The Chinese Room

by Vivian Connell

  She had sat in silence, and now he had become unconscious enough of her body to look down at her trousers and say: “Did you get these in London?”

  “No.” She smiled. “I made them myself.” She smiled again. “They just haven’t any excuse at all.” She moved her legs slightly, and he felt their heat in proximity to him. All her warmth was now moving in his blood. She took a jar and rubbed some kind of cream into the skin above her waist and suddenly looked up and smiled in a nonchalant way. “I’m just amusing myself.”

  He knew that he had to wait, and she indicated a jar on the table and said: “Will you open that?”

  When he tried to twist off the top it scorched his hand. He was now sweating in excitement and his hands had begun to burn.

  “Oh, your hands are sore!”

  “I—ahm, yes.”

  He did not know how to explain about his hands. “You seemed hardly able to hold your knife and fork at dinner.”

  So she had noticed it. There was a silence while he tried to think of something to say.

  “I know why your hands are sore,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. I saw you coming back. I’d gone up to the box room and saw you on the bridge. Then I got it out of Blake. When I saw him taking your suit away, I stopped him. He didn’t want to tell me anything but I”—she smiled—“blackmailed him. I told him I’d call up the police and report him for stealing your clothes. He was furious with me for making him tell me. I thought he’d slap my face once. I didn’t know Blake had such a temper.” She paused. “Did you enjoy yourself, Nick?”

  “Yes.”

  “I knew you’d want a good sleep, and—I didn’t want you to wake tired.” Now her voice was very soft. “Let me see your hands.”

  She took his hands and he felt that she could somehow feel the pain of them in herself as fearfully as he felt the heat of her body come into him through her hands. She blew softly on the palm and he felt it.

  “Even my breath hurts you. I’ll rub in a little cream.”

  As she rubbed in the cream gently he wondered how long more he could stand this desire for her without seizing her in his arms. When she had done his hands she touched the palm of one with her tongue and he leaped from the touch.

  “They taste nicely now.”

  She took his hand in hers and turned it over. The palm was raw and red like the inside flesh of the body, and the black hairs on the back stood out as the hand became tumescent in the heat of her hand and the soft, agonizing cold of the cream. For the first time she looked up at him with her emotion in her eyes, and he knew that she was feeling the symbolism of the hand with the black hairs and the red, tender flesh. Her face was now slightly swollen below the eyes and he felt that her blood was clogging in desire. She murmured, having awakened his eyes in hers: “I’ve always liked your hands, Nick.”

  He felt that somehow this was the truth, although perhaps in an oblique way. “God, I can’t bear water on them. I could hardly get my clothes on.”

  She put her cheek down on his hand and then looked up with eyes that now had a slumberous light on them, like purple grapes in the shadow of leaves.

  ‘Til undo your tie for you.”

  She moved near to him and undid the knot, and he found every muscle in his body clenched in the effort to restrain himself. Now they were both beyond speech, and she very gently got all his clothes off. Then when he stood up, he felt a pressure on his eyeballs and felt they might burst out of his head if this were delayed any longer. She stood in front of him, with her lip held between her teeth, and her whole body tensed, and then suddenly felt that strange impersonal, almost hostile look of sexual desire leap out of her eyes into his. Then her hands jumped up and caught his shoulders, and, as if released from a spring of intolerant compression, she leaped off the carpet and seized him around the waist with her legs. He was nearly overborne by the shock, and then somehow sank to the floor with her, was conscious of two violent turns on the rug in conjunction, and knew they had rolled asunder after the mutual accomplishment.

  He felt giddy and empty for a moment and knew that the whole thing had been over in less than ten seconds. There was a trickle on his neck, and he put up his hand thinking it was sweat and found that it was blood. She must have unconsciously bitten his ear or he had cut it against the stool. He could not remember. He looked at her as she lay panting. It was a long time before he spoke.

  “In God’s name, why had we to wait ten years for this?”

  She did not speak for a moment. Now the emotional onslaught was upon her, and she was unable to think or reason or do anything except rest herself in an obliteration of ten years in ten seconds. At last she said: “I don’t know.”

