‘But, Olive!’ cried Nelly, ‘lots of us wear things like that just to attract men!’ ‘They won’t be attracted to what I shall wear,’ said Olive smiling. ‘I’m perfectly sick of this stupid idea that we’ve all got to have love affairs or husbands. I don’t see things that way at all.’
‘You’re not going into a convent are you, Miss Shelter?’ Richard threw in without taking very much heed to what he said. The girl’s clear-cut sharp-featured brusqueness had little appeal for him.
‘A convent? Oh dear, no!’ she replied, giving Richard a quick satiric glance which seemed to say ‘as usual!’ ‘That’s just what everybody thinks,’ she went on. ‘It seems incredible to people nowadays that a girl should prefer to be unmarried just as a man prefers to be a bachelor. Whenever I talk of my poultry farm, everyone always smiles and sniggers — as much as to say “she’ll be married in a week and then you’ll see!” And if they don’t do that, they look at each other and become grave and sympathetic, as much as to say “she must have been badly jilted, poor little thing!”’
Richard became faintly interested at this point. ‘But you don’t mean to say, Miss Shelter, that you really intend to live alone all your life?’
‘Certainly I do!’ she laughed back at him. ‘Though I might of course take a partner, if I could find some girl of my own sort.’
‘Ah! a girl, a platonic friendship,’ laughed Richard superciliously. ‘Not a bit of it!’ replied Olive, giving him a quick, almost angry look and flushing a little. ‘A business partnership between good comrades,’ she threw out with a toss of her head.
Richard became puzzled and silent. It seemed incredible to his mind that there should be any alternative between a passionate devotion to religion and a passionate devotion to some shape of flesh and blood. To rule out the attraction between human bodies and souls and not to substitute for it some exclusive passion of religious faith seemed to him weird and strange.
He looked at Olive with an unexpected interest. She was certainly a new type to him of what England could produce. Was it really possible, he wondered, for life to go on being thrilling and exciting, without the stimulus of either religion or sex?
Olive was by no means a bad looking girl. Her features were a little hard; but her complexion was soft and childlike. Richard was quite glad to take her hand when they said goodbye. It was a cool and a firm hand, the hand of a woman who, like Natalia in Wilhelm Meister, loved ‘never or always’!
Chapter 12
John Moreton was buried on the following Wednesday by the side of his wife Cecilia.
Mrs Shotover came to the funeral; she thoroughly scared the new vicar, patronized Richard before the whole neighbourhood and offended Nelly very seriously by being rude to Robert.
The news which Canyot received that week about his exhibitions made it possible for him once more to postpone his journey; for it appeared there was to be a second New York show of his things which promised to be of far greater importance than anything that had been done hitherto; there was no need for him to cross the water until July.
He stayed on therefore at the farm, painting as he had never painted before, painting at a furious speed and with a gathered weight of feeling and intensity.
He wanted if possible to have at least half a dozen more pictures to carry over with him and he dreaded to lose the peculiar value of the kind of power which was now coming to him, snatched out of the electric air of his relations with Nelly.
He felt obscurely that all was not perfectly right between the husband and wife; he felt that Nelly needed him and in some mysterious way clung to him at this juncture, almost as if he had understood what she felt about her father better than Richard did.
Richard himself was making at that time a concentrated effort to recover the interrupted sequence of his own work. He found this surprisingly difficult. The roots of the thing were there, firmly planted in his new feeling; but the temptation to enjoy that lovely countryside, to fall into a sort of vague half-sensual dreaming over the sounds and scents of those unequalled fields, was still fatally strong.
The sweetness of Nelly’s initial surrender to him still remained, an intoxicating drug among these other enchantments, and his pleasure in her grew more and more material, more and more a thing of the thrilled and exacting senses, less and less of an emotional or spiritual passion.
Nelly was occupied in arranging the natural history treasures in her father’s study; she went about this work with a greater weight of gloom upon her mind than she had ever known. She had not separated herself from her husband; nor had she referred again to the matter of the letter; but even while she submitted to his caresses, even while she passionately responded to his caresses, there was a weary disillusionment in her heart. She tried to forget this, just as she had tried to forget her father’s loss, by abandoning herself almost fiercely to her love; but the whole thing was different. Her very love seemed to herself much more a thing of the senses than it was before; a thing from which some peculiarly subtle essence had been withdrawn. She knew only too well what she was trying to do. She was trying to forget her father and she was trying to forget the old ‘dead’ Richard, by plunging recklessly into the mere material thrill of the chemical attraction that existed between them.
She was playing the courtezan, so to speak, in the temple of her pure love, so as to drown, if she could, that bitter underlying consciousness that something was wrong between them.
It was very painful to her to think of her father at all, so guilty did she feel towards him. The actual pain of missing the old man was made so much worse by the miserable feeling that in a hundred ways recently she had neglected him for her own pleasure. And the only distraction that seemed able to make her forget this remorse was the distraction of Richard’s caresses.
The unfortunate thing was that in proportion as Richard made more sophisticated love to her and she responded to his lovemaking, Richard himself in his own brain and nerves began to lose something of the original delicacy of his attitude towards her. The more feverishly she tried to forget her troubles in his arms the less rare and exquisite did the link between them tend to become. This tarnishing and blunting process was not, of course, a thing of a few days, but it began to have its effect upon Richard’s character. This effect showed itself in two ways.
His wife became more of an obsession to him in a physical sense and very much less of an inspiration to him in a spiritual sense.
The situation was a singularly cruel one; for had the girl loved him less, had there been less magnetic attraction between them, the charm of her personality, apart from flesh and blood, would have grown more powerfully upon him. Nelly’s physical beauty was indeed Nelly’s own rival in this matter, and a rival who was absorbing and devouring the very thing in the man she loved that had originally drawn her towards him.
What was happening to Richard was indeed the very thing he had fled from Elise Angel to avoid. He had fled from it because he knew how dangerous to his peculiar temperament this sort of erotic obsession was — how it sapped the very life blood of his soul. He had married Nelly for a conscious and also an unconscious reason. Consciously he had wanted her as a living symbol of what he was aiming at in his work. Unconsciously he had been attracted to her with precisely the same sort of purely sensual attraction as he had felt towards Elise Angel. He had not known that at first. But now he did know it and it had a fatal effect upon the freedom of his brain. The sweetness of his English wife and the sweetness of the English scenery became between them a dangerous euthanasia, a drug-induced trance, the death of his better self.