“I suppose you’ll tell me it serves me right,” she said, “but my head’s aching fit to split. I wouldn’t have come down, but I’ve run out of brandy; don’t preach, dear, but just be good and give me a B. and S.”
For a week or so after the dinner with West, Marian’s life was very quiet outwardly. Inwardly she lived tossed this way and that by a turmoil of contrary desires. She realized with terror that she was losing grip upon herself; that her physical emotions were daily growing more and more imperious. When she had sundered herself from her old and had plunged into this new life, she had fully counted on using her bodily gifts to procure her the ends for which her soul thirsted. But this life was different to what she had expected it to be, and now her mental desires were rapidly growing weaker, and the lust of mere pleasure and excitement was usurping their place.
Her visit to Maddison at Rottingdean and her friendship with West had stayed for a while this degeneration, and now she had come to look upon the latter as the one bulwark remaining between her and a life of promiscuous debauchery.
The time, too, was approaching for her to go down to Rottingdean again, and the thought of seeing Maddison was very distasteful. His letters came regularly, full of love and devotion, telling how much he missed her, how often he thought of her, how difficult he found it to stick to his work, how dissatisfied he was with the result, and how he counted the hours to the day when he should see her again. She wrote at less length and less frequently than he did, and each time the effort was more laborious to her. She was anxious that he should not discover her discontent, still more that he should not obtain any inkling that he was not as dear and as necessary to her as she was to him. Now and again dread came to her when she thought of what might happen when she dismissed him.
Her loneliness rendered all these thoughts the more distressing to her; she was unable to escape from herself, and herself was the very worst and most hurtful company that she could have.
Broken sleep, which quickly became night-long sleeplessness, was the inevitable result.
One night she lay awake, restlessly shifting her position from time to time; striving to rest her mind by fixing it upon matters of indifference, but without success. Then of a sudden there swept down upon her a terror that had often stricken her when a child, but from which she had not suffered of recent years. What if this sleeplessness should prove incurable and kill her? Or the beginning of a dangerous illness? She turned cold and faint with the horror of the thought of death. Not of the physical pain with which it might be accompanied, but of the thing itself. She could not lie there any longer in the dark; turning up the light brought no comfort, only rendering the idea of death more real. She imagined herself lying there, a nurse in the room, Maddison, perhaps, by her side. She knowing, they knowing, that Death stood outside the door, his grisly knuckle sounding for the admission that could not be denied. There was added an oppressive sense of being alone; she refrained with difficulty from shrieking, just for the sake of hearing some living response.
She recalled how once, soon after their marriage, her husband had suffered from a long spell of sleeplessness, brought upon him by over-work, and how she had told him again and again that if he would only exert his will he could overcome his trouble. She remembered, too, that the doctor had ordered him to set aside his teetotal scruples, and drink each night before going to bed a glass of brandy and water, and how much she had disliked the smell of the spirit.
She slipped out of bed, shivering, for the night was bitter cold, and having wrapped herself in her dressing gown made her way to the dining room. She poured out about a wineglassful of brandy into a tumbler, added water, and drank it hastily. She shuddered as she put the glass down, but the quick warmth of the liquor comforted her, running like heat through her frame.
After a while she slept heavily, wakening late in the morning, parched and unrefreshed. She was not hungry, but drank her tea eagerly, feeling refreshed for a time.