“You see,” he said, “how can I ask for love, if I don’t feel any love in myself? You know I have a real regard for you — ”
“How can you feel any love, when you never feel anything?” she said.
“That is true,” he replied.
And she waited for what next.
“And how can I marry?” he said. “I am a failure even at making money. I can’t ask my mother for money.”
She sighed deeply.
“Then don’t bother yet about marrying,” she said. “Only love me a little. Won’t you?”
He gave a short laugh.
“It sounds so atrocious, to say it is hard to begin,” he said.
She sighed again. He was so stiff to move.
“Shall we sit down a minute?” she said. And then, as they sat on the hay, she added: “May I touch you? Do you mind?”
“Yes, I mind. But do as you wish,” he replied, with that mixture of shyness and queer candour which made him a little ridiculous, as he knew quite well. But in his heart there was almost murder.
She touched his black, always tidy, hair, with her fingers.
“I suppose I shall rebel one day,” he said again suddenly.
They sat some time, till it grew chilly. And he held her hand fast, but he never put his arms round her. At last she rose, and went indoors, saying good-night.
The next day, as Cecilia lay stunned and angry on the roof, taking her sun-bath, and becoming hot and fierce with sunshine, suddenly she started. A terror seized her in spite of herself. It was the voice.
“Caro, caro, tu non l’hai visto!” it was murmuring away, in a language Cecilia did not understand. She lay and writhed her limbs in the sun, listening intently to words she could not follow. Softly, whisperingly, with infinite caressiveness and yet with that subtle, insidious arrogance under its velvet, came the voice, murmuring in Italian: “Bravo, si, molto bravo, poverino, ma uomo come te non sarà mai, mai, mai!” Oh, especially in Italian Cecilia heard the poisonous charm of the voice, so caressive, so soft and flexible, yet so utterly egoistic. She hated it with intensity as it sighed and whispered out of nowhere. Why, why should it be so delicate, so subtle and flexible and beautifully controlled, when she herself was so clumsy? Oh, poor Cecilia, she writhed in the afternoon sun, knowing her own clownish clumsiness and lack of suavity, in comparison.
“No, Robert dear, you will never be the man your father was, though you have some of his looks. He was a marvellous lover, soft as a flower yet piercing as a humming-bird. Cara, cara mia bellissima, ti ho aspettato come l’agonissante aspetta la morte, morte deliziosa, quasi quasi troppo deliziosa per una mera anima humana. He gave himself to a woman as he gave himself to God. Mauro! Mauro! How you loved me! How you loved me!”
The voice ceased in reverie, and Cecilia knew what she had guessed before — that Robert was not the son of her Uncle Ronald, but of some Italian.
“I am disappointed in you, Robert. There is no poignancy in you. Your father was a Jesuit, but he was the most perfect and poignant lover in the world. You are a Jesuit like a fish in a tank. And that Ciss of yours is the cat fishing for you. It is less edifying even than poor Henry.”
Cecilia suddenly bent her mouth down to the tube, and said in a deep voice:
“Leave Robert alone! Don’t kill him as well.”
There was dead silence in the hot July afternoon that was lowering for thunder. Cecilia lay prostrate, her heart beating in great thumps. She was listening as if her whole soul were an ear. At last she caught the whisper:
“Did someone speak?”
She leaned again to the mouth of the tube:
“Don’t kill Robert as you killed me,” she said, with slow enunciation, and a deep but small voice.
“Ah!” came the sharp little cry. “Who is that speaking?”
“Henry,” said the deep voice.
There was dead silence. Poor Cecilia lay with all the use gone out of her. And there was dead silence. Till at last came the whisper:
“I didn’t kill Henry. No, no! No, no! Henry, surely you can’t blame me! I loved you, dearest; I only wanted to help you.”
“You killed me!” came the deep, artificial, accusing voice. “Now let Robert live. Let him go! Let him marry!”
There was a pause.
“How very, very awful!” mused the whispering voice. “Is it possible, Henry, you are a spirit, and you condemn me?”