  This, he realized, was the wrong time to try and sum up ten years of disaster in a few words. After a while he got up and sat on the edge of the bed. She still lay on the rug. He knew that this violent explosion had been necessary to discharge the repression of ten years. It was incredible that it had happened at last. It was incredible that it had not happened before. It was incredible that an external barrier of social and sexual inhibitions could have separated them all this time from each other and their own natures.

  For a little time he felt empty in the shock of the emotional concussion and watched her lying on the rug. Then, at last, she gave a long sigh, and pulled herself onto her haunches...and removed the trouser leg that had not been torn away. She gave a slight smile to herself as she flung the pieces of silk onto a chair. Then she moved over to the dressing table and sat herself on the stool and combed down her hair and made up her mouth again. There was a red glint of light on her golden skin.

  “You look like a red Indian girl,” he said.

  Her smile communicated itself to him in the glass. After a moment she stood up, and he saw how clean and shining and slim were her loins and flanks and how she was able to go naked without being nude. She was everything that a man wanted and hardly ever got. Her bosom had a lighter shade of gold and he guessed that she had protected her breasts from the sunlight with a silk bandage. And all about her hair and skin was that sense of moisture, as if her whole body breathed freely and was soaked in the dew of breath. She paused for a moment and then came over and sat on the rug and laid her head on his knee. She said nothing, and he knew that she wanted to shut the mind away and let the body use its own language.

  “How have you got like this?” he asked.

  She gave a little laugh.

  “Maybe the question is how I stayed so long like I was.” She laughed. “Does it matter now?”

  “No.”

  Now there was a jerk of anger in her voice. “God, what a fool you must have thought me.”

  He pulled her face up to him and kissed her. “Don’t let’s talk about it now.”

  He pulled her slowly onto the bed because it was exquisite and luxurious to delay, and now that they had got rid of ten years on the rug, they could begin a new lifetime up here on the bed.

  An hour later, when they had rested, and the heart had slowed down again to its regular beat, she moved her head on the pillow, and said: “Nicholas, you must go on a holiday.” She paused. “Why don’t you give up the bank altogether?”

  “That’s what I intend to do. Every time I dug in that spade today I dug a stone out of Bude’s Bank. It was like digging my way out of jail.”

  “Let’s go down to the South and sun and run away from the winter.”

  “Yes.”

  She suddenly gave a little gasp and kissed him. “I’ve always been like this inside, darling, but I didn’t know it or something.”

  “I know. I knew that the first time I met you.”

  “I thought you were going to take me in the garden that night.”

  “I wish to God I had. If we’d been ourselves nothing would have gone wrong.”

  “I know. We got locked up in the social cage. Mummy did that. I’d always been locked up.” She spoke bitterly. “So I was a bitch, Nick, a rather c
ommon little bitch, but I didn’t know it. I didn’t know I was being one. I suppose you must have felt like raping a nun when you tried to make love to me in a natural way.”

  “Yes. Something like that. But it’s all gone now.”

  “I’ll make it up to you now, darling. I’ll show you what a woman can be when she’s not afraid to be a woman.”

  “Well, you’ve shown me a lot in the last hour.”

  “It’s not very late yet, darling.”

  Nicholas smiled. She reached for a mirror on the bedside. “I must get my lip salve. My mouth’s gone all over you. You’ll be like a red Indian long before you go to sleep, darling, if you don’t stop me.”

  “I’m not going to stop you.”

  She made a large, juicy mouth, and he had the feeling each time she made a new mouth it would refresh them to begin again. She smiled as she laid down the lipstick.

  “I like it when we can’t unstick, darling.”

