Too sick at heart, too cruelly torn between the two women, to enjoy the escape which now offered itself as they left the houses behind and began to breathe the unsullied breath of the Jersey coast, Richard had a strange sense, as he wrangled with his companion in one of those interminable lovers’ quarrels which seem like elemental forces, that he and she were will-less automata, doomed to hurt each other for the amusement of unseen spectators.
Struggling to break loose from the exhausting logic of anger which poisoned the air about them, he stopped at last and began tracing patterns with his stick in the white sand.
He drew an ornamental E and a deeply indented A on that smooth surface. But no sooner had he done so than an angry contempt for his own sentiment made him erase both of them with a violent gesture. The dancer’s face was pale and sardonic as she watched him; her red lips curved in a hard significant smile.
‘You don’t know what the word love means,’ she said suddenly.
‘I wasn’t writing love,’ he retorted childishly.’ Can’t you read English? I was making your initials.’
‘In sand,’ she said.
‘Well! they’re gone now, anyhow.’
‘It’s the fact of your being English, I suppose,’ she remarked, looking at him with a misery of indignation. ‘I hate all you English. Your feelings are clotted up with clods of earth — gross, thick, heavy clods of earth! Not one of you can be clear and free and honest. You worship what is, just because it is. It’s worse than materialism, it is absolute deadness! And what’s more you’re not content until everyone’s as dead as you are. Dead words, dead sentiment, dead hearts! You’ve no real courage in you … without courage everything becomes initials written on sand!’
Richard’s face assumed the bewildered expression of a child that is beaten for an unknown fault. His superficial cynicism was swallowed up in real trouble. He looked at her like a dumb flogged animal.
His bewilderment increased her anger.
‘These three days with you have killed my love,’ she said. ‘You’ve done the unpardonable thing … and you’ve made it worse by your stupidity. It would have been far better if you’d known what you were doing. It has been like being tied to a corpse!’
‘I thought we’d been so happy,’ he murmured.
‘That’s just it,’ she cried, ‘it’s always happiness, happiness, happiness with you! Have you no idea of great, beautiful, terrible things that have to be paid for by the loss of all that? Happiness? My God! It means comfort to you — a nice, easy, complacent English comfort.’
‘It’s you who are not honest,’ he muttered. ‘Why can’t you confess the truth? You’re angry with me for quite a different reason from the one you’re talking about.’
She flashed at him a look of splendid fury, a look that made her so beautiful that he was completely disarmed.
‘What reason?’ she flung out.
‘Oh you know …’ He hesitated. ‘What’s the use of my saying it? It’s you who drive me on till you force me to say these things.’
‘Tell me what you were thinking. Tell me! Quick!’
‘It was nothing,’ he stammered. ‘We both think all sorts of unfair malicious things.’
‘You must tell me. I must know. What was it?’
‘It was natural enough … I daresay it’s not true. I meant that you’re angry with me because I felt remorseful about Nelly.’
‘Ah!’ She drew in her breath and her eyes grew dark against the pallor of her skin. Of course you’d say that. Being the most ill-bred thing you could possibly say, it’s characteristic of course. As it happens, it’s untrue. But if it were true, would that let you out? Can’t you see that such remorse with you is only fear for your own skin? Or are you really such a baby as to think that you can make your wife happy by holding her hand?’
‘You are very unfair,’ said Richard. ‘I can’t help hating to make a person suffer.’
‘We all suffer,’ retorted the dancer. ‘And the worst cause of our suffering is a man like you who thinks he can carry an ointment pot about with him to heal the wounds he makes. Haven’t you even got the courage of your callousness? Haven’t you even got the courage to face the fact that you are utterly and profoundly selfish? Must you go on slipping out of it and evading it and covering it up, to the very end?’
‘I don’t slip out of anything,’ protested Richard. ‘I wish I did!’
‘It’s because of this that your poetry is so bad,’ she went on. ‘It’s only your ingrained conceit that makes you think it anything but thoroughly bad. You deceive yourself far more deeply than you deceive anyone else.’
Richard’s face assumed the dogged obstinate look of a much persecuted mule, and this seemed to hound her on to further malicious stabs.
‘You talk of bringing your philosophy into your poetry. My good man, you must realize once for all that your poetry is a fraud, a fake, a piece of rank charlatanism. You’re the very last person to be a poet. The whole business is an elaborate edifice of humbug!’
‘If my poetry isn’t real,’ said Richard, ‘nothing in my existence is real.’
‘Nonsense! Stuff and nonsense! You’ve got a sound critical faculty. You’re receptive enough. You’re capable of doing very good honest literary work. But you’re so ridiculously proud that you pretend that all this is nothing. You must be the great poet of the age — or you will sulk in your tent and do nothing at all.’
‘You are most frightfully unfair,’ he began. ‘No one can tell for certain where their power is until they—’
‘Until they stop lying,’ she interrupted. ‘Don’t you understand that art is a thing connected with character?’
‘I thought it was a thing connected with imagination,’ said Richard sulkily.
The great dancer fixed her eyes on a sailing ship far out to sea.
‘God knows what it is, my dear,’ and she sighed deeply. ‘I only know it is a thing we seem unable to get into our life with each other. But it may be my fault quite as much as yours. I’m sorry, Richard. I’m sorry I’ve been bad. Shall we go back?’
He took her hand and kissed it and they began slowly retracing their steps. They were silent. With the splash of the long waves breaking beside them an infinite sadness gathered about their hearts, the kind of sadness which no argument can destroy and no hope can lift; the sadness which is of the very nature of life itself, when the distractions of desire and curiosity are for the moment in abeyance.
They had not moved far in the direction of the town when they heard themselves called by name from one of the high ridges of sand overgrown with grass that separated them from the marshes on the left. They stopped and turned. Two figures rose from a hollow place in the sand dunes and came running down the slope towards them.
Catharine’s extravagant greeting of Elise was a reminder to Richard of how small a place in the great world he himself held in comparison with his companion. Elise had never met Karmakoff; and before she condescended to notice Richard at all, the enthusiastic girl eagerly introduced him to the dancer.
The encounter between Elise and Ivan was like the encounter between two feline animals of the same jungle. They watched each other furtively, measuring one another’s strength and weighing in the balance one another’s magnetism. Her accumulated anger against Richard made the imperious dancer ready for any kind of an emotional plunge; the womanish eyes of the cynical Russian, with their strange green lights, dilated in amorous reciprocity to the furtive challenge which she gave him.