She moved towards the door. Matthew came after her, grasping at her, and her heart beat thickly, for she knew it was a fight to the death between them. She would never submit to him. Her will was ultimately set against that, hard and inflexible. She put out her arms to keep him off.
‘Don’t think you can get away from me,’ he bullied. He contorted his face, the neat lips half smiling. There was something fundamentally obscene in his expression. Anna shrank back. She was trembling. And she was repelled. Her whole soul sickened in repulsion.
‘Come here!’ he cried, in a mad frenzy, snarling, rabid. He seized her by the arms and dragged her to him. A cord snapped in Anna’s heart. Her eyes and her face stony, she struggled against him. His mad, fixed, glowering eyes were close to hers. She strained back. It was the final battle between her and him. She felt herself utterly calm and cold. She had become simply an instrument of pure resistance. She jerked herself half out of his grip, and fought her way, struggling, to the door. He still held her by one arm, and clung to her fiercely, but she was almost at the door.
She knew that if once she could get out of the room she was safe. He would not follow her. So she concentrated on the door, to reach it and free herself. He was panting and desperate. She saw his face above hers brown and neat still, with eyes like pieces of blue glass, meaningless, yet full of a mad obstinacy and a horrible frenzied lust. He should not conquer her, this hateful, non-human creature who was so much stronger than she. In loathing of his smooth, monkeyish strength she writhed and struggled and twisted in his grasp. But he would not release her. He swung her off her feet, and struck at her with his free hand, his eyes murderous. She felt a stab of nightmare panic; yet really, at heart, she was calm and even indifferent. Then his arm and his clenched fist came down hard across her chest. Instinctively she ducked her head to protect her face. The next blow fell on her neck. The next on her shoulders. Then, suddenly, he let go of her entirely. For a moment, she was as if stunned.
She recovered her equilibrium and stood still, her face sombre and fixed. She felt that something had broken in her. Matthew stood dumb, confounded. Gradually a sort of horror dawned on his face, incredulous.
‘What am I doing?’ he said, in strange gulping tones. A queer, complicated grimace disfigured him. His face seemed to disintegrate. He seemed to collapse all at once, to fall in upon himself.
Anna looked at him, turned, and went out of the room. It was over: she had conquered him. But she felt wounded to death; violated and defiled. It was the end of everything. Now she must die. There was nothing else left.
Trembling slightly, she went downstairs and opened the door of the house. The night was quite black, like a black hole, and full of wild ripping and rushing noises. The violence of the wind struck her like a flat blow. The palm tree in front leaned over in an extraordinary thin arch, its leaves almost touching the ground. Across the sky, from horizon to horizon, ran blazing paths of lightning, changing and bifurcating. And deep, ponderous rolls of thunder broke above the wind, ominously, like judgments given against mankind.
Anna stood still, watching the bent palm tree, which seemed to her very fantastic and unreal. She was still trembling, and weak. She felt that she had come to the end of her life. She wanted to get away from the house, away from Matthew. She felt she could never endure to see him again, or to hear his voice. She had the sense of something being broken inside her. Her feet seemed heavy and very far off.
She dragged herself out of the house. As she went out, the wind swept upon her, as though to carry her away, up into the air. She felt that it was shaking her. to bits, that she must presently disappear in this void of windy dark. Something pained her shoulders, hurting her, but she struggled on.
She was lonely, and lost. She was in an ugly, repulsive nightmare which terrified her and degraded her. And the only way out of the nightmare was to die. She did not think how she should die. Something was broken and destroyed in her. She had come to an end. It was all repulsive and strange: and incoherent. There was no rational sequence of cause and effect.
Struggling along in the dark, she saw the tremendous writhing tumult of the great trees, streaming and roaring overhead, and flying darkly against the sky. She turned away from the trees, to avoid them. She was afraid of the trees because she had once seen a python, looped and hanging from a branch, and swaying a little, with a kind of hideous, revolting negligence, at the end of a deep glade. She would not go to the trees.
So she went on, lost and solitary, in the black, crashing wilderness, without thought. The lightning blazed bluishly from moment to moment, revealing a spasmodic, ghostly world. She was very tired and desolate, drowned deeply in the nightmare and the black night, far from any security.
Suddenly she was aware of something new. Something was flying in the air, a swarm of cold, heavy insects flying in her face, striking her skin with flat, cold bodies. It was the rain beginning. The first great drops struck her in the dark, like beetles. She shuddered, and caught her breath.
Down came the rain with a shattering crash, as though the floor of the sky had given way. Anna bowed her head before it, her breathing became laboured. The cold mass of water was crushing her, beating out her life. For some moments she could not move. The rain was beating her to death.
The bare ground was already running with water. The rain fell endlessly in solid floods, blotting out everything. The wind had gone suddenly. There was now nothing but falling masses of water, crooked slashes of lightning jagging across the black, and slow wheels of thunder, loose in the black sky, rolling and drumming heavily.
She must get away from the rain. A strange, morbid irritation awoke in her because of the stunning, persistent mass of water. This was not what she wanted. She wanted death. But not this maddening, insensate bludgeoning, this crushing infliction of water. It was idiotic. She raged inwardly in semi-delirious irritation, her heart began to beat in a mania of irritation.
She started to go back to the distant light of the house. She seemed paralysed, yet felt herself moving forward with stumbling steps. The weight of water beating upon her shoulders bruised her, the water crashed down upon her, ceaseless, relentless, to beat her down. She could not protect herself, so the rain battered upon her.
Her consciousness was almost gone, she had no more reason. She knew she must get out of the rain. That blind, malignant mass of water was too much for her. It fell in a dead weight, to crush her. She was almost unconscious, her movements were automatic, she was crushed to unconsciousness.
Her feet stumbled, she faltered continually. The ground was a morass, the force of rain striking the ground rebounded in a steamy fume to the height of her waist. The rain descended triumphantly. She looked to the light, faintly. It was not far away.
Shuddering, in a tranced unconsciousness, she worked her way forward, feeling that she must fall at every step. The rain battered in a mass against her. She struggled on as if hypnotized.
Then suddenly, in a flash of astonishment, she saw the light near, she stumbled against steps and went slowly up. She knew she was saved. She climbed with a dim determination to the top of the steps. The intolerable infliction of the rain was lifted. She made her way into the house and collapsed. Everything went from her, she sat in a chair, in her sodden clothes, motionless, spent.
For a long time she remained as if quite unconscious. She had no idea of what she should do. Vaguely, she began to feel that there was something she ought to do. But what was it? She did not know. She could not make the effort of thought. The thunder gradually retreated. Then there was nothing but darkness, the empty house, and the hissing, steady crash of the rain.