She knew the ultimate fear of darkness, in the night. Her nerves seemed stretched to breaking, in a long pain.
She thought the morning would never come. She slept, and wakened suddenly with a fresh start of fear. She sat up and listened. From far away, out of the unknown night, the slow clanging of a gong came sullenly. Then it stopped, died away, and immediately the noise of the frogs filled up the empty darkness.
It was torture to her, the loneliness of the night. It terrified her and destroyed her. The nightmare was worse than anguish to her. It destroyed something in her mind.
In a trance of apprehension she went through the empty days. She was all the time waiting for the night, her mind was screwed up in a knot of suspense. As the days of loneliness passed, her misery increased. She wondered vaguely how she could endure the awful horror that had overtaken her. Then Matthew came back.
And immediately the horror retreated. Its edge was dulled. She was no longer quite alone in the ghastly black void of the night. She came back to herself a little. Her blood began to flow again in normality. But still there was the tension underneath. She was lonely, she was endlessly lonely. And she was afraid. The horror was gradually inflicting a permanent injury, a sort of unhealing bruise was coming on her mind.
Anna had her books and her curtains, her little odds and ends of personal possessions in the house. But she was not really settling down, although she appeared resigned. Even Matthew realized this. It rather irritated him to see her wandering aimlessly about, or sitting under the punkah, with the curious vague, lost look on her face. She seemed to have no sense of permanency. She never looked upon the bungalow as her home.
‘What is the matter with you?’ he asked her, hostile. ‘Why can’t you be like the rest of us and make the best of things?’
She smiled at the futility of the question, and would not answer. She knew the hopelessness of trying to talk to him.
It made him indignant that she still remained somehow apart. It shattered his complacency to think that he had not finally conquered her even yet. He craved so much to possess her utterly, not in the possession of love, but as one might triumph over an enemy. It came to this, that he craved to conquer her. And he had so nearly succeeded. He possessed her body, he had imprisoned her in the house with him. He had cut her off from her own world. It seemed that he must have vanquished her completely. She seemed so submissive. And yet, in some way, she still eluded him. There were moments when he could not believe in his victory over her. He had not got her altogether, even now.
This made him very angry. A frenzy of determination came to him to possess her utterly. The sense of frustration was maddening to him. He must, must conquer her.
He began to hate her for eluding him. He hated her because he knew that she despised him. He hated the way she had of looking coldly at him when he spoke to her, and then turning away her face in a gesture of cold, indifferent contempt. It made him feel he could kill her.
And Anna, when she looked at his angry face, when she saw his eyes blank and opaque like two circles of blue glass, and the strange cunning expression, almost imbecile, yet so crafty, about his mouth, then a great disgust overcame her, a shuddering repulsion. And she knew she would have to escape: or die. It really seemed at such moments as if she would die, or as if he would kill her.
And then it would be all over, suddenly. The tension would relax, the atmosphere would suddenly change. Back would come the old Matthew, the man she had known at Blue Hills, the neat, well-mannered, innocuous person, quite uninteresting and unimportant, but well-disposed towards her, and even genuinely affectionate — her husband. He would smile at her, and say quite nice things from his mouthful of sharp little teeth. There was something agreeable about him, his odd, inconsistent humility, his sincerity. It all seemed genuine enough. But, at the same time, there was the rabid hostility underneath, a sort of repressed madness, rather frightening. Sometimes Anna was a little afraid of him: sometimes a goblin perversity drove her on and on to provoke him: but for the most part she disregarded him. He did not matter.
The climate, and the loneliness were beginning to tell on her; she looked tired; she was thinner and paler.
‘You don’t feel ill, do you?’ Matthew asked.
She could see his blue eyes examining her closely, eagerly, with a curious suggestive speculation, slightly indecent. She knew he was wondering whether she had conceived. He was very anxious that she should bear his child. He wanted to set the final seal of his possession upon her. A child would surely subject her to him, would make her ultimately his.
But Anna, when she thought of it, felt her heart sicken with horror. She did not want a child either with her body or with her mind. It was not her role. It seemed unnatural, almost shocking to think of such a thing. The thought disgusted her. Yet there were times in the midst of her loneliness, in the midst of the dreadful blankness which her life had become, when a different mood came upon her. At such time she began to tell herself that she should bear a child and be as other women, content to abandon her own life to live again in the child. She almost persuaded herself that she would be happy doing this. That this was her true womanly destiny.
But then, when she thought of Matthew’s child, she shuddered in every nerve. If she could conceive a child of herself and bear it of herself alone, well and good. But Matthew’s child! She shivered at the thought. No, it was not to be thought of, never, never. How could she bear it? How could she bear the thought of producing a curious neat, half-unreal, ball-headed child, a little surprise packet of her own? How could she! Disgust flamed to horror in her heart, she felt revolted. The very idea wrenched her with actual nausea.
So that it distracted her to know that the thought was always in Matthew’s mind. And also in the minds of the other women. There was a rich stir of fecundity abroad among the white women of Naunggyi, a warm, moist surge of philoprogenitiveness. Anna saw it all as so revolting, a sort of human stud-farm.
Mrs. Barry came and leaned against Anna’s new cushions and smiled at Anna suggestively. She was a faded and rather sugary-looking young woman, inclined to prettiness.
‘It must be dull for you here alone,’ she said. ‘Perhaps later on —’ And her pretty, light, slightly blood-shot eyes would gaze eagerly round the room in quest of some telltale oddment of sewing or suchlike.
Anna found it disgusting. It was really repulsive to her, this semi-lewd interest in her reproductive possibilities. She felt herself go hard and cold, very tensely rigid, and sharp, sword-like, in the midst of all this warm, yielding luxuriance of femininity. She seemed to close up more than ever in herself.
None the less, the general atmosphere of breeding and maternity had its effect upon her. She did actually think, occasionally, that she would like a child — provided it was not Matthew’s. More as an occupation than anything else. It would be an interest.
But in her more lucid moments, when the nightmare of the place had retreated a little, she was astonished at her own imaginings. Except that they were not her own. It was not Anna-Marie who indulged in these incongruous flights of fancy. She was not herself. The mere incongruity of associating her real self with procreation made her tremble.
The cool months passed away, with their limpid mornings and floods of bright, pure sunshine. March was already tropical, a steadily increasing onslaught of torridness. The punkah was creaking from morning till night, stirring up the sluggish, lukewarm air. And the shutters were always closed. The sun had become an enemy. So that the rooms were always dim, depressing, yellowish. A queer yellowish light came oozing in, like marsh-water, through the wooden slats of the shutters. By the middle of April it was almost too hot to live. The scourge of heat had fallen like a visitation. Everyone complained in a half-hearted, hopeless way. There was nothing to be done, of course. Except grin and bear it. But it was deathly, dreadful; an abominable infliction. Like one of the mediæval plagues.