“Take a seat,” she mumbled as she chewed, “and help yourself.” She pushed the china bowl toward me. “Sweet of you to have forgiven me. What are you doing in London?”
“Nothing. I’ve come to see you.”
I pushed the bowl back with my hand.
“Sweet of you,” she repeated. “You don’t care for Turkish delight?”
“I loathe it.”
“I’ve always doted on it, ever since I was a little girl. They wouldn’t let me have it because it’s fattening. I’m getting my own back. Well,” she said, “now you’ve seen me. Anything you want?”
I disregarded the insolence.
“I have come to court you. The harvest is in, and I have time on my hands before the autumn plowing. I’m settling down a stone’s throw from here, at Bonington House. In this way I’ll only have a few yards to come to present my loving respects to you.”
There was a gleam in her eyes—the first I had seen since I was there. With two fingers she had just picked up a flabby chunk of sweet stuff from the sticky bowl, but she put it back. She wiped her sugary fingers on the panther skin.
“You’re not going to impose your presence on me every day, are you?” she asked.
“I’ve come to court you,” I repeated. “Those words have a definite meaning. Have you any other suitor?”
“I won’t open the door to you.”
“You’ll leave me out on the landing?”
“Yes. You don’t love me. You’re just working yourself up. You’re being a nuisance.”
“You’ll judge after our wedding if I love you or not.”
“I ask you to leave me at once.”
“Dorothy, tell me frankly, and once for alclass="underline" would you talk like that if Sylva did not exist?”
“She does exist and you can’t do anything about it. However, set your mind at rest. I’d talk just like that.”
“Have you taken a dislike to me?”
“Heavens, no! I like you very much. As much as ever. But there’s somebody I like even better: that’s me.”
“But you’re destroying yourself!”
“One can destroy oneself out of self-love. Didn’t I give you a lecture on that subject, one rather awful evening? The lecture may have been grotesque, but what I said was true.”
“You’re just frightened of life because of that rotten marriage. I’ll make you forget it.”
“You’re talking nonsense. I’m not frightened of anything. Neither of life nor death. Nor of falling low in the esteem of fools.”
“Whom do you call fools?”
“People of your type who organize life as if it had a purpose. Which it hasn’t. It’s perfectly meaningless. Oh, all this is so trite! Must I repeat those commonplaces? I am tired, Albert.”
As if to show me that she really was tired, she let her head fall on the cushion and closed her eyes.
“Love,” I told her, “can give a meaning to the most senseless life. Suppose you made up your mind to love me?”
She opened her eyes without raising her head. Her gaze, glinting between her eyelids, reached me as through the narrow slats of a Venetian blind.
“I no longer feel at all inclined to love. And even less inclined to give my life an artificial aim. You don’t understand anything, Albert. I seem to… well, yes… to be killing myself slowly. Perhaps. But, as the saying goes, I’m in no hurry. Life has no meaning, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t plenty of pleasures to offer. And I like pleasures, especially those that don’t give too much trouble, because life also offers a lot of idiotic suffering, and that I’m against. I am all for pleasure and all against suffering, even ever so little. Is that so hard to understand? Love? To love you? I accept the pleasures of love, but refuse its ties. The least tie hurts as soon as you tug at it. No, don’t count on me. Never. But who’s forcing us to marry? What a funny idea, my sweet.”
She paused, then said with unexpected familiarity, “Do you want to go to bed with me?” And she sat up a little on the panther skin and narrowed her eyes. “Tell me, do you? Well, goodness, show me if you do instead of chattering. I hate words. Always words, words. All those ghastly inanities. You keep spouting of love and yet you know quite well that when one gets down to brass tacks it’s just a lot of filth. For heaven’s sake, let’s take it for what it is!” she cried, and one bare leg emerged from under the cover.
“Isn’t that good enough? Is that what you want of me? Would you like that?” she asked, and it seemed to me all of a sudden that her voice was shaking. “Tell me, is that what you want? For all I care! Here, take it, take it!” she said with growing excitement; she threw back the blanket altogether and with a suddenly feverish hand began to unbutton her blouse.
“Dorothy!” I started. I began to rise but the sight of her breast rooted me to the spot. I was seized with giddiness. With a jerk she bared both her breasts and presented them to me in triumph. Her head fell back as if under the weight of her hair, and the walls began to spin around me.
She was swaying, clasping her breasts with both hands. “Come!” she said. “Do come!” She raised her head, a little moisture sparkling at the corners of her lips. “Ah!” she moaned. “What are you waiting for? Do you think I don’t want it now too? I love pleasure, I tell you, I love it! Quick! Aren’t you a man?” She leaned toward me, stretched out a shameless hand.
I was at last able to wrench my feet from the ground and flee.
So, definitely, this was all I was ever able to do! But this fit of hysteria, just like her delirious rage when I had thrown away the snuffbox, this unexpected hurricane of raving eroticism, had quashed all my sensual desire under the same impact of horror, of annihilating repulsion. I returned to Bonington House utterly disturbed and flustered, unable to regain my calm. I could not get out of my mind the alluring beauty of her body, the thrill I had felt at her offering, or the disgust aroused in me by her brazen lasciviousness. At the same time, all sorts of disconcerting thoughts passed through my head. I could see once more the beautiful, half-naked Dorothy, magnificently offered up in that burst of animal desire. A libertine would have taken her, whereas I, imbued with an insular prudishness of almost atavistic power, had refused her. But in the same situation I had not refused Sylva.
Oh yes, you had, I told myself, for a long time. And with the same kind of horror. And then you gave yourself some good reasons for yielding to her charms. Isn’t that just what’s happening to you today? The drug has rotted Dorothy, it has ravaged her, decomposed her until she had become what you have seen today, a female stuffing herself with Turkish delight and suddenly gripped by the mating instinct like a bitch in spring. She abandons herself to her appetites, just as Sylva once did, she no longer strives to tame them but even rushes to gratify them. The only difference from Sylva is that she still pretends to justify her degradation with philosophical balderdash, as a last vestige of humanity—but for how much longer? The only difference? There is another, and so much more heartbreaking! For Sylva is painfully extracting herself from bestial unconsciousness, whereas Dorothy is sinking back into it, dissolving in it, seeking in it a cowardly oblivion…
This last thought shook me more than all the others. For it projected on the situation in which I found myself a new, garish and decisive light. I could no longer shut my eyes to the self-evident fact that the quality of a soul is not measured by what it is, but by what it is becoming. Was I not obliged, in this perspective, to re-examine all that I had lately told myself about my respective duties toward Sylva and Dorothy and reach the opposite conclusion?
However, I did not want to surrender to arguments that corresponded somewhat too nicely to my secret desires… No doubt, in their opposite evolution, Sylva was ennobling herself while Dorothy was rotting her soul in a foul degradation. But that was just the point. Whom should a man on the riverbank rescue: the bold swimmer who is about to win a 100-yard race, or the poor wretch who is on the point of drowning? An insistent voice within me did indeed suggest that to abandon Sylva in the midst of her effort might also be tantamount to letting her drown. But this suggestion again was a little too comforting for my desires. No, the one who stood in the gravest peril just now was Dorothy. I owed it to myself to save her. To overcome my repugnance. To plunge, if necessary, into the nauseous seas in which she was sinking so that I might at least support her until the day when I should be able to bring her safely back to the shore.