Well, then? If so, could I part them? Had I a right to? But revolt again overwhelmed me, a revolt of the senses no doubt but one which, as I gradually perceived, pushed its roots to much greater depths, to strata of my mind that were still clouded with shadows. Yes, I gradually realized that to abandon Sylva to the wretched Jeremy might possibly spell happiness for her, but would certainly be a betrayal. I could not dig deeper than that. The feeling that I would be betraying something very precious in her remained an overriding presentiment, though it did not yet light up with any intelligible meaning. I would be betraying her, but in what way? Certainly not in her fox nature. Nor in her chances of happiness. Where then, I kept wondering, where then, betrayal, is thy sting? But I could not find an answer and once again felt irritated and on edge.
And suddenly this inner agitation resolved itself in a pressing urge that was most singular in the circumstances: an urge to be among people. As if I could find the answer to that irritating question in contact with other human beings. I have always been a recluse. I go to town as little as possible; people normally tire and annoy me; more often than not they make me uneasy. I feel vulnerable amidst them and have only one desire: to be back among my books in the snug silence of the old manor. And suddenly this solitude amid the wind-swept gorse, the fields around me, the nearby forest and all this vast vegetable kingdom were oppressing me! I had the dim but powerful feeling that if I could not find an answer to my self-interrogations, the fault lay above all with this luxuriance around me, this immense burgeoning of inarticulate life and my own isolation in it—infinitesimal mankind dissolving in the welter of this blind and triumphant sea of proliferating vegetation which sided with the gorilla against me. So long as I was deafened by this elementary exuberance, I would be unable to hear a human reply. I got up, left the melancholy ruins and made for the hamlet. There I borrowed a trap from a friendly farmer who agreed to drive me to town himself. Wednesday was market day in Wardley; there would be no lack of people. Half an hour later I was strolling amid the crowd, or rather adrift in it like flotsam carried by the sea, by its heaving and tossing, by its ebb and flow loud with the drone of surf breaking on the shingle. I no longer thought of anything. I was looking.
Ears. Necks. Fuzzy hair. Chests straining under jerseys, others heavy and limp, wobbling like jelly. Brick-colored faces, faces the color of turnips or potatoes, two cheeks stretched tight like red marble, a chin burgeoning as if in spring, a nose like a knife stuck into a pear. Breath, shouts, laughter, groans of strain, sighs of weariness, a vast smell of meat warmed by the sun that floated above this shambling jostle, big sudden eddies beginning to liquefy like turning mayonnaise, then just as suddenly thickening again, whisked together by the reflux. I felt stifled. Once again I was flooded by the same nauseous obsession of organic proliferation that I had fled from; I had merely exchanged one surfeit for another, and whether animal or vegetable it still was on the gorilla’s side against me. All I could see in this welter of human flesh was a blind, limp lurching toward obscene agglutinations, a bestial heel-kicking until four walls and nightfall would bring it carnal release in a vast fornication. I thought of an article I had read in The Times a few days previously, expressing alarm at the growing population of the globe, which had doubled in fifty years and would be tripled again before the end of the century. Meat, meat, apes, apes everywhere! There was nothing to look for in this swarming genesis; this human glut could not give me the answer I needed.
I felt so depressed, so disheartened, that I walked into the first public house I came to, sat myself down in the barroom in a deep leather armchair shiny with wear, and ordered a whisky, then another. I dimly felt that I was making a mistake somewhere, since in spite of everything the idea of leaving Sylva to her pithecanthrope left me with that feeling of betrayal which I could neither banish nor admit. How many whiskies did I drink? I do not know. Nor how much time I spent, sprawling in the armchair with closed eyelids, in the fumes of alcohol, subjected to an endless procession of lewd pictures which I did not even have the strength to dismiss.
How I came to be outside I have forgotten, except that it was dark. How I hired a cart (or how it was hired for me, and by whom), how it got me back to Richwick Manor, I have forgotten too. The first picture I can see, shaky and blurred, is the bulldog face of Mrs. Bumley. Or rather pieces of her face which I cannot manage to put together: a pair of eyes full of sorrow; two sagging cheeks quivering with disapproval; two thin, long lips opening on a gulf, in the depths of which quivers a lump of moist flesh whose crimson color fascinates me. And words reach me as if from another world: “Sylva is back. She is upstairs.”
I recollect an endless flight of stairs which rises and rolls with me, and starts over and over again. I must have fallen down several times, for next morning my knees were very sore. A door in a dark corridor resists malignantly. Even more malignantly it suddenly opens; I am sent sprawling and crawl across the carpet on all fours, I pull the bed sheets toward me, the blanket comes with them, what I now see sobers me suddenly—or rather, ah! my drunkenness amplifies strangely, breaks into an inspired paean, bursts out like a heavenly fanfare…
Faced with this sleeping body in the reclining grace of a Correggio, it seems to me that everything has at last become marvelously clear. No more mystery. A dazzling brightness floods me, I send up to heaven a Te Deum which, though somewhat profane, is nonetheless a thanksgiving—Halleluja! Halleluja! But what happened afterward I cannot say. I would set it down quite truthfully if my memory could conjure up the slightest picture, however dim. But there is nothing: what comes after this hosanna is a drop into a black hole. At most I retained on waking the very vague impression of having spent a restless night.
Chapter 17
NEXT morning when I woke, sobered, I was holding between my chest and my knees, as if in a pair of nutcrackers, a very small, frail Sylva, curled up, foxlike, in a ball, her hair caressing my chin. And I was amazed that, with my drunkenness gone, I did not feel at all ashamed, or at least embarrassed or perplexed, at holding the sweet creature in my arms. On the contrary, I felt lighthearted, happy. I remembered having thought, as in my drunken stupor I gazed at the sleeping sylph in her amber-colored indolence, that I had at last “understood everything.”
“No more mystery.” But I vainly tried to recapture that sense of sudden perspicacity and, with it, what it was that I had perceived so irrefutably in my drunkenness. I could recapture none of it. Nor, as a matter of fact, could I rediscover the source from which, the night before, had sprung the sort of shame or disgust that had impregnated me for so long: six glasses of whisky had swept it away, but logically it ought to have reappeared. The conditions, I reflected, are the same as they were yesterday, and the warm little animal I am holding ensconced like a sweet hazelnut in the crook of my body still has nothing feminine about her except her appearance. I am not trying to deceive myself. She is a vixen. And yet I feel no confusion, no regret, at imagining (quite mistakenly, perhaps) what may have happened last night. All my previous repugnance now seems to me silly and prejudiced. What has changed then? If Sylva hasn’t, have I?