The third letter was certainly the most sincere, since I felt curiously little remorse about the scene in the cellar. The only thing I regretted, paradoxically, was that I had not been sober, although of course if I had been sober the scene would not have occurred. But I recalled the scene itself with a certain satisfaction: satisfaction mingled with some more obscure and disturbing emotions. I kept returning with wonderment to the thought that I had now touched her: 'touched' was putting it mildly, given what had happened. But it seemed, perhaps for that very reason, almost implausible in retrospect; and although I could picture her face screwed up with pain and fury, although I could see her black oily hair rolling in the dust and hear her gasp as I twisted her arm yet further, I could not altogether recall any sense of the contact of my flesh with hers. It was as if the extreme untouchability, which with a kind of repulsion I had earlier felt her to possess, had cast, on this sacrilegious occasion, a cloak about her. It was as if I had not really touched her.
I was beginning to feel rather sick again. I walked on under Waterloo Bridge and saw through the tilting, slightly lifting, mist the long gracious pillared facade of Somerset House. Receding, swaying, variously browned and greyed, it seemed like a piece of stage scenery. Below it upon the river, clear yet infinitely soft and simple as in a Chinese print, two swans sailed against a background of watery grey light, swept steadily downstream in the company of a dipping branch of some unidentified foliage. They receded, turning a little, and disappeared. I walked on, and then paused by the parapet looking out to where in the much-curtained distance the great form of St Paul's must be. I could now just descry the warehouses directly opposite across the river, their fronts touched by diffused but increasing intimations of sunlight. The task of peering through the mist was becoming exasperating and painful. I cannot see, I cannot see, I said to myself: it was as if some inner blindness were being here tormentingly exteriorized. I saw shadows and hints of things, nothing clearly at all.
I turned back from the swirling tawny flood with its shadow palaces to look for reassurance at the solid pavement, and I saw that I was standing near a telephone box. I looked at the telephone box; and as I looked it seemed to take on a strange sudden glory, such as is said to invest the meanest object in the eyes of those who claim to experience the proof of the existence of God e contingentia mundi. Like one of Kohler's apes, my cluttered mind attempted to connect one thing with another. Very dimly and distantly, but hugely, it began to dawn upon me what the nature of my ailment was. It was something new and something, as I even then at once apprehended, terrible. My pain was that of a perhaps fatal illness. I moved towards the telephone box. My hands trembled so much that it was only at the third attempt that I was able to dial the Pelham Crescent number correctly. The maid answered. Dr Anderson and Mrs Lynch-Gibbon had gone away for the week-end, and Dr Klein had gone back to Cambridge.
Nineteen
Cambridge by moonlight was light blue and brownish black. There was no mist here and a great vault of clear stars hung over the city with an intent luxurious brilliance. It was the sort of night when one knows of other galaxies. My long shadow glided before me on the pavement. Although it was not yet eleven o'clock the place seemed empty and I moved through it like a mysterious and lonely harlequin in a painting: like an assassin.
When the idea had come to me that I was desperately, irrevocably, agonizingly in love with Honor Klein it had seemed at first to shed a great light. It was clear to me that this, just this, was what so urgently and with such novelty of torment ailed me, and also that the thing was inevitable. Inevitable now Honor certainly seemed to be, vast across my way as the horizon itself or the spread wings of Satan; and although I could not as yet trace it out I could feel behind me like steel the pattern of which this and only this could have been the outcome. I had never felt so certain of any path upon which I had set my feet; and this in itself produced an exhilaration.
Extreme love, once it is recognized, has the stamp of the indubitable. I knew to perfection both my condition and what I must instantly do about it. There was, however, as I began to realize as soon as I was safely stowed in the train at Liverpool Street, much cause for anxiety, or rather for terror, and also for puzzlement, or rather for sheer amazement. That I had no business, with two women on my hands already, to go falling in love with a third, troubled me comparatively little. The force that drew me now towards Honor imposed itself with the authority of a cataclysm; and as I felt no possibility of indecision I had, if not exactly no sense of disloyalty, at least no anxieties about disloyalty. I was chosen, and relentlessly, not choosing. Yet this very image brought home the insanity of my position. I was chosen, but by whom or what? Certainly not by Honor, whose words to me, still ringing like a box on the ear, had been far from flattering. I had never felt so certain of any path; but it was a path that seemed likely to lead only to humiliation and defeat.
Yet even this did not yet trouble me very much. The thought that, whatever my reception, I would see Honor again was, in the frenzy of need and desire which had now come upon me, enough. I was perhaps moreover a little the dupe of that illusion of lovers that the beloved object must, somehow, respond, that an extremity of love not only merits but compels some return. I expected nothing very much, I certainly expected nothing precise, but the future was sufficiently open, sufficiently obscure, to receive the now so fierce onward rush of my purpose. I had to see her and that was all.
What had more occupied my mind, as the train drew near to Cambridge, was wonderment at the nature and genesis of this love. When had I begun, unbeknown to myself, to love Honor Klein? Was it when I threw her to the cellar floor? Or when I saw her cut the napkins in two with the Samurai sword? Or at some earlier time, perhaps at that strange moment when I had seen her dusty, booted and spurred, confront the golden potentates who were my oppressors? Or even, most prophetically, when I had glimpsed the curving seam of her stocking in the flaring orange lights at Hyde Park Corner? It was hard to say, and the harder because of the peculiar nature of this love. When I thought how peculiar it was it struck me as marvellous that I had nevertheless such a deep certainty that it was love. I seemed to have passed from dislike to love without experiencing any intermediate stage. There had been no moment when I reassessed her character, noticed new qualities, or passed less harsh judgements on the old ones: which seemed to imply that I now loved her for the same things for which I had previously disliked her heartily; if indeed I had ever disliked her. None of this, on the other hand, made me doubt that now I loved her. Yet it was in truth a monstrous love such as I had never experienced before, a love devoid of tenderness and humour, a love practically devoid of personality.
It was strange too how little this passion which involved, so it seemed, a subjection of my whole being had to do in any simple or comprehensible sense with the flesh. It had to do with it, as my blood at every moment told me, but so darkly. I preserved the illusion of never having touched her. I had knocked her down but I had never held her hand; and at the idea of holding her hand I practically felt fault. How very different was this from my old love for Antonia, so warm and radiant with golden human dignity, and from my love for Georgie, so tender and sensuous and gay. Yet, too, how flimsy these other attachments seemed by comparison. The power that held me now was like nothing I had ever known: and the image returned to me of the terrible figure of Love as pictured by Dante. El m'ha percosso in terra e stammi sopra.
It occurred to me later as remarkable and somehow splendid that one thing which I never envisaged in these early moments was that my condition was in any way bogus or unreal. Where-ever it might lead, it was sufficiently what it seemed and had utterly to do with me: I would not, I could not, attempt to disown it or explain it away. If it was grotesque it was a grotesqueness which was of my own substance and to which, beyond any area of possible explanation, I laid an absolute claim. I had no idea what I would do when I saw Honor. It seemed quite likely that I would simply collapse speechless at her feet. Nothing of this mattered. I was doing what I had to do and my actions were, with a richness, my own.