“Yes, I condemn you!”
Cecilia felt all the pent-up rage going down that rain-pipe. At the same time, she almost laughed. It was awful.
She lay and listened and listened. No sound! As if time had ceased, she lay inert in the weakening sun, till she heard a far-off rumble of thunder. She sat up. The sky was yellowing. Quickly she dressed herself, went down, and out to the corner of the stables.
“Aunt Pauline!” she called discreetly. “Did you hear thunder?”
“Yes. I am going in. Don’t wait,” came a feeble voice.
Cecilia retired, and from the loft watched, spying, as the figure of the lovely lady, wrapped in a lovely wrap of old blue silk, went rather totteringly to the house.
The sky gradually darkened. Cecilia hastened in with the rugs. Then the storm broke. Aunt Pauline did not appear to tea. She found the thunder trying. Robert also did not arrive till after tea, in the pouring rain. Cecilia went down the covered passage to her own house, and dressed carefully for dinner, putting some white columbines at her breast.
The drawing-room was lit with a softly-shaded lamp. Robert, dressed, was waiting, listening to the rain. He too seemed strangely crackling and on edge. Cecilia came in, with the white flowers nodding at her dusky breast. Robert was watching her curiously, a new look on his face. Cecilia went to the bookshelves near the door, and was peering for something, listening acutely. She heard a rustle, then the door softly opening. And as it opened, Ciss suddenly switched on the strong electric light by the door.
Her aunt, in a dress of black lace over ivory colour, stood in the doorway. Her face was made up, but haggard with a look of unspeakable irritability, as if years of suppressed exasperation and dislike of her fellow-men had suddenly crumpled her into an old witch.
“Oh, aunt!” cried Cecilia.
“Why, mother, you’re a little old lady!” came the astounded voice of Robert — like an astonished boy, as if it were a joke.
“Have you only just found it out?” snapped the old woman venomously.
“Yes! Why, I thought — ” his voice tailed out in misgiving.
The haggard, old Pauline, in a frenzy of exasperation, said:
“Aren’t we going down?”
She had not even noticed the excess of light, a thing she shunned. And she went downstairs almost tottering.
At table she sat with her face like a crumpled mask of unspeakable irritability. She looked old, very old, and like a witch. Robert and Cecilia fetched furtive glances at her. And Ciss, watching Robert, saw that he was so astonished and repelled by his mother’s looks that he was another man.
“What kind of a drive home did you have?” snapped Pauline, with an almost gibbering irritability.
“It rained, of course,” he said.
“How clever of you to have found that out!” said his mother, with the grisly grin of malice that had succeeded her arch smile.
“I don’t understand,” he said, with quiet suavity.
“It’s apparent,” said his mother, rapidly and sloppily eating her food.
She rushed through the meal like a crazy dog, to the utter consternation of the servant. And the moment it was over she darted in a queer, crab-like way upstairs. Robert and Cecilia followed her, thunderstruck, like two conspirators.
“You pour the coffee. I loathe it! I’m going. Good-night!” said the old woman, in a succession of sharp shots. And she scrambled out of the room.
There was a dead silence. At last he said:
“I’m afraid mother isn’t well. I must persuade her to see a doctor.”
“Yes,” said Cecilia.
The evening passed in silence. Robert and Ciss stayed on in the drawing-room, having lit a fire. Outside was cold rain. Each pretended to read. They did not want to separate. The evening passed with ominous mysteriousness, yet quickly.
At about ten o’clock the door suddenly opened, and Pauline appeared, in a blue wrap. She shut the door behind her, and came to the fire. Then she looked at the two young people in hate, real hate.
“You two had better get married quickly,” she said, in an ugly voice. “It would look more decent; such a passionate pair of lovers!”
Robert looked up at her quietly.
“I thought you believed that cousins should not marry, mother,” he said.
