She got into the front of the car, which was loaded up behind with the things they had bought. She heard the shred of a tune drifting over the noisy crowd, seeking her out.
‘Are you pleased with your shopping?’ Matthew asked.
‘Yes,’ she answered. She looked at him with grey, condemnatory eyes, wherein lurked a sardonic contempt.
‘All that silk stuff will go rotten as soon as the rains start,’ he said, a covert sneer in his voice. It hurt him all at once that the house was not good enough for her. It was good enough for him. He felt that she was slighting him.
They rattled back through the growing heat of the morning. It was very hot by the time they got back to the shabby, gloomy house. The servants came out to meet them. Matthew went indoors with Anna, while the parcels were being fetched from the car.
Anna looked at Matthew impartially. When they were inside, out of sight of the servants, he took her in his sinewy embrace. She saw the smooth, tough skin upon his cheek. And his hair, brittle and dry and lustreless, with a strange dead look, repulsive. How could she endure his embraces, how could she suffer him, and live? In the hot, tropical stillness she felt a chill. But the worst was over. She knew that there would be an end. Some time, she would shake off the nightmare and the marsh, and be for ever undismayed.
CHAPTER 15
TIME went on. The brief, beautiful spell of winter weather was ending. Every day it grew a little hotter, the nights began to lose their freshness.
‘The hot weather will soon be here,’ Matthew said.
Anna stood outside, in the sparse and speckly shade of the tamarind trees which seemed to be always losing their leaves, and watched the big lizards basking on the branches and on the trunks of the trees. Some of the lizards shone blue like turquoise, they really seemed carved out of turquoise matrix, they glowed, they shone. And the other wrinkled, yellowish lizards were also like ancient carvings in precious gold. Minute after minute the dry, inscrutable, ancient-looking creatures hung motionless on the rough bark, as if waiting for something. Anna watched them, with her grey-blue eyes.
‘Shall we be here for a long time?’ she said to Matthew. ‘For always?’ She seemed to speak with a kind of impertinence, lost upon him.
‘Till I get transferred to another station.’
‘And when is that likely to happen?’
‘Perhaps not for years,’ he said indifferently. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I see.’ She had a slight smile on her face, secretive, slightly contemptuous, which he did not notice.
He now felt almost sure of her, almost safe. Only occasionally he was afraid of losing her. For the most part he thought he had safely caged her. He thought he had won. He did not realize how her spirit was set away from him. And she, when she saw his complacency, his obtuseness, she felt the old heavy suffocation, weary, hopeless despair, like a slow suffocation.
They lived in the same house. And she submitted herself to him. Outwardly she seemed apathetic, hopeless. But inwardly she trembled, she grew sick with the horror of his proximity. She felt she must die. Yet she did not really despair. She had in her some calm foreknowledge that kept her alive. She would escape, sooner or later.
But Matthew’s unreality affected her strangely. It seemed to make her unreal also. The strangeness of the place, of the bungalow, of the people at the club made her feel like an actor in some meaningless play. She was unreal. She was not herself. The real world she had left behind her; she was wandering now in a strangely lit, false world of unreality, imitation houses and painted landscape, and mouthing, unnatural people.
Quite unreal, quite out of herself, she went to the club, or sat in the lonely bungalow, mechanically, like a clockwork figure. She felt that Matthew had turned her into an automaton, destroying her individuality. It was his influence making her unreal.
She felt as though she had lost herself. Her personality was absent. She was like a mechanical thing moving about, with no real existence.
She appeared to be settling down. She now had two rooms more or less habitable, the drawing-room and her own room upstairs. These rooms were quite pleasant, with curtains of stiff, shot Mandalay silk, and bright rugs on the floor. And she had written for books to be sent her, she had books and papers to read.
She did the things that were required of her, the things everyone else did. But whatever she was doing remained unreal to her, nothing had any significance. She went to the club; the talk which she heard and in which she joined was like a dialogue heard in a theatre, she seemed to listen to it from outside. With a vague surprise she heard her own voice speaking. But it was not she herself who spoke. She was simply not there. She had no contact with anything. There was no meaning in the world in which she now moved, it was made up of shapes and noises, without reality or consequence.
During the greater part of the time she was alone in the house. Then everything became blank. The loneliness completely extinguished her, it washed over even her fictitious self. She was nothing.
Matthew’s work obliged him to be away a good deaclass="underline" five days, a week, sometimes ten days at a time. He took his own personal servant and the second house-boy who could cook a little, and went off into the jungle with his guns and papers and paraphernalia. Then Anna was quite alone. She became a vague, aimless portion of a vague, meaningless world. It was all a sort of empty madness, a madness of vacancy. Everything faded into blank inanity, she was a blankness, everything was blankness, there was nothing but blankness, and it was horrible, horrible. It almost killed her, it was so horrible.
The nights were worse than the days. The days were just bearable, so many stretches of interminable emptiness, that seemed really endless. But they did end, and then came the horror of the night.
Slowly the horror would accumulate, soaking into Anna as she lay on her hard, uncomfortable bed. The frogs were noisy, and their croaking rose from the marsh, a strange disharmony of sound, half-bark, half-cough, filling the silence of the house. She was quite alone. The servants slept away in their row of primitive go-downs at the back. And she knew, if she called, they would never hear her, or would pretend not to hear.
Anna would lie on her bed under the ghostly net. There was no light but the faint, discomforting pallor that came from outside. She could not even lock herself in. And she could feel the demonish exultation of the marsh gathering on the tepid air.
She thought of the horrors of the jungle, the stalking, silent creatures, tigers and panthers with their fœtid breath, and the great snakes moving unseen over the darkened ground. And she thought of the people apparently so gay and innocent, with a friendly look. But at the same time, how extraordinary they were, how incomprehensible. Who could tell what unknown devilry lurked behind their smiling insouciance?
She lay and thought in the darkness. And all the time her nerves were trembling, strained tight with horror. She heard the irregular beating of her heart, now loud and fast as though to choke her with painful speed, now slow, slow with a deathly reluctance, till she could fancy herself really dying. But always it would start again, the laborious beating, beating her back to renewed consciousness of fear.