit a cigarette and began to pace up and down the room, interested by the knowledge that if all this had occurred when I was about to write a book, I should have got rid of her instantly. But I had just finished one, and so had nothing to do. Also, I had long since tired of meeting herds of people. For some years I had concentrated on individuals. Curiosity therefore suggested exploration.
As I paced up and down I glanced at her repeatedly, noting her powerful regular features, her jet-black hair, her strong over-developed figure. She was leaning forward, her hands clasping her knees, staring into futurity with fanatical eyes. She looked rather like a prophetess who had got the sack and was plotting revenge.
Then, with a view to testing the validity of a theory I had already formed, I began to question her regarding certain parts of her story. Not one of these questions related to her achievements, or her spiritual claims, or her fantastic conception of me. They concerned the members of her family. I pressed for further details about them—especially her sisters. I made her describe their appearance, their clothes and—above all—the types of life they led. Vera had only hinted darkly at enormities, but now I insisted on details.
I got them—obscured by a veil of prudery—but more or less complete. They were not in the least interesting, being merely commonplace examples of the pleasures of dull people with the modern conception of freedom. What was interesting, however, were certain facts which Vera made plain without intending to do so.
Briefly summarised, these were: that her sisters were pretty, attractive, and in great demand; that they ridiculed her pretensions; patronised her; and generally regarded her as a freak.
In fact, her account of them was an astonishing example of unconscious self-revelation. She made it very clear that it was her pride which was in flaming revolt against her family, not her soul. She hated them, not because of their sensuality, but because they refused to acknowledge her superiority. Her leaving them and coming to London was not the initial deed of a spiritual crusade. It was a melodramatic attempt to convince them of her originality. Her governing motive was to impress them, and so to be revenged for the humiliations they had inflicted.