“I do. But you’re not cousins. Your father was an Italian priest.” Pauline held her daintily-slippered foot to the fire, in an old coquettish gesture. Her body tried to repeat all the old graceful gestures. But the nerve had snapped, so it was a rather dreadful caricature.
“Is that really true, mother?” he asked.
“True! What do you think? He was a distinguished man, or he wouldn’t have been my lover. He was far too distinguished a man to have had you for a son. But that joy fell to me.”
“How unfortunate all round,” he said slowly.
“Unfortunate for you? You were lucky. It was my misfortune,” she said acidly to him.
She was really a dreadful sight, like a piece of lovely Venetian glass that has been dropped and gathered up again in horrible, sharp-edged fragments.
Suddenly she left the room again.
For a week it went on. She did not recover. It was as if every nerve in her body had suddenly started screaming in an insanity of discordance. The doctor came, and gave her sedatives, for she never slept. Without drugs she never slept at all, only paced back and forth in her room, looking hideous and evil, reeking with malevolence. She could not bear to see either her son or her niece. Only when either of them came she asked, in pure malice:
“Well! When’s the wedding? Have you celebrated the nuptials yet?”
At first Cecilia was stunned by what she had done. She realised vaguely that her aunt, once a definite thrust of condemnation had penetrated her beautiful armour, had just collapsed, squirming, inside her shell. It was too terrible. Ciss was almost terrified into repentance. Then she thought: “This is what she always was. Now let her live the rest of her days in her true colours.”
But Pauline would not live long. She was literally shrivelling away. She kept her room, and saw no one. She had her mirrors taken away.
Robert and Cecilia sat a good deal together. The jeering of the mad Pauline had not driven them apart, as she had hoped. But Cecilia dared not confess to him what she had done.
“Do you think your mother ever loved anybody?” Ciss asked him tentatively, rather wistfully, one evening.
He looked at her fixedly.
“Herself!” he said at last.
“She didn’t even love herself,” said Ciss. “It was something else. What was it?” She lifted a troubled, utterly puzzled face to him.
“Power,” he said curtly.
“But what power?” she asked. “I don’t understand.”
“Power to feed on other lives,” he said bitterly. “She was beautiful, and she fed on life. She has fed on me as she fed on Henry. She put a sucker into one’s soul, and sucked up one’s essential life.”
“And don’t you forgive her?”
“No.”
“Poor Aunt Pauline!”
But even Ciss did not mean it. She was only aghast.
“I know I’ve got a heart,” he said, passionately striking his breast. “But it’s almost sucked dry. I know I’ve got a soul, somewhere. But it’s gnawed bare. I hate people who want power over others.”
Ciss was silent. What was there to say?
And two days later Pauline was found dead in her bed, having taken too much veronal, for her heart was weakened.
From the grave even she hit back at her son and her niece. She left Robert the noble sum of one thousand pounds, and Ciss one hundred. All the rest, with the nucleus of her valuable antiques, went to form the “Pauline Attenborough Museum”.
TWO BLUE BIRDS
There was a woman who loved her husband, but she could not live with him. The husband, on his side, was sincerely attached to his wife, yet he could not live with her. They were both under forty, both handsome and both attractive. They had the most sincere regard for one another, and felt, in some odd way, eternally married to one another. They knew one another more intimately than they knew anybody else, they felt more known to one another than to any other person.
Yet they could not live together. Usually, they kept a thousand miles apart, geographically. But when he sat in the greyness of England, at the back of his mind, with a certain grim fidelity, he was aware of his wife, her strange yearning to be loyal and faithful, having her gallant affairs away in the sun, in the south. And she, as she drank her cocktail on the terrace over the sea, and turned her grey, sardonic eyes on the heavy dark face of her admirer, whom she really liked quite a lot, she was actually preoccupied with the clear-cut features of her handsome young husband, thinking of how he would be asking his secretary to do something for him, asking in that good-natured, confident voice of a man who knows that his request will be only too gladly fulfilled.
The secretary, of course, adored him. She was very competent, quite young, and quite good-looking. She adored him. But then all his servants always did, particularly his women-servants. His men-servants were likely to swindle him.