  Now she began to make love to him again, and at last she knew by his face that she had relaxed his mind into his body. His face was no longer, as the face nearly always is, the photograph of whatever thought is in the mind. All it registered was the emotion in him. When moved, it shaded from one mood into another. His mouth softened into a smile, as her hand moved on his body, in a natural reflex. When she startled him with a pinch, the nostrils of his strong, courageous nose twitched in protest. When his eyes answered hers, the look in them was not directed by the mind. She managed to loosen him into the forgetfulness that allows the body to breathe and heal itself. For even as she saturated him in her oils, her woman’s instinct working told her that the important thing in all this was not the quieting down of lust, but the fact that it let his mind go away to heal itself of the fatigue, the frustration, the interminable fear of the anonymous letters. She knew now the woman’s real secret, that she must keep always secret. Soon he would be only a child sleeping by her side.

  She only hoped that she was not too late in being a woman.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  When Nicholas awoke at dawn he got up quietly from her side and went into his own bedroom. There was something in him that could not bear the sentimental hang-over of the morning. He wondered why he felt so buoyant and realized that he had enjoyed a dreamless sleep. His fears and worries had gone away. He lay in the cool sheets of his bed and felt happy and calm. What gave him this confidence was the knowledge that his first instinct about Muriel had been right. This was the woman to whom, without any hesitation, he had proposed a few hours after they had met. She had generosity in her blood. And, also, she had an imagination about love. She had been clever enough to know that she had to change from the sophisticated woman into a bold and naked gypsy to find the mood natural to them both.

  Suddenly he thought of Sidonie when she had made herself a bride for him and somehow had glowed like a waxen light before her glass. His mind was very clear now and he knew that Muriel had not the spiritual reach of Sidonie. She could never travel out beyond the light of day. When he lost himself in passion with Muriel he would be drowned in a red ocean of the blood. But that last night with Sidonie he had gone aloft and dreamed in the balcony of the moon. Never with Muriel could he have that sense of holiness that he had with Sidonie. Never could he know with Muriel such a terror of the soul that made his hands helpless to unbind the girdle from Sidonie’s waist. Never would he feel that Muriel’s soul had gone away into that electric light beyond the mountain spires. Never could she make him feel a monk and a vampire at the same time as Sidonie could. Nor ever lying beside her would he have that curious notion he had when lying by Sidonie, that he was like an empty mirror into which her mind projected beautiful pictures and images always in profile so that he wanted to go round the corner of the world to look at them. Never with Muriel would he see the gleam of that delicate and distant light like the ancient glow on the luminous page in the niche on Elder’s stairway. What was that queer remark that Elder had made about Sidonie? Miss Coleman’s beauty is like an Atlantis. You go down in it—and drown. Yes, Elder understood all this, too, this interior world that was his Chinese room, that mysterious world the sense of which settled on you like a cold dew on the skin, like the plasmatic glow on the face of Sarah Fuidge...

  “Your tea, sir!”

  Good Lord, he had fallen into a doze, gone back into that world that was his own terrible secret. Ah, it was good to see the sunshine on this windy morning! Just for a moment he had slipped back into the Chinese room, that chamber of twilight that belonged to the other side of the world. He drank his tea and for the first time in his life wondered if he were two persons, one which belonged to Sidonie, one which belonged to Muriel. Somehow it seemed a sharp solution that cleared up everything in his mind. Psychologists, he knew, had some name that defined this dualism in a human being. But now, with the sun shining in, as if it were a light blown along the clear wind, he felt that he said good-by forever to that mysterious Nicholas Bude who was linked up with Elder and Sidonie. He stretched himself and sat up and slapped his chest. Blast it, he had forgotten his sore hands Never mind, it .was good to feel the ridge of muscle from shoulder to shoulder again. By the Lord, he felt braced and fine this morning, and his body was seasoned by the salt and oil from Muriel. Hum, he wondered if he might go in and say good morning to her. No, he would have a fresh cool bath and spend the day in the open air. He went over to the window, and the wind whetted his appetite. By George, but he wanted breakfast!

  Muriel came down late to breakfast, gave him a slight smile, and took up The Sunday Times. She had a stimulating air about her, and she somehow embodied the spirit of this morning. She was as fresh as if she had climbed out of a lake of spring water and had been dried by the wind and polished by the sunlight. Before he left the room he bent and kissed her on the mouth, and she made a little snatch with her mouth at his, and he went out of the room laughing. Something very important had happened to him. He had just got married.

