‘Elise! Elise! Stop! How can you say things like that? I can’t understand you.’ And he stared at her with contracted brows as if she were some kind of extraordinary animal.
‘I suppose,’ he began, in a meditative voice, ‘this weird mood of yours comes from that accursed possessive instinct which all you women have. I suppose you are really just simply jealous of my wife.’
The crouching position she had assumed became still more pronounced. She drew in her hands slowly, along the edge of the chair, and her greenish-hazel eyes, staring at him out of her pale face, seemed to darken almost to blackness.
‘How little you know me! How little you know anyone! It’s your gross, heavy, blind complacent vanity!’
Richard mechanically drew out of his pocket a packet of cigarettes. Then, seeing what he had done, he deliberately and consciously selected one and lit it.
Do women, he thought, never give the real reason of their sudden angers? Is it an inveterate tendency with them, like a dog who turns round before he lies down, to give their fury some moral basis completely removed from the point at issue?
Why didn’t she scold me for my ‘gross, blind heavy vanity’ yesterday, when we were happy together? I was much vainer and more complacent then — the Lord knows — than I am today!
But how magnificently beautiful Elise looked! He couldn’t help admiring her in spite of his sense of injustice. Her hands pressed against the sides of the chair straightened her Attic torso, under its filmy drapery, into lines and curves that were worthy of Praxiteles.
He couldn’t resist a faint smile, through his clouds of cigarette smoke, as he looked at her sitting there in her dark smouldering feline sulkiness. If she was less dangerous and less irrational, he thought, she wouldn’t be so lovely.
‘Come, my dear, my dear,’ he said, ‘it’s absurd for us to quarrel like this. It’s not fair to make me tell you my thoughts and then to pounce on me for them. Of course I’m bound to have moments with you when I feel a little guilty. You know what I’m like. You know my troublesome ridiculous conscience. It’s just because I’m so happy with you that I get these moods. I can’t help my nature. I was made like that.’
Her eyes darkened yet more and her face paled yet more. Before she could find her voice, her lips quivered, opening and closing like the petals of a sensitive plant. ‘’Made like that!’ she hissed at last, her beautiful head swaying on her long white neck like the head of some angry Lamia that might at any moment revert to its primitive shape. ‘Oh, how English you are, Richard! That’s what we other races have to accept is it, and just conform to? Made like that. And we have to unmake ourselves, and change our very skins, so as to adapt ourselves to this thing that cannot alter!’
‘Elise — Elise — you must be mad to talk like that! You know that with us from the very beginning it’s been the attraction of opposites. You don’t change, you can’t change, any more than I. If I weren’t so English, as you call it, so heavy and gross and all the rest of it, do you think you’d have ever cared for me? Not a bit of it!’
‘Well, I don’t care for you now, anyway,’ she flung out. ‘I hate you!’
There was just a faintly perceptible softening in that ‘I hate you!’ which was not concealed from Richard. By laying the stress upon the faults of his character and keeping his wife out of it he had evidently succeeded in turning the course of her thoughts. He got up and threw his cigarette into the grate.
Her incredibly sensitive mouth with its twitching lips looked irresistible to him and he suddenly loved her with a fierce deep strange love such as he had not felt for any living person in his life before.
He went straight up to her, seized her by her wrists and pulled her up upon her feet. Then he kissed her as he had never before kissed any woman. He kissed her with an emotion that was neither sensual nor spiritual. It seemed to him as if his soul required her soul, and the only way to obtain it was by draining it through those quivering lips.
When at last, after what seemed a blind eternity of feelings beyond any analysis, he let her go, he noticed that her eyes had changed from that dark look. They were strangely beautiful still but it was with a different kind of beauty. As he took her on his knees and caressed her Grecian head, pushing back the heavy bronze-coloured braids from her broad low forehead, it seemed to him that her eyes resembled the leafy shadows of cool rock caves overhung with ferns and moss. He had never realized their depth or what soft greenish lights were hidden in them.
‘You know how to treat us!’ she said with a low tender laugh that had something in it of the sigh of a wild animal that submits to being petted. ‘But I don’t love you any better for this.’
‘I don’t care whether you love me better or not,’ he said, ‘as long as I’ve got you still. I should be much more agitated about your moods if I wasn’t with you, if it were a case of writing letters to each other.’
She looked at him almost as intensely and questioningly as he had looked at her a little while ago.
‘I’ve been reading those poems of yours,’ she said, with just a faint flicker of malice, ‘and I cannot say that I think they’re worthy of you. They are so overloaded with sensations that one doesn’t get any emotion at all from them.’
‘I must have a cigarette if I’m to talk about poetry,’ said Richard, lifting her off his knee and walking over to the chimneypiece to get a match. ‘And you must free yourself from the burden of your critic’s weight too, it seems!’ she retorted, as she settled herself alone in the wicker chair.
‘What do you mean by sensations?’ said Richard walking up and down the room with impatient strides. ‘The whole purpose of what I’ve been writing is to get into it the very essence of the English country — and that’s a “sensation”, isn’t it?’
‘It may be to an Englishman, my dear,’ she replied. ‘It isn’t to me. All this indiscriminate piling up of flowers and trees and grasses, all this business about lanes and fields, seems to me just heavy and dull. It seems to get into the way of something.’
‘That’s because you’re an American,’ he threw at her indignantly. ‘Any English person reading what I’ve written would be reminded of the happiest moments of his life.’
‘And what are they, if I may ask?’
Richard looked at her with a scowl. A red flush came into his cheeks. ‘It’s no use trying to explain to an American things of that kind,’ he said. ‘The happiest moments of a person’s life in England are associated with old country memories, with just those lanes and gardens and fields that you find so dull. If you don’t care for things like that, of course my poems are nothing to you!’
‘But my dear Richard,’ cried Elise, ‘surely the whole purpose of art is to make such impressions universal, so that everybody feels them? If you’re content to write about ponds and ditches for the benefit of English people — well! you may please yourself of course; but I cannot allow you to call such a thing art. It’s the merest personal sensation of one individual!’
Richard looked as if it would have given him immense satisfaction to box her ears.
‘Isn’t art always a personal sensation?’ he protested.
‘Not a bit of it!’ cried the dancer. ‘Art’s an emotion not a sensation. It’s an emotion that expresses the only really impersonal thing in the world.’