When a man has an adoring secretary, and you are the man’s wife, what are you to do? Not that there was anything ‘wrong’ — if you know what I mean! — between them. Nothing you could call adultery, to come down to brass tacks. No, no! They were just the young master and his secretary. He dictated to her, she slaved for him and adored him, and the whole thing went on wheels.
He didn’t ‘adore’ her. A man doesn’t need to adore his secretary. But he depended on her. “I simply rely on Miss Wrexall.” Whereas he could never rely on his wife. The one thing he knew finally about her was that she didn’t intend to be relied on.
So they remained friends, in the awful unspoken intimacy of the once-married. Usually each year they went away together for a holiday, and, if they had not been man and wife, they would have found a great deal of fun and stimulation in one another. The fact that they were married, had been married for the last dozen years, and couldn’t live together for the last three or four, spoilt them for one another. Each had a private feeling of bitterness about the other.
However, they were awfully kind. He was the soul of generosity, and held her in real tender esteem, no matter how many gallant affairs she had. Her gallant affairs were part of her modern necessity. “After all, I’ve got to live. I can’t turn into a pillar of salt in five minutes just because you and I can’t live together! It takes years for a woman like me to turn into a pillar of salt. At least I hope so!”
“Quite!” he replied. “Quite! By all means put them in pickle, make pickled cucumbers of them, before you crystallise out. That’s my advice.”
He was like that: so awfully clever and enigmatic. She could more or less fathom the idea of the pickled cucumbers, but the ‘crystallising out’ — what did that signify?
And did he mean to suggest that he himself had been well pickled and that further immersion was for him unnecessary, would spoil his flavour? Was that what he meant? And herself, was she the brine and the vale of tears?
You never knew how catty a man was being, when he was really clever and enigmatic, withal a bit whimsical. He was adorably whimsical, with a twist of his flexible, vain mouth, that had a long upper lip, so fraught with vanity! But then a handsome, clear-cut, histrionic young man like that, how could he help being vain? The women made him so.
Ah, the women! How nice men would be if there were no other women!
And how nice t
he women would be if there were no other men! That’s the best of a secretary. She may have a husband, but a husband is the mere shred of a man, compared to a boss, a chief, a man who dictates to you and whose words you faithfully write down and then transcribe. Imagine a wife writing down anything her husband said to her! But a secretary! Every and and but of his she preserves for ever. What are candied violets in comparison!
Now it is all very well having gallant affairs under the southern sun, when you know there is a husband whom you adore dictating to a secretary whom you are too scornful to hate yet whom you rather despise, though you allow she has her good points, away north in the place you ought to regard as home. A gallant affair isn’t much good when you’ve got a bit of grit in your eye. Or something at the back of your mind.
What’s to be done? The husband, of course, did not send his wife away.
“You’ve got your secretary and your work,” she said. “There’s no room for me.”
“There’s a bedroom and a sitting-room exclusively for you,” he replied. “And a garden and half a motor-car. But please yourself entirely. Do what gives you most pleasure.”
“In that case,” she said, “I’ll just go south for the winter.”
“Yes, do!” he said. “You always enjoy it.”
“I always do,” she replied.
They parted with a certain relentlessness that had a touch of wistful sentiment behind it. Off she went to her gallant affairs, that were like the curate’s egg, palatable in parts. And he settled down to work. He said he hated working, but he never did anything else. Ten or eleven hours a day. That’s what it is to be your own master!
So the winter wore away, and it was spring, when the swallows homeward fly, or northward, in this case. This winter, one of a series similar, had been rather hard to get through. The bit of grit in the gallant lady’s eye had worked deeper in the more she blinked. Dark faces might be dark, and icy cocktails might lend a glow; she blinked her hardest to blink that bit of grit away, without success. Under the spicy balls of the mimosa she thought of that husband of hers in his library, and of that neat, competent but common little secretary of his, for ever taking down what he said!
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 684