"There's no God," he said.
He dashed his head against the wall of his cell.
XIX
Henry Harper was now in a universe of infinite complexity. The genie who lived in the wonderful lamp in his brain had taught him already that he knew nothing about whole stellar spaces in this strange cosmos that he, the thing he called himself, inhabited. Moreover, it presented many problems. Of these the most instant and pressing was Cora.
It was no use mincing the matter: Cora and he were not getting on. There was no bond of sympathy between them. His work and all that went with it were far more to him than the woman he had married. And when this fact came home to her, she began to resent it in a contemptuous way. It made it more difficult for both that his work only appealed to her in one aspect, and that the one which least appealed to him. The hard and continuous labor it involved meant nothing to her; the hopes and the fears of an awakening artistic sense were things beyond her power to grasp; if his work had not a definite commercial value, if it could not be rendered in pounds and shillings, it was a waste of time and worse than meaningless. Everything apart from that was a closed book as far as she was concerned. She began to despise his timidity and his ignorance, and the time soon came when she did not hesitate to sneer at him before her friends.
For one thing, she was bitterly resentful. It was useless to disguise that he was not merely indifferent to her physical charms, he positively disliked and even dreaded that aspect of their life together. Within a very short time after their marriage, he made the discovery that she drank.
Even before that knowledge came he had discerned something unwholesome about her. The blackened eyebrows, the rouged cheeks, the dyed hair, the overfine presence, the stealthy, cloying color of scent she exuded, the coarse mouth, the apathetic eyes, had always been things that he dared not let his mind rest upon in detail even before he had taken them unto himself. And now that he had done so at the call of duty, and with even that to sustain him, he foresaw that he must come to dislike them more and more. It hardly needed a pervading reek of brandy in her bedroom to read the future.
Unluckily for Cora, the monotony of a "straight" life with such a humdrum young man was more than she could stand for any length of time. The old fatal habit was soon upon her again. Years of yielding had weakened her will; and now she was beginning to grow contemptuous of her husband—perhaps as a requital of his apathy towards her—she began to assume a defiant carelessness, first of manner and then of conduct.
Disaster was foreshadowed by several quarrels. None of these were serious, but they showed the inevitable end towards which matters had begun to drift. Henry Harper was not the sort of man with whom it was easy to quarrel; he had no aptitude for a form of reflex action quite alien to his nature. All the same, there were times when he was almost tempted to defend himself from Cora's perpetual sneers at his dullness, not only in her company, which was bad enough, but in that of her friends, which was worse.