She saw his eyes looking down on her, dark and sparkling and alien. Gazing up, she saw the luminous pallor of his face above her, in the moonlight, something irresponsible and thrilling and rather sinister. She looked at him and her blood pulsed hot and expectant. She waited, submissive, and he hovered above her in his elusiveness, his heart yearning to her.
He wanted so much to take her in the moonlight. But the desire in him was overborne by the knowledge of her difference. He knew that she was not for him. His airy nature sheered off in alarm. He wanted her, and yet he did not want her. His irresponsibility made a gulf between them. They were in different worlds.
So he could not touch her. He did nothing. He did not even kiss her. He sheered off, he had to retain his elvish freedom, though the leaving of her hurt him and lacerated him.
Anna stood still, feeling lost. Presently she realized his failure. Her heart flew to anger. She looked at Findlay, and there seemed to be a furtive look about him, an evasiveness, and she stiffened in sudden dislike, turning away. Then a sort of shame stabbed through her anger; she was ashamed, and only wanted to be gone.
‘Let us go back,’ she said.
They turned away from the heaving bulk of water, away from the darkly surging waves, back towards the hotel. Findlay glanced at her, and would have spoken. But she would not look at him. Pale and silent and angry, she walked in the gleaming, silvery night. And all the time at the back of her mind there was something shameful. She wondered angrily at her own shame.
They reached the lighted entrance. Anna’s heart trembled, but it was locked in bitterness.
‘Good night,’ she said, standing on the step above him, her face wearing its peculiar blank, almost stony look. She wondered what he was thinking, as he stood and watched her.
He looked at her, at her slender body, which he was not able to touch. And he knew that his failure would always haunt him. He did not want her, he was in a different world; but he suffered at losing her.
‘What have I done?’ he asked, diffident, and smiling rather exquisitely.
She felt her heart stir. His smile still went to her heart. Yet her heart was not touched; it was cold and bitter. No response came on her face.
‘Nothing,’ she said, hating him.
She went into the hotel and turned her back on him. There were people moving about. She caught sight of Matthew. She went up and touched his arm.
‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘I shall go to bed now.’
He looked at her very strangely. He looked at her hands, which trembled slightly. Then he looked at her face again, which was cold and blank and a little despairing.
A slyness came into his eyes, a strange suggestion of craft.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I will see you upstairs.’
He took her arm at the elbow to lead her away. She did not notice him. Findlay stood in the doorway, watching, but without any expression, the two people, the girl and the stiff-shouldered, rather insignificant man. Anna went on with Matthew. They began to walk up the stairs. Still she was locked in anger, feeling a great bitterness in her heart. Against her will her hands were trembling: but she was not softened: her anger was cold and shameful. She had a sensation of strange, cold lightness.
Matthew had opened her bedroom door, and was waiting for her to go in.
‘Can I do anything?’ he asked, watching her.
She was aware of a cold indifference, and also of something else, not exactly excitement, but a kind of frozen recklessness, anguished and bitter. It was as if her disillusionment, her feeling of shame aroused some passionate desperation in her. She seemed to be in the grip of a kind of possession.
‘Can I do anything for you?’ persisted Matthew. There was a queer confidence in his voice and also a note of insinuation.
She hesitated, watching him. The blue glassiness was bright in his eyes, he was staring at her hungrily, as a starved creature might. Some certainty flared in her soul. She knew that if she let him come into the room she would have to submit to him.
‘Would you like me to open the shutters?’ he asked, humbly it seemed.
She shuddered with cold and with the intense premonition of what must follow.
They still stood at the door.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘Leave them as they are.’
‘It will be stuffy. I had better open them,’ he said, with his strange, blindly persisting obstinacy that seemed to stifle her.
There was something inevitable about him. It no longer seemed worth while to resist. Sometime, somewhere his obstinacy, his mindless, unwavering determination would get the better of her. Impossible to withstand him for ever. She realized with horror that she was going to yield. His large, brown, hairless hand was advancing in her direction. She stood still. His head was round and dark and ball-like. So unlike a human cranium. He smiled in anticipation.
‘No!’ she exclaimed involuntarily, stepping back.
But he stepped after her, very prancy and complacent now, and closed the door behind him. She saw his brown, neat, expressionless face coming towards her through the air. It was like an image approaching. Her blood ran cold with the horror of his unreality, with the horror of the thing he threatened, and with humiliation, and with the bitterness of lonely despair. She was a helpless traveller alone in the night. And what was he? She felt herself his victim.
Just for a moment, she struggled wildly to defend herself. But when she felt his strength, the tough, monkeyish strength of his long arms about her, she knew she had no chance against him. She had to submit. But he was ugly to her, horrible. Never for one instant did her spirit yield to him. Her will, her soul, was set in inflexible, adamantine resistance, defying him. He was hateful to her, despicable, so that she cringed under the humiliating infliction of his body, his hard, smooth, unattractive muscularity. But she submitted to him, to his ugliness and to his strength, his imperceptiveness. And he ravished her. He simply took her body and ravished it. She suffered atrociously. Yet all the time her spirit remained cold, reckless, and unchanging. Nor did he ever become real to her.
CHAPTER 13
AFTER Colombo there still remained five days of sea before the Henzada would reach Rangoon. But the heart seemed to have gone out of the ship, this part of the voyage hardly counted. All the more noticeable passengers — the smartest, the most interesting, the most amusing — had left the boat at Colombo. The people stopping on board were the callow young bachelors fresh from unimportant schools and training colleges, the untidy families of young children with their tired-looking parents, the insignificant elderly couples, like the Bretts. The same convention of jovial gaiety was maintained; but now it was the gaiety of the nursery. The whole tone of the ship had descended to a rather tiresome domesticity. And there was an undercurrent of discontent. Superficially, these people might be all keenness and enthusiasm. But underneath was a certain reluctance — rather the feeling of schoolboys at the start of a new term.
With a complete indifference Anna watched the monotonous last days of sea. She saw a shadowy line, far out in the midst of the blue vacancy, running along the edge of the sky. She knew that it was the coast of Burma.
And slowly the land approached — they came to the mouth of the river and steamed up, slowly, so slowly, in the sluggish afternoon. Soon they would be in Rangoon. Anna was too indifferent to care. A vast indifference had settled on her like a doom. She went about calm and vague and indifferent. Vaguely, she was sorry that Findlay had gone. Vaguely, she was aware of a sense of humiliation, of bitter loneliness: the absolute loneliness of her existence. She felt weighed down by an oppressive rock of indifference. And Matthew was the cause of her humiliation. Vaguely, she wanted to escape from him, but she was too indifferent to make any effort.