Grey Wethers: A Romantic Novel

by V. Sackville-West

Daisy herself was less unreal than Calladine; Daisy knew suffering too, Clare supposed; in a clumsy, common way she knew it; blundering, but human; yes, she could be sorry for the other woman.

But they must be sacrificed, the two, Calladine and Daisy, if matters came to a head; sacrificed to the blazing reality of herself and Lovel.

Would Olver come again? Would he leave her alone now? Would he give her a chance to forget the words he had spoken? some of them remained, rang in her head, brassy, like beaten gongs; fell on her like big sparks from an anvil, burning. It had been a strange experience, to hear Olver voice the passion that had upreared itself, always mute, in Lovel.

Olver came again. He came like an avenging angel, inspired, the crazed creature, by the urgency of his message. Like a reproachful angel he came to rebuke her, grotesquely disguised in his scarecrow travesty; the beauty of his selflessness shone through the ramshackle of his appearance. She scarcely knew whether to find him pathetic or alarming; she wanted to pity, she could only be disturbed; he disturbed her to the darkest places of her soul. The fixity of his idea, the strength of his purpose, his devotion, his anger, raised his simplicity to the plane of nobleness. She could not answer him; she was abashed before him.

She was afraid of him, his image pursued her, his upraised hand denouncing her, his eyes and tongue pouring scorn upon her. At moments he seemed like fate itself, like a thing she could not escape from. She never knew at what hour of the day he would come, so all day, sometimes for two or three days on end, she waited, dreading and longing for his coming. She could have refused to see him, but had not the strength; but when she must crush Calladine’s protests, then she had strength in plenty.

The snow lay deeper than ever, after another heavy fall, upon the Downs, but although still a prisoner her restlessness had left her: the life she had wanted came now to her from without. Olver brought that life; he brought tumult, anguish, but it was life that he brought, besieging her. And although he was not Lovel’s envoy, still it was straight from Lovel that he came. His eyes, as they flamed on Clare, an hour earlier had been filled with Lovel; she could fancy Lovel’s image still lingering in them. And after he had left her, it was to Lovel’s presence that he would return; he would hear Lovel’s voice and see Lovel’s hands, that so haunted her. Once she broke her silence to ask about Lovel, “What does he do, these days of snow? does he get out? stay at home?” and Olver answered, “To-day he has been twisting new snares, and last night he brought home a lamb that still lies by our fire.”

She knew that an end must come; beleaguered, she knew that. She had pushed life away, but it had followed her, even into her retreat. It was useless; Calladine was not life; his need of her had not been life. He was a shadow, a man of pretence, sufficient to himself, with his own pretences for company. It was only the true solitaries, the really lonely people, like Lovel, who had absolute need of their chosen loves. The strong, clamping loves, that fastened on to one another, to lose their hold only when they lost their hold on life; the unalterable, ordained loves. She could not justify the argument; her selfishness towards Calladine remained unjustified. But she knew that that would not weigh with her; she and Lovel would reach one another when the day came, even through a stone wall.

Still she could not justify it. She tried to, perfunctorily. She sat frowning, and saying the words over to herself. Selfishness, duty. They remained mere words; she could not feel them in her blood, as she felt her need for Lovel and Lovel’s need for her; they were words pitted against instinct. Was it love, that need? Was it no more than that ordinary miracle, love? She thought that it was more. They had the Downs as a bond between them; the Downs, and all nature, of which Lovel seemed the spirit, the incarnation. He was the darkness of the Downs, their threat, their solitude, their intractability; she was their light, their windiness, their sunlit flanks, their springiness of turf. United, they formed a whole. There was an essential significance in Lovel, as there was an essential insignificance in Calladine.

Olver seemed to know these things; he had an untutored insight. Calladine seemed to know them too, but that was less surprising; with his subtle, lyrical mind he might well be expected to apprehend, and apprehending, to drape in wordiness; to give a name; to illuminate blind impulse by giving a name. Poor Calladine; she watched him, detached, as he rambled from discovery to definition, tormenting himself by the beauty of his own phrasing. At moments he viewed them, herself and Lovel, as a spectator, losing himself in the romanticism he wove around them; recalled to the fact that it was his own wife of whom he spoke, he relapsed into the gloom and terror of his pain. For he lived in terror, impotent terror. And Clare watched him, living herself in her hours with Olver and in her consciousness of Lovel.

There was the little round mirror she had given to Olver. He always brought it with him; he told her, chuckling, and tapping its bright surface with his finger, that he could see her in it even when she was not present. She did not believe this, but still she half believed it. “Look into it now,” he said, thrusting it under her eyes, “and you will see Nicholas.” She shrank back, afraid; he could not persuade her to look into it, he could not even deride her into looking into it. “You don’t believe me, yet you won’t look,” he said, “but if you don’t believe me, why then won’t you look?” He was for ever daring her to look into it, to find the image of Nicholas. She would not; she did not believe in the magical properties of the mirror, yet nothing would induce her to glance into its queer convexity. “I watched the circus in this, the night Nicholas took you out of the tent,” he said, and she wondered whether he knew how bound to Lovel she had felt herself that night; “I watched Nicholas’ wedding in this; I looked in this at him and Daisy sitting in the kitchen. Look into it now,” he said, offering it to her again: “maybe you’ll see Daisy nursing her baby; maybe you’ll see Nicholas twisting snares; maybe you’ll see him riding up on White Horse Hill, alone, in the snow.”