Was he actually — he, Richard Storm — exulting in his possession of these two women as if he were a gross fool of a numbskull roué, devoid of all finer instincts?
Eighth Street! It was necessary for Richard to get out here, if he wished to walk through Cornelia Street and Le Roy Street to Seventh Avenue.
As he made his way through Greenwich Village with its laxer, easier, more careless atmosphere, he became conscious that there did exist in New York, hidden away among its iron buildings and its chaotic litter, many charming backwaters of friendly humanity.
In this particular quarter were artists of all the nations of the earth, writers, painters, journalists, bric-à-brac dealers, revolutionists, virtuosos, charlatans, dilettantes, actors, bachelor women, women workers, wealthy connoisseurs of the theatre, aesthetic dabblers, art-book dealers, literary recluses, imagist poets, futurist sculptors, popular mystics, cranks, faddists, philosophers, humbugs, devoted humanitarians, art-movement leaders, and many quiet solitary thinkers living between uptown fashion and downtown greed, intersected by wedges of every sort of foreign element. There was certainly a large, free, easygoing casualness in the air that seemed powerful enough to maintain itself unspoiled, in defiance of both economic necessity and social convention.
It was naïve and simple, this Quartier Latin of the New Atlantis; it was crude and self-conscious, but something of the great ocean spaces that surrounded it, something of those free winds and that high unclouded sky, had got into its manners and habits and usages. It was certainly primitive and unsophisticated in its ardours and devotions to what it proudly called ‘creative work’ but its very primitiveness preserved its love of beauty intact and pure, unspoiled by the cynical disillusionment of the traditional Bohemians of the Old World.
Here, if anywhere, wedged in between foreign tenements and big business, breathed the lungs of whatever mental and spiritual freedom that iron Manhattan could offer to her children!
When he reached the Charlton Street apartment he found that Nelly had already got their supper ready. She permitted him to kiss her, only turning her head a little to one side so as to avoid giving him her lips.
How blint and clumsy, how brutally callous and dull he had been, he thought. This avoidance of his lips made him suddenly aware of the infinite subtleties, the world of shy emotional reactions, so deep and so clear-edged, that women associate with this simple symbol. He was made obscurely conscious that he had hurt something in his wife’s soul of a different character, of a more sensitive texture, than anything which he possessed in his own.
Does any man, he thought, really understand what this touching of the lips implies in the heart of a woman?
He felt at that moment as though there was a region of delicate, evasive, exquisitely attuned vibrations in Nelly’s spirit, of which he might suddenly awake to discover he had lost the clue for ever; to discover that he had lost it, when it was too late to get it back.
As he chattered superficially with her, of this piece of gossip and that piece of scandal, over their meal, there slowly grew upon him the bitter cruel sense that he had, in his clumsy sensuality, thrown away something much more exquisite and precious than any merely physical thrill. After all, he could have given himself up to the divine genius of Elise, to her inspiration, her great instinctive art, without dragging her down to the level of an odalisque, a courtesan, an amorous plaything.
There was no reason to suppose that if he had made it clear to Elise that he loved his wife and intended to remain faithful to her she would have rejected his platonic friendship. The passionate paganism of Elise was a thing quite uninvolved with her deeper nature and a few clear indications of loyalty to Nelly would have placed his relations with the dance on a basis much more honourable to both of them.
Every mouthful he took at that meal, as he sat facing the delicate being whose love he had deliberately set himself, so it seemed to him now, to trample on and to kill, tasted of miserable remorse.
Had she sulked, had she thrown out sarcastic speeches, had she been vituperative and vindictive, he could have hardened his heart in his unfaithfulness. But as it was, thinking his self-accusing thoughts beneath their friendly chatter, it seemed to him as though he had dragged down and exploited in sheer stupidity of sensuality both these finer spirits. His remorse about Nelly diffused itself over Elise too, and he felt he had betrayed them both. The great creative spirit of life — the only god he worshipped — had given him Nelly’s love and the child she carried within her; had also given him the friendship of Elise and the child she carried within her, that incomparable art of hers. And what had he done to both these mirrors of the eternal vision? Tossed them down, flung one against the other, tried to see his own egotistic countenance in each of them, and clouded and blurred them in the effort.
He sought, absurdly enough, on this particular evening, to soothe the smart of his conscience by an exaggerated consideration. He helped Nelly clear the table, he helped her to wash up; it was only afterwards, when seated near her in their small living room looking out on the quiet houses opposite, that he was made starkly aware how futile such catchpenny offerings were.
He found himself leaning forward and touching her hand as she worked at the piece of sewing spread over her knees. ‘Nelly — my dear — my dear, can’t you bring yourself to forget and forgive? It’s more than I can stand, this way we’re living now. It makes me homesick for the old days. It makes me long for Sussex.’
She let his hand stay where it was, but her fingers lay passive and cold within his own.
‘What can I do, Richard?’ she murmured, looking at him gravely and quietly. ‘What can I do that I haven’t done? I haven’t interfered with your pleasure. I haven’t made a fuss or tried to leave you. Many women would have … well! you know! But when you ask me to be just the same, as if nothing were going on, when you’re still seeing that person, I can’t understand quite what you mean. Sometimes, my dear,’ and she looked at him with a puzzled look that almost flickered into a faint smile, ‘sometimes I doubt whether you’ve ever grown up. You seem to be so blind to certain things; as if you actually didn’t understand, as if you were not quite an ordinary human being; as if you were hurting me without knowing that you were hurting me. You can’t expect me to laugh and smile and encourage you to go off to someone else.’
He moved a little nearer to her. ‘But you do love me still, my darling, my darling?’ he whispered.
Her forehead puckered up into a concentrated frown and her lips quivered.
‘You don’t think I like the way we’re living?’ she broke out. ‘But how can I bear it differently? What can I do? When I asked you that first day whether you’d give this person up, you wouldn’t answer. And of course I know you haven’t given her up. I know you see her every day. I know you came straight from her this very night. And how can I feel as if it were just the same — when it’s like that? I can hold myself in, from saying any more. I must hold myself in, for our child’s sake. But I can’t help feeling bitter. You can’t expect me to go on just the same. It takes a little time to make a person’s heart numb and dead. I don’t think you know — that’s what I keep saying to myself — I don’t think you know what a woman feels. I don’t think you can know. You couldn’t have done it, you couldn’t have done it, if you did.’
Her voice broke at this point but she controlled herself with a pathetic struggle, and got up from her chair. ‘You mustn’t expect too much from me, Richard,’ she added. ‘I’m not made of wood and stone.’