Secretly, she feared that their estimate of her was the true one. She was terribly afraid that, underneath, she was like them. She was haunted by the fear that what separated her from them was not spirituality, but lack of courage. Her hatred was a secret fear of kinship. Consequently she was determined to prove that she did not belong to them.
And she expected me to accept her at her own valuation! I regarded her with the contempt that a great swindler feels for a pickpocket.
Nevertheless, I gave her tea and, later, I told the servants some lie about a cousin, so that Vera could spend the night in the flat.
For some days she talked and I listened. I listened to such fantastic nonsense about myself that, more than once, nothing less than murder seemed an adequate punishment. She grovelled before me. I was to be the means by which she would convince herself of her spiritual superiority to her family.
Things could not go on like this. That was definite. By now, I had met Rosalie, and so Vera had to leave the flat. I got her a room and then I told her, in the plainest possible terms, that her Christmas-card conception of me bore no relation to the facts, and that if we were to meet in the future it must be on that basis.
She gave me a superior smile—the kind of smile that is exchanged by members of a tiny community which meets in a basement once a week, and is dogmatically certain that it—and only it—possesses the Key to the Riddle of the Universe. Despite this smile, however, I told her that in no circumstances was she to come to the flat unless I asked her. Then, having repeated that her conception of me was wholly fictitious, I got rid of her.
But that did not stop her writing. My God, those letters! Vera’s letters! Someone once said that the spiritual life must be a fulfilment, not a substitute. If ever truth were written, it is there. Those letters—what she believed them to be, and what they were! I began to hate her. I wrote her a line asking her not to write to me. I received three thousand words by return of post, mainly to the effect that I did not know what I really was, and that what I really was—was what the world really wanted.
I had had enough. And I had arrived at a decision. I sent her a note asking her to come to the flat the next night, stressing—for the third time—that if she came she must not expect to find the man she imagined me to be.
She came the next night. I tested the extent of my dominion over her, only to discover that it had no limits. Then I told her she would come to the flat twice a week, and oftener if I sent for her.
For a year she visited me regularly.
During that period I proved a number of things to her in such a manner that even she could retain no illusions about me or herself. Not only did I descend from the pedestal on which she had placed me, but I also forced her to vacate hers.
I humiliated her, physically and psychologically, till no trace of her former conception of me remained. I proved to her that she did belong to that family which she so despised. I proved to her that their estimate of her was the true one, and that her pretensions were a façade erected by her pride.
Again and again—breathless, crimson, infuriated—she announced that she hated me and would never see me again—never! And whenever I sent her a note, she arrived at the flat precisely at the hour I had stated.
Her surrender, on every level, was complete and abject. She had no will in my presence—only a genius for obedience. Soon, she had one fear, and only one—that in some mysterious manner her family would learn of her degradation. This fear was so rooted that it was not removed by the statement that they would learn of it only if she told them.
Those are the facts about my relations with Vera. They are not pretty ones, but I am not concerned with prettiness.
To be worshipped for everything I was not—everything from which I had run away—was intolerable. It woke a cold anger in me, an icy determination to destroy. She should learn what she was—as I had been forced to know what I was. She should know what she was running away from—even as I knew. If she wanted to present a façade to the world, it was better to realise what was behind it. It was better to know that it hid a naked empty Vera Thornton, than to believe that it shielded a saint in the making.
So, in the space of a few weeks, I ceased to be a Spiritual Superman for Vera and became a Monster of Vice. (The latter designation was as fantastic as the former. I was, in fact, consistently a ghost throughout.) Originally, she gazed at my Radiance in the clouds, and now she peered at my Dark Shadow in the pit. She melodramatised everything.
But she believed I had Power. Her façade had not deceived me—but mine had deceived her. She was so convinced of the power of my Dark Malignity that at times I too almost believed in it. Almost—but not quite. It threw no shadow on the floor, so I knew it was a ghost.
At the end of a year she said she must have a job. I managed to get her a position in the foreign department of a bank. She left her room and took a small flat in Bloomsbury.
She still came to see me whenever I asked her, but I began to ask her less and less frequently. And, finally, not at all.
H
The brutality of my relations with Vera temporarily eased the tension created by my association with Rosalie. Or so I deluded myself. Actually, of course, it increased that tension till a collapse was inevitable.
Apart from the ever-present possibility that Vivian would discover our secret, constant companionship with Rosalie was in the nature of an ordeal, for her world was not this one. It was a world of psychic extremity. To meet her was to enter it. To enter it, was to experience its intensity.
Often, when I left her, I was in a state of inner irritability which was intolerable. It was on these occasions that I rang up Vera and told her to come to the flat.
Or, if I did not telephone Vera, I would talk to someone—anyone—and learn all about his or her life till I could steep myself in his or her activities.
There was a girl they called Rummy, who served in the long bar of the Cosmopolitan. I often talked to her, till I had learned everything about her. Then I identified myself imaginatively with her activities till I almost became her. I knew every detail of her life in the bar and at home. I knew her hopes, her fears, her pleasures. I could become her at will—and so be delivered from the heavy chain of my own personality. She was a drug which I used again and again.
But there was another reason why I clung to the madness represented by Rosalie and Vera. That reason was Denis Wrayburn.
I spoke to him for the first time in the station restaurant at Basle. I had arrived at about dawn and had an hour or two to fill in before getting the train to Italy. I went and looked at the Rhine, then returned to the station for rolls and coffee.
I ordered these and was studying the mural decorations, when I heard a polar voice behind me refusing to pay the price asked for the excellent jam provided.
I turned and saw a remarkable-looking individual. I spoke to him and we spent an hour together. Among other things, I learned that he was acting as courier to a rich American family.
I doubt if I saw Wrayburn more than once during the next two years, then—soon after Rosalie and I had become lovers—he turned up at my flat and we met regularly.
I have known hosts of people, but no one remotely resembling Wrayburn. He was disembodied intelligence. He looked like a ghost who had genius—and that is precisely what he was. Only a dying civilisation could have produced him—and he regarded it with the eyes of an undertaker. He was the one man I have met who had to be what he was. No disguise was possible for him. He could present no façade to the world. He was an absolute being.