CHAPTER 20
1
For three weeks they kept away from each other, neither writing nor making any effort to meet. Angela’s prudence forbade her to write: ‘Litera scripta manet’—a good motto, and one to which it was wise to adhere when dealing with a firebrand like Stephen. Stephen had given her a pretty bad scare, she realized the necessity for caution; still, thinking over that incredible scene, she found the memory rather exciting. Deprived of her anodyne against boredom, she looked upon Ralph with unfriendly eyes; while he, poor, inadequate, irritable devil, with his vague suspicions and his chronic dyspepsia, did little enough to divert his wife—his days, and a fairly large part of his nights as well, were now spent in nagging.
He nagged about Tony who, as ill luck would have it, had decided that the garden was rampant with moles: ‘If you can’t keep that bloody dog in order, he goes. I won’t have him digging craters round my roses!’ Then would come a long list of Tony’s misdeeds from the time he had left the litter. He nagged about the large population of green-fly, deploring the existence of their sexual organs: ‘Nature’s a fool! Fancy procreation being extended to that sort of vermin!’ And then he would grow somewhat coarse as he dwelt on the frequent conjugal excesses of green-fly. But most of all he nagged about Stephen, because this as he knew, irritated his wife: ‘How’s your freak getting on? I haven’t seen her just lately; have you quarrelled or what? Damned good thing if you have. She’s appalling; never saw such a girl in my life; comes swaggering round here with her legs in breeches. Why can’t she ride like an ordinary woman? Good Lord, it’s enough to make any man see red; that sort of thing wants putting down at birth, I’d like to institute state lethal chambers!’
Or perhaps he would take quite another tack and complain that recently he had been neglected. ‘Late for every damned meal—running round with that girl—you don’t care what happens to me any more. A lot you care about my indigestion! I’ve got to eat any old thing these days from cow-hide to bricks. Well, you listen to me, that’s not what I pay for; get that into your head! I pay for good meals to be served on time; on time, do you hear? And I expect my wife to be in her rightful place at my table to see that the omelette’s properly prepared. What’s the matter with you that you can’t go along and make it yourself? When we were first married you always made my omelettes yourself. I won’t eat yellow froth with a few strings of parsley in it—it reminds me of the dog when he’s sick, it’s disgusting! And I won’t go on talking about it either, the next time it happens I’ll sack the cook. Damn it all, you were glad enough of my help when I found you practically starving in New York—but now you’re for ever racing off with that girl. It’s all this damned animal’s fault that you met her!’ He would kick out sideways at the terrified Tony, who had lately been made to stand proxy for Stephen.
But worst of all was it when Ralph started weeping, because, as he said, his wife did not love him any more, and because, as he did not always say, he felt ill with his painful, chronic dyspepsia. One day he must make feeble love through his tears: ‘Angela, come here—put your arms around me—come and sit on my knee the way you used to.’ His wet eyes looked dejected yet rather greedy: ‘Put your arms around me, as though you cared—’ He was always insistent when most ineffectual.
That night he appeared in his best silk pyjamas—the pink ones that made his complexion look sallow. He climbed into bed with the sly expression that Angela hated—it was so pornographic. ‘Well, old girl, don’t forget that you’ve got a man about the house; you haven’t forgotten it, have you?’ After which followed one or two flaccid embraces together with much arrogant masculine bragging; and Angela, sighing as she lay and endured, quite suddenly thought of Stephen.
2
Pacing restlessly up and down her bedroom, Stephen would be thinking of Angela Crossby—haunted, tormented by Angela’s words that day in the garden: ‘Could you marry me, Stephen?’ and then by those other pitiless words: ‘Can I help it if you’re—what you obviously are?’
She would think with a kind of despair: ‘What am I in God’s name—some kind of abomination?’ And this thought would fill her with very great anguish, because, loving much, her love seemed to her sacred. She could not endure that the slur of those words should come anywhere near her love. So now night after night she must pace up and down, beating her mind against a blind problem, beating her spirit against a blank wall—the impregnable wall of non-comprehension: ‘Why am I as I am—and what am I?’ Her mind would recoil while her spirit grew faint. A great darkness would seem to descend on her spirit—there would be no light wherewith to lighten that darkness.