Five Women (26 page)

And when the sun was setting, sending its rays through the hem of her skirts, she was still standing there, quiescent and without a word and abandoned to this light, as shameless as though she knew everyone could see. And as in some far off oblivion she had a sense, even now, of that greater yearning which was yet to be fulfilled. But at this moment all that was as muted and sad as if far, far off there were bells ringing. And so the two of them stood there, side by side, grave and tall—two enormous animals, their backs bowed, outlined against the evening sky.

The sun had set. Veronica walked back, alone and meditative, along the path between meadows and fields.

i'~lll1ll~l'G From this leave-taking, as though from a broken husk on the ground, there had risen a sense of her own existence; it was suddenly so firm and solid that she felt like a knife plunged into that other person's life. Everything was clearly defined: he had gone away and was going to kill himself. She did not question it; it was simply a thing as majestically oppressive as some ponderous, dark form lying on the earth. It seemed as irrevocable as a dividing-line sliced through time, with everything that was previous to it eternally fixed and petrified. This day leapt out from the row of all the other days with the sudden flash of a drawn sword; indeed, it was as if she positively could see her soul's relationship to that other soul, a relationship that had now become final and unalterable, before her in mid-air like the broken branch of a tree pointing upwards into eternity.

At moments she felt tenderness for Johannes, to whom she owed this; and then again she would feel nothing, only the sense of her own walking. What urged her on was the knowledge that her destiny was solitude and nothing else; and with this she walked on between meadows and fields.

The world grew small in the dusk. And gradually Veronica began to be borne along by a strange pleasure that was like cruelly thin air: she inhaled it with twitching nostrils till it filled her lungs and buoyed her up; her arms reached out into the distance, and her steps became so light that her feet lost touch with the ground and she was carried away high over the woods.

She felt so volatile, she was almost sick with delight. Nor did this tension release her until she put her hand on the outer door of the house. It was a small, solid, rounded door. When she locked it after her it was like an impenetrable barrier, and she stood in the darkness as though at the bottom of a still, subterranean pool of water. Slowly she took a few paces ahead, feeling the proximity of the cool enclosing walls, though she did not touch them. It was a queerly secret, furtively-familiar feeling; she knew that now she was home.

Then she quietly did all that she had to do, and the day drew to its end like all the other days. From time to time the thought of Johannes loomed up among her other thoughts, and then she would glance at the clock and guess where he must be by now. Once, however, she made an effort not to think of him for a long time, and when she did think of him again she realised that now the train must be travelling through the mountain valleys southwards into the night, and an unknown landscape shut her out, leaving her behind in darkness.

She went to bed and soon fell asleep. But she slept lightly and impatiently as someone for whom the next day there is something extraordinary in store. Under her eyelids there was a perpetual radiance, and towards morning it grew still brighter, seeming to expand, until it became immeasurably vast. When Veronica awoke she knew: it was the sea.

By now he must be in sight of the sea, and there was nothing more that he need do except carry out his resolve. She imagined that he would take a boat and row far out and —then there would be a shot. But she did not know when this would be. She began guessing and trying to work it out in various ways. Would he go straight from the railway-station to find a boat? Or would he wait until evening? Till evening, when the sea was a great expanse of utter calm, gazing at one as though with enormous eyes? All day she went about in such uneasiness that it was as though her skin were all the time being pricked with tiny pins. Now and then, from here or there—perhaps out of a gilded frame glittering on a wall, or out of the darkness of the stairwell, or out of the white linen that she was embroidering Johannes' face would loom up. Pale, with purplish lips, bloated and distorted from being in the water.... Or merely a black lock of hair over a shattered forehead. And now and then she was invaded by drifting fragments of tenderness that came as though on the returning tide. And when it was evening she knew that now it must be over.

Yet somewhere in the remote depths of her being there was a vague thought that it was all senseless: this expectation of hers and this way in which she was treating things unknown to her as though they were reality. From time to time the notion would flit through her mind that Johannes was not dead, and it was as if something were snatching at a large soft blanket, and for an instant such a fragment of reality would leap up, only to collapse again. Then she would feel the evening outside gliding around the house, and felt how silent and how ordinary it all was. And it was like thinking: Once there was a night; it came and went. She knew it. But then this feeling died away. Slowly a profound peace sank over her, and a sense of mystery, sinking in innumerable folds.

And so the night came, this one night of her life when all that had ever taken form under the twilit blanket of the long malaise that her existence was, all that had been dammed off from reality, became like a drop of acid corroding everything, spreading into weird patterns of unimaginable experience; and now at long last it had the force to break through into her consciousness.

Driven by some urge that she could not account for, she lit all the candles in her room and sat there among them, unmoving in the centre of it. Then she took out a portrait of Johannes and set it before her. But it no longer seemed that what she had been waiting for had anything to do with Johannes and his fate; nor did it seem to be within her either, as anything she imagined. What she all at once realised was that it was some sense of her surroundings that had changed, expanding into an unknown territory halfway between dream and waking.

The space between herself and the objects around her ceased to be emptiness; instead there was a strange network of relations. All the objects were in their places—the table, the wardrobe, the clock on the wall—as solidly there as though nothing could ever shift them; and they were all as though heavily loaded with themselves, distinct from her and as firmly locked into themselves as a clenched fist. And yet at moments it was as though they were within her, or they gazed at her as if they had eyes, gazing out of some space that lay like a sheet of glass between herself and her room. And they were there as though for many years they had been waiting only for this one evening in order to find themselves, curving and bulging, arching high, with something emanating from them that was a kind of excess—until the sense of the moment rose like a hollow cube around Veronica and she herself became a silent room full of flickering candles, herself a room enclosing everything. And sometimes she was overcome with exhaustion after so much tension, and then it seemed that she was no more than a shining; and a radiance would flare up in her limbs, and she would feel it like a weight upon her and grow tired under the load of her own being, as one grows tired in the circle of light under a softly humming lamp. And her thoughts moved through this radiance and out into the bright sleepiness, like thin-tipped tendrils, a now visible pattern of delicate capillaries. And everything became more and more silent; veils sank about her, softly as drifts of snow floating down before the illumined windows of her conscious mind; and now and then there was a crackling, jagged flash of great light.... But after a while she rose once more to the limits of this strangely tense state of wakefulness, and all at once she had the distinct awareness: this is what Johannes is like now, he is within this other dimension of reality, within this kind of transformed space.

