“You want a virgin saint to live with you, not a woman.”
Now she stopped, aghast at herself, horrified by the pain and disgust she had brought into his eyes. He could hardly speak, and jerked out:
“I didn’t know. . . . I didn’t know I’d done all that to you, Ann. I’m so terribly sorry. I seem to make a mess of things always.”
She had turned her back on him, and he knew that she was weeping. He had no desire to console her. He wished only to get away. Neither could break the heavy silence that followed the storm. He left her, though he could hardly move, so acute was his physical exhaustion. Groping his way along the wall of the mews, he counted the doors until he came to Kilner’s. The rooms were empty. He flung himself on the bed and lay chilled and racked, thinking only of Ann weeping, unmoved, detached, feeling neither sorrow nor hate. She had robbed him of all capacity of emotion, all power of thought. The storm had been so unlocked for. Rita was so remote from them. Why should Rita and anything she said or did have let loose upon them so violent a convulsion?
Ann weeping, Ann silent, so appallingly silent. Her silence weighed on him more than her words. Desire grew in him slowly and painfully, a desire to understand. He remembered exactly what he had said to her, and the words seemed meaningless. Her silence had killed them. They were genuine as he spoke them. Speaking them, he had surmounted his disgust and horror at her rage. Yet there was an even more burning fury in her silence. She was weeping; Ann, the gay little comrade, was weeping, and her tears had moved him not at all.
He began to think again, and to think with a new power. His body was cold and aching. His mind seemed to leave it. His mind played about Ann, the figure of Ann, weeping in silence. It played maliciously about her, stripped her, let down her hair, revealed her nakedly as woman, short-legged, wide-hipped, small-breasted, not so unlike a boy save for the excrescences and distortions created by her physical functions. That was too horrible. With an effort of will he brushed it aside, wrenched away from its fascination. Her individuality was restored to her and a little warmth crept into his vision of her. He was not sensible of her charm, and he was free of all lover’s memory of her attraction. His mind went probing into hers, saw how it delighted in impressions, but could make no store of them; how her delight had been increased by love and how she had used her love to aggravate her sensibility to the point of intoxication; how the fierce hunger for intoxication had desired to feed on him, and how her love for him had made her desire to bring him to the same condition. He saw her innocence; how free she was of deliberate purpose and set greed; how animal and yet how little sensual; and how she was snared in her own ignorance of love and its ways. Trapped she was and baffled. She could have been so happy with a mate as ignorant as herself, as willing to be snared. They could so easily have perished together, and sunk into resignation, she and such a mate. And inexorable nature had made her fruitful, to bring forth in her rage, when she would be spent with tearing at the meshes that had caught her. She would go on tearing, tearing, and he could spare her nothing. His strength could not sustain her. She desired only his weakness, to have him with her, caught and struggling; to have him by her side, spent and broken, to take comfort in the child.
He seemed to himself to be so near this fate, so nearly caught, that he cried out:
“I will not! I will not!”
For a moment the words startled him and shook him out of his stupor. Then his agony came back with a redoubled fury, and in the desperate hope of fighting it back he let words come tumbling out, hurling them from him: