In the Wilderness

by Robert Hichens

In saying that he acknowledged the power she had already obtained over him, a power from which he did not feel sure that he could break away, although he was acutely aware of it and sometimes almost bitterly resented it. Mrs. Clarke knew very well that most men can only be held when they do not know that they are held, but Dion, in his present condition, was not like any other man she had known. More than once in the earliest stages of their intimacy she had had really to fight to keep him near her, and so he knew how arbitrary she could be when her nature was roused.

Sometimes he hated her with intensity, for she had set herself to destroy the fabric of his spirit, which not even Rosamund had been able entirely to destroy by her desertion of him. Sometimes he felt a sort of ugly love of her, because she was the agent through whom he was learning to get rid of all that Rosamund had most prized in him. It was as if he called out to her, “Help me to pull down, to tear down, all that I built up in the long years till not one stone is left upon another. What I built up was despised and rejected. I won’t look upon it any more. I’ll raze it to the ground. But I can’t do that alone. Come, you, and help me.” And she came and she helped in the work of destruction, and in an ugly, horrible way he loved her for it sometimes, as a criminal might love an assistant in his crime.

But from such a type of love there are terrible reactions. During these reactions Dion had treated Cynthia Clarke abominably sometimes, showing the hatred which alternated with his ugly love, if love it could properly be called. He hated her in such moments for the fierce lure she had for the senses, a lure which he felt more and more strongly as he left farther behind him the old life of sane enjoyments and of the wisdom which walks with restraint; he hated her for the perversity which he was increasingly conscious of as he came to know her more intimately; he hated her because he had so much loved the woman who would not make a friend of her; he hated her because he knew that she was drawing him into a path which led into the center of a maze, the maze of hypocrisy.

Hitherto Dion had been essentially honest and truthful, what men call “open and above-board.” He had walked clear-eyed in the light; he had had nothing dirty to hide; what his relations with others had seemed to be that they had actually been. But since that first night in the pavilion Cynthia Clarke had taught him very thoroughly the hypocrisy a man owes to the woman with whom he has a secret liaison.

He still believed that till that night she had been what the world calls “a straight woman.” She did not ape a rigid morality for once betrayed by passion, or pretend to any religious scruples, or show any fears of an eventual punishment held in reserve for all sinners by an implacable Power; she did not, when Dion was brutal to her, ever reproach him with having made of her a wicked or even a light woman. But she made him feel by innumerable hints and subtleties that for him she had exchanged a safe life for a life that was beset with danger, the smiled-on life of a not too conventional virtue for something very different. She seemed sometimes uneasy in her love, as if such a love were an error new to her experience.

Jimmy was her chief weapon against Dion’s natural sincerity. Dion realized that she was passionately attached to her boy, and that she would make almost any sacrifice rather than lose his respect and affection. Nevertheless, she was ready to take great risks. The risks she was not prepared to take were the smaller risks. And in connexion with them her call for hypocrisy was incessant. If Dion ever tried to resist her demands for small lies and petty deceptions, she would look at him, and say huskily:

“I have to do these things now because of Jimmy. No one must ever have the least suspicion of what we are to each other, or some day Jimmy might get to know of it. It isn’t my husband I’m afraid of, it’s Jimmy.”

If Dion had been by nature a suspicious man, or if he had had a wider experience with women, Mrs. Clarke’s remarkable ingenuity in hypocrisy would almost certainly have suggested to him that she was no novice in the life of deception. Her appearance of frankness, even of bluntness, was admirable. To every one she presented herself as a woman of strong will and unconventional temperament who took her own way openly, having nothing to conceal, and therefore nothing to fear. She made a feature of her friendship with the tragic Englishman; she even dwelt upon it and paraded it for the pretense of blunt and Platonic friendship was the cloud with which she concealed the fire of their illicit relation. The trip on the “Leyla” to Brusa had tortured Dion. Since the episode in the pavilion a more refined torment had been his. Mrs. Clarke had not allowed him to escape from the social ties which were so hateful to him. She had made him understand that he must go among her acquaintances now and then, that he must take a certain part in the summer life of Therapia and Buyukderer, that the trip to Brusa had been only a beginning. More than once he had tried to break away, but he had not succeeded in his effort. Her will had been too strong for his, not merely because she did not fear at moments to be fierce and determined, but because behind her fierceness and determination was an unuttered plea which his not dead chivalry heard; “For you I have become what I was falsely accused of being in London.” He remembered the wonderful fight she had made then; often her look and manner, when they were alone together, implied, “I couldn’t make such a fight now.” She never said that, but she made him float in an atmosphere of that suggestion.

He believed that she loved him. Sometimes he compared her love with the affection which Rosamund had given him, and then it seemed to his not very experienced heart that perhaps intense love can only show itself by something akin to degradation, by enticements which a genuinely pure nature could never descend to, by perversities which the grand simplicity and wholesomeness of goodness would certainly abhor. Then a distortion of love presented itself to his tragic investigation as the only love that was real, and good and evil lost for him their true significance. He had said to himself, “Let the spirit die that the body may live.” He had wished, he still wished, to pull down. He had a sort of demented desire for ruins and dust. But he longed for action, on the grand scale. Small secrecies, trickeries, tiptoeing through the maze—all these things revolted that part of his nature which was, perhaps, unchangeable. They seemed to him unmanly. In his present condition he could quite easily have lain down in the sink of Pera’s iniquity, careless whether any one knew; but it was horribly difficult to him to dine with the Ingletons and Vane at the Villa Hafiz, to say “Good night” to Mrs. Clarke before them, to go away, leaving them in the villa, and then, very late, to sneak back, with a key, to the garden gate, when all the servants were in bed, and to creep up, like a thief, to the pavilion. Some men would have enjoyed all the small deceptions, would have thought them good fun, would have found that they added a sharp zest to the pursuit of a woman. Dion loathed them.

And now he was confronted with something he was going to loathe far more, something which would call for more sustained and elaborate deception than any he had practised yet. He feared the eyes of an English boy more than he feared the eyes of the diplomats and the cosmopolitans of varying types who were gathered on the Bosporus during the months of heat. He detested the idea of playing a part to a boy. How could a mother lay plots to deceive her son? And yet Mrs. Clarke adored Jimmy.