Ruminating, they sipped their whiskies. The bartender was shaking cocktails for two college boys who leaned with careful nonchalance, in wet raincoats, against the bar. The snow, one of them was saying, had turned to rain.
“That touches the spot,” said the Professor. He put down his glass and smiled. He felt extraordinarily good-natured. “Lovely! Lovely! Lovely!”… Bill’s phrase, in Bill’s suave and intense and—yes—gauzy voice, ran in his head hypnotically.
“To resume. I’ll cut the thing short—for of course you can imagine the next few stages well enough for yourselves. Nothing much happened in the morning and afternoon of the third day—but in the evening, when we climbed up to the boat-deck again, things began to happen pretty fast. She was in a frenzy—had an idea that I had been cold to her all day—accused me of avoiding her, not looking at her—and so forth. Naturally, I denied this, and took the easiest way of doing so—I embraced her ardently and kissed her, swearing that if I had appeared to avoid meeting her eyes it was only because I was so afraid of giving myself away in public. She hugged me, she kissed my hands, she ran her fingers up inside my coat sleeves, and then, beginning to cry, she told me about her husband.… It appears that he was a typical American businessman—successful, energetic, cold, hard-boiled, as the saying is. She had been married to him for five years—he was twelve years older than she—and for the first year or so she had been more or less happy. But then she began to discover their temperamental differences. She was passionately in love, and he was not. She was romantic, and he was not. She wanted adventure, color, excitement, parties, music, poetry, art—you know the sort of things: a kind of American Emma Bovary; and he, alas, became every minute more absorbed in his business life, a mere walking ledger. What relaxation he sought was in his club or on the golf-links, and always alone. In a nut-shell, he was indifferent to her because he was sexless. Nothing new in the situation, of course—we read about it every other day in the divorce cases. But it astounded me, as it still astounds me, that anyone could have married such a being as she was and remain indifferent. She said he had no tact, no understanding, whatever: gave her things, of the kind that money could buy, and gave generously, but never gave himself. A perfunctory kiss at breakfast, and another when he came home from the office. And there had been no children.…
“Quae cum ita sint, she was unconsciously ripe for such a misadventure as befell her with me. She thought me romantic-looking; and I had then only to kiss Smet-Smet, and murmur to her how nice it would be if we could fly away together to Tahiti or Karnak, and she was certain that in me she had found her great lover, her ideal. In fact, she said so. That I was myself married—I had fortunately mentioned this at the outset—didn’t affect her in the least. No matter what happened, she said, she would now and henceforth be happy all her life, by virtue of this memory. She now knew—so she said—what it was to love and be loved. Just think of it! She had extracted all this from a few clandestine embraces on B Deck and the paltry half-dozen romantic phrases which I had managed to recall from my reading of soupy love-stories in the cheaper magazines. If that isn’t an irony, what is? I was horribly ashamed of myself—I’ve never in all my days felt so miserably cheap and dishonest. A perfect cad. And yet, when I looked back over the affair I couldn’t, to save my neck, see any point at which I could decently, or mercifully—yes, mercifully—have behaved otherwise than as I did … Good God!”
He paused, removed his pipe from his mouth, stared at the ashes in it as if a little surprised, struck a match absent-mindedly, without using it blew it out, and then resumed.
“Yes.… That’s how it was.… And you can imagine exactly how it affected me. I exerted myself, on the one hand, to make love to her more passionately; and on the other hand, I had my eye perpetually on my watch, or my ear on the ship’s bells, so as to reduce our meetings to a minimum. I worked my three acquaintances for all they were worth—told her that they were already a little suspicious, and that I would have to be a good deal more careful. Pretended also that I had some very important work to do—reading for lectures, et cetera. She took it like a lamb, believed me without question. And—heavens!—how astonishing it was, to go down from that dark upper deck, where we stood for an hour under the stars, absolutely immobile with passionate absorption in each other, in that blind state of panic when the whole universe seems to flow into one’s soul—to go down alone from this to the smoking room and hear Peters saying, in his lazy drawl, ‘Well, according to Einstein—’ or Marks telling the other chap the theoretical value in tricks of each card in a bridge-game. That, in addition to my own singular detachment—call it dishonest if you like—gave the thing an exotic unreality, a nostalgic remoteness, of an unmatchable loveliness. I experienced a profound feeling of gratitude that such an adventure should have befallen the least romantic of men: and I was terrified, with the genuine sacred terror, when I wondered what the future might hold in store for me.
“I remarked, earlier, on the inevitable step-by-step progression of such affairs, from the less to the more intense, and this was no exception. With each night, as we approached nearer to America and the American winter, the weather grew colder—but nothing could daunt us. On the last night, when we climbed up for our farewell meeting, it was actually snowing. We had our heavy coats on—and there we stood, being literally drifted under, while the ship plunged and corkscrewed in a gigantic sea. It was marvelous—as if the elements themselves were conspiring with us to give our Liebestod a touch of grandiosity. No—grandeur! For it was that. Certainly, with Lovely, it had become a grand passion. I admit that I’d never had any idea what terrific force a passion could have. It she could have torn me limb from limb, as the Bacchantes tore—who was it? I’ve forgotten his name—she’d have done so. As it was, she kissed me with a kiss that was more like flame, lambent flame, than I could have conceived it to be: restless, rapid, devouring. She even opened my waistcoat, and slid her hand in against my heart; and we stood there, motionless in the blizzard for all the world like a pair of stanchions or davits, and apparently as lifeless.
“What happened then is the thing that gives its whole point to the story—if it has a point at all—and it’s essential that you should see it in the right way. If you regard the thing as merely a tidbit of scandal, and hope for a climax of the approved smoking-room style, you’ll be disappointed, and you’ll miss what is to my mind the real beauty and pathos, or rather tragedy, of the actual event. I need hardly say that when we finally groped our way down below again, shaking the snow off our hats and coats, we were in no mood to separate. It was late—eleven-thirty—for one hour had stretched to two; and when we stood in the corridor to say good night we found ourselves alone, in a ship which to all intents and purposes had gone to sleep. We said good night: I had my hand on her wrist: and then, once more surrendering to an impulse that seemed to come from her rather than from myself, I asked her to come to my room. The question seemed to hang there for a long while, portentously reverberating, catastrophically reverberating, while we stared at each other: and then, shutting her eyes as if in an agony, she said ‘no.’ I didn’t urge her. I merely added that I would wait for her—that I would expect her in three minutes—told her how to find my stateroom—and that I would leave the door ajar. With this, I turned my back and departed. She stood there, unmoving.
“In three minutes, she came into my room. When I embraced her, and told her how happy she had made me, I felt that she was trembling—trembling violently. She was in a queer passive trancelike state; and while I kissed her, she kept her dark eyes wide open, as if she were desperately looking for something, something unresolved or unresolvable. And then, gently detaching herself from me, and leaning her back against the door, she said the most completely surprising and most completely terrifying thing that was ever said to me. ‘I am yours—’ she said—‘irrevocably and utterly yours. I must stay here with you, if you like. But I must tell you that if I do this, then I shall never, never, never, as long as I live, let you go. I’ll follow you everywhere—I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth. Your wife won’t matter to me, nor my husband, nor social scandal, nor anything: I will sacrifice everything to be near you, and I’ll never give you up, so help me God. I’ve got to tell you that. And then you can decide whether you want me to stay.…’