Children and dead people have no souls. But the soul that living people have is what prevents them from loving,no matter how much they may want to; it is that which, in all love, withholds a residue. Veronica was in this moment aware that the thing that cannot be given away by even the greatest love is the very thing that endues all emotions with direction, steering them away from whatever clings to them with timorous faith, the one thing that endues all emotions with something that is inaccessible to even the most dear beloved: something that is always ready to turn away and leave. It is something that even as it comes towards the beloved will smile and, as though keeping some secret pledge, turn and glance back the other way. But children and dead people are either not yet anything or no longer anything, and so it seems possible to believe that they may yet become everything, or that they have been it; they are like the hollowed-out reality of empty vessels, lending their shape to dreams. Children and dead people have no soul—no soul of such a kind. Nor have animals. To Veronica animals were terrifying, a menace in their ugliness; yet in their eyes there was that pin-bright glint of here and now, the falling droplet of oblivion.

To those who are searching without any definite aim the soul is something like that. All her sombre life long Veronica had been in dread of one kind of love and had yearned for another kind; in dreams it is sometimes the way she yearned for it to be. The things that really happen take their course in the full strength of what they are, hugely, draggingly, and yet like something that is within the person to whom they happen. It hurts, but just the way it does when one hurts oneself; it is humiliating, yet a humiliation like that floats away like a cloud drifting nowhere, and there is no one there to see it; such a humiliation floats like the blissful floating of a dark cloud.... So she wavered between Johannes and Demeter.... And dreams are not within one, nor are they rags and tatters of reality; somewhere there is a totality of feeling where they are at home and grow high, arching into a dome, hovering, weightless, like one fluid in another. In dreams one abandons oneself to a beloved the way one fluid merges with another; there is an altered sense of space, for the awakened soul is a hollow space within space and cannot ever be filled—the soul causes the space around it to warp and become like ice that is full of bubbles.

Veronica could now recall that she had sometimes dreamed. Never before tonight had she realised that. All she had known was that at times when she had wakened it had been as if she had become accustomed to some other rhythm, and she had then collided with the confining walls of her conscious mind; and yet somewhere there was a chink through which she could still see brightness ... only a chink, yet she could sense the vastness of the space that lay beyond. And now it occurred to her that she must have dreamt often. And she gazed through the substance of her waking life and saw the life and pattern of her dreams, just as with the returning memory of conversations and actions long ago there also returns the memory of a pattern of emotions and thoughts that has long been overlaid. It is as one may often have remembered words that were spoken in the past, and then, after many years, one suddenly recalls too that all during that conversation there had been bells chiming, chiming.... Such were the talks she had had with Johannes, and such with Demeter. And underlying all those spoken words she now began to recognise the dog, the rooster, and a clenched fist striking a face.... And then there was Johannes speaking of God. Slowly, clingingly, as a snail moves, his words slid over it all.

Veronica too had always known, somewhere in the realm of all that is indifferent : there is an animal, its skin malodorous, loathsomely slimy, an animal that everyone knows. But in her mind it was merely a restless, vaguely outlined dark thing that sometimes went sliding along under her waking consciousness, or a forest, endless and tender as a man asleep.

II

In her it had nothing of the animal about it, except for certain lines of its effect upon her soul, as it were lines extended beyond their proper length.... And then Demeter would say: ‘I only need to bend down' ... and Johannes would say, right in the middle of the day: ‘Something in me has sunk deeper, grown longer'.... And there would be a very soft, pallid wish in her that Johannes might be dead.

And—in some vague way, even while she was still awake —there was a mad, quiet way she had of looking at him when she would let her glances slide softly into him like needles, deeper and deeper, a way of watching to see whether some tremor of his smile, some twist of his lips, some tormented gesture, might not all at once be as a gift offered to her, as though someone dead were rising before her in all the incalculable fullness of life suddenly become real. Then his hair was a thicket and his fingernails were large glimmering discs. She saw fluid clouds in the whites of his eyes, and small mirroring pools. He lay there before her as hideous as if his body were wide open to her, with frontiers all disarmed; but his soul was still hidden in some ultimate feeling that was a feeling only of itself. And if he spoke of God, she would think: By ‘God' he meant that
other
feeling, perhaps the feeling of some dimension in which he would wish to live.

Those thoughts of hers were a sign of something diseased in her. But besides this she also thought: Surely an animal would be like that other dimension, gliding past so very close, like things seen through water in one's eyes, spreading in large vague patterns, and yet small and far off when one regards it as something exterior to oneself. Why is it right in a fairy-tale to think in this way of animals that keep guard over princesses? Was that morbid? In this night she felt herself and these images all bright, floating upon a premonitory fear of going under again. Her waking life, that creeping life of hers by day, would once more founder. She knew that. And she saw that everything would then be disease, and full of impossibilities. But if she could manage to hold on to those details that went on growing longer and longer, holding them in her hand like bundles of sticks in spite of the repulsion they caused as soon as they became glued together into a real whole. . . . In this night her thoughts were able to reach the idea of a haleness that was tremendous as mountain air, a state in which she might master all her emotions with the utmost ease.