Grey Wethers: A Romantic Novel

by V. Sackville-West

Mrs. Quince peeped in through the door.

“Ah, that’s good,” she said in a relieved tone; “I wasn’t easy so long as I thought Mrs. Calladine was with that scamp,” and she retired.

“Even the servants, you see, Clare, are concerned for you.”

“Mrs. Quince, far from being concerned,” Clare said, returning briefly to a consciousness of Calladine and of the house that held her, “is full of delight.”

“Clare, these bitter words from you! you are changed indeed, or am I seeing you as you are for the first time? I begin to look back at these four months as at a long delusion; I am utterly bewildered. You are withdrawn to an unbelievable distance from me; I feel it, yet I cannot say what has taken place. This morning, we were close to one another; we were, as it seemed, enclosed by our little room, leisured, snug, sheltered; now, I am striving to reach you, and am held off.” His words beat without meaning against Clare’s isolation; she could not emerge at all from the tumult of the terrible scene she had endured from Olver. She looked, indeed, at Calladine, intently, as though she were trying to bring herself back to the importance of his world, but her eyes were empty.

The day dragged away; Calladine continued to clamour fitfully. He could not leave her alone, and, though she clearly suffered, he, perverse, must torment her. By adding to her pain, he added to his own, but could not desist. She answered him very little; a negative, an affirmative now and then, was all he could get from her; for her part, all that she wished was that his voice might cease, so that she might have a lull, a silence, alone with her own mind. Yet it seemed to her that she had, indeed, a silence at the core of her being, still and inviolate against his ineffectual clamour, like the stillness in the heart of a cyclone, where birds poise and sing. At this core, this kernel, this patch of peace, she dwelt apart; Lovel was there, and so was Olver, Olver with the urgent hands and fanatical eyes, passing from Lovel to her and from her to Lovel, almost crushing them up against one another by the force of his urgency, Olver’s determination was like a menace, becoming almost malevolent by virtue of its very violence. He overwhelmed, he terrified her; she had nothing but weak refusal; she had tried to push him away with hands that had no strength in them. She had covered her eyes, but he had forced away her hands; she had shut her ears, but he had screamed past her defences. It was easy to remain deaf to Calladine’s whining; it had been impossible to shut out the ferocity of Olver’s attack. And yet, in spite of the din, she was aware of that core of silence, in which she and Lovel were, with Olver rushing between.

She and Calladine, Lovel and Daisy, there they were, the four of them, all separate; and Olver, like a firebrand, a trail of fire, working between them. They might have had some control, the four, but for this crazy creature, obsessed by the one idea, not to be reasoned with. He was the incalculable element; he made the others helpless, taking their intentions out of their hands and throwing them away.

The danger of Olver,—what if he should see Calladine? What if he should irrupt into the room and shout irreparable words before she had time to stop him? The danger of Olver,—what had he said to Lovel? what to Lovel’s wife? But Calladine and Lovel’s wife alike remained insignificant; she and Lovel were the two full of meaning, shut up with the wild, charging Olver in their core of silence.

Vaguely somewhere, she was sorry for Calladine, but he was insignificant; she could not pause to consider him; where she and Lovel came together, he faded into that poor wisp drained of blood, that he had dwindled to on the evening of the circus fire, when she and Lovel had stood together on the embankment. They shed him; he slipped off, and only his noise reached them intermittently, scarcely troublesome.