  He looked through the newspapers over the library fire and then went out for a walk. He felt that Muriel wanted to be left alone. He went over the fields straight into the wind and felt his hands swing at his sides in muscular freedom. He knew that the fresh air would heal them. He had walked about a mile when suddenly he stopped. He had felt the wind streaming through his fingers like cool water. He looked down at his hands. They were hanging open. By God, the hard labor of yesterday must have done that. His hands never hung open. And then suddenly he knew that it was not merely the hard labor in the drain. Some great internal tension had gone. It was that which had kept his hands cracked. And it was Muriel who had undone the psychological knots in his mind.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Nicholas enjoyed his breakfast on Monday morning. There was a glow in the log fire, and he felt a glow within him. He was looking at the morning paper, and Muriel heard him chuckle. A social and political diarist had commented on the fact that the Egyptian to whom Nicholas had refused the loan had complained of the English cold over dinner last Friday. That paragraph would be understood by everybody in Lombard Street and the City. Nicholas had a peculiar feeling that he was enjoying it as an outsider, and from a distance, much as he might laugh at something in an English paper from a veranda in Honolulu. That somehow made him certain that he had done with banking for good and all.

  “What are you laughing at?”

  “Just a bit in the paper.” He saw the car coming around the steps outside. “Oh, here’s Blake! I must shake myself up.” He got up. “Going to get my case.” The mention of the case suddenly reminded her of the letters and she got up and strolled into the drawing room after him. She felt it was all right now, but she wanted to make sure. He came out of the study with the case. Then he looked at her, and something jumped between their eyes.

  He went over to her and said: “Well, until tomorrow. Thank God this will be the last Monday night I’ll sleep at the club for many a long day. I’m going around to Cook’s today to make a few inquiries. The sooner
we get away the better. Let’s just hop a ship without too much choosing and planning.”

  “Haul Haul That’s what I want.” She paused and said almost shyly, “It’s fun being married, isn’t it, Nick?”

  “Yes.” He sighed. “God, I’ve just lost count of this week end!”

  She chuckled and said: “I lost count, too, darling!” He smiled at her and then laughed: “You’re coarse as well as being immoral.” He paused and said with emotion, “God, you’re looking lovely this morning!” That seemed to have jumped out of his heart, and she was touched and suddenly kissed him. She teased him with her body enough to make sure that he would want to come back to her. Then she said: “Nick, you’ve had something on your mind, haven’t you, for some time? I mean, some worry.”

  “Yes.”

  . “Is it all gone now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did—this week end take it away?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, I’m so happy about that.” She added with a little snap: “God, what damn fools we’ve been, all these years. It’s—it’s like being cheated out of ten years of one’s life.”

  “I know. We’ll make up for it now.” She kissed him with a long, searching kiss. He pushed her away. “If you do that again, I’ll put down this case and send the car back and stay here all day.”

  She laughed. “Go on, darling. You must go up. The sooner it’s all cleared up, the better.” She framed his face in her hands. “Oh, it’s so nice to see you now. I couldn’t bear you all these weeks, with that awful kind of absent-minded look you had on your face.”

  “Had I?”

  “Yes...What are you doing?” He laughed. “Gosh, I’ll never wear a blouse like this again in me morning.”

  “Are you mad with me?”

  “Go away, damn you!”

  He went out of the room with a laugh. As she closed her blouse, she felt herself aching all over for him at this very moment. Then she smiled to herself. Therese would take very good care that her husband left her this way every morning. She trembled into the marrow of her being as she remembered last night. Perhaps because she wanted him to master her, she had found herself in an unaccountable mood of sulkiness, and, then when she had resisted, he had got out of control and awakened red hell in her. She had fought, and cried, and used her teeth, and snarled, and had been astonished at the animal she had discovered in herself. Afterwards she nearly wept in remorse, knowing his hands were sore and she had chafed them between her body and the bed. Then she felt that he might have been annoyed and apologized.