He should be here in ten minutes. I was feeling exalted, braced, active with physical well-being; there was a tremor in my hands.
Hugh was a quarter of an hour late. I was standing up as he came in. He gave his bright, flickering smile. I said that it was a nasty night, and asked if he were soaked. He replied that he had found a taxi, but that his trousers were damp below the knees. Could he dry them by the fire? He sat in a chair with his feet in the fireplace. He remarked, sulkily, that he had to take care of his chest.
I invited him to have a drink. First he said no, then he changed his mind, then he stopped me and asked for a very small one. He sat there with glass in hand while I stood on the other side of the hearth. Steam was rising from his trousers, and he pushed his feet nearer to the grate.
‘I’m sorry to have brought you out on a night like this,’ I said.
‘Oh well, I’m here.’ His manner, when he was not defending himself, was easy and gentle.
‘If you had to turn out tonight,’ I said, ‘it’s a pity that I’ve got to tell you unpleasant things.’
He was looking at me, alert for the next words. His face was open.
I said casually: ‘I wonder if you’d rather we went out and ate first. If so, I won’t begin talking seriously until we come back. I must have you alone for what I’ve got to say. I don’t know what the weather’s like now.’
I left the fireplace, went to the window, and lifted the bottom of the blind. The rain was tapping steadily. Now that our eyes were not meeting, he raised his voice sharply ‘It can’t possibly take long, can it? I haven’t the faintest idea what it’s all about—’
I turned back.
‘You’d rather I spoke now?’ I said,
‘I suppose so.’
I sat down opposite to him. The steam was still wafted by the draught, and there was a smell of moist clothes. His eyes flickered away, and then were drawn back. He did not know what to expect.
‘Sheila wants to marry you,’ I said. ‘She wants to marry you more than you want to marry her.’
His eyelids blinked. He looked half-surprised that I should begin so.
‘Perhaps that’s true,’ he said.
‘You’re quite undecided,’ I said.
‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’
‘You’re absolutely undecided,’ I said. ‘You can’t make up your mind. It’s very natural that you shouldn’t be able to.’
‘I shall make it up.’
‘You’re not happy about it. You’ve got a feeling that there’s something wrong. That’s why you’re so undecided.’
‘How do you know that I feel there’s something wrong?’
‘By the same instinct that is warning you,’ I said. ‘You feel that there are reasons why you shouldn’t marry her. You can’t place them, but you feel that they exist.’
‘Well?’
‘If you knew her better’, I said, ‘you would know what those reasons are.’
He was leaning back in the chair with his shoulders huddled.
‘Of course, you’re not unprejudiced,’ he said.
‘I’m not unprejudiced,’ I said. ‘But I’m speaking the truth, and you believe that I’m speaking the truth.’
‘I’m very fond of her,’ he said. ‘I don’t care what you tell me. I shall make up my mind for myself.’
I waited, I let his eyes dart towards me, before I spoke again.
‘Have you any idea’, I said, ‘what marriage with her would mean?’
‘Of course I’ve an idea.’
‘Let me tell you. She has little physical love for you — or any man.’
‘More for me than for anyone.’ He had a moment of certainty.
I said: ‘You’ve made love to other women. What do you think of her?’
He did not reply. I repeated the question. He was more obstinate than I had counted on — but I was full of the joy of power, of revenge, of the joy that mine was the cruel will. Power over him, that was nothing, except to get my way. He was an instrument, and nothing else. In those words I took revenge for the humiliation of years, for the love of which I had been deprived. It was she to whom I spoke.
I said: ‘She has no other love to give.’
‘If I feel like marrying her,’ he said, ‘I shall.’
‘In that case,’ I said, and now I knew the extreme of effort, the extreme of release, ‘you’ll be marrying an abnormal woman.’
He misunderstood me.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t mean that. I mean that she is hopelessly unstable. And she’ll never be anything else.’
I could feel his hate. He hated me, he hated the force and violence in my voice. He longed to escape, and yet he was fascinated.
‘But you’d take her on,’ he said. ‘If only she’d have you. You can’t deny it, can you?’
‘It is true,’ I said. ‘But I love her, which is the bitterest fate in my life. You don’t love her, and you know it. I couldn’t help myself, and you can. And if I married her, I should do it with my eyes open. I should marry her, but I should know that she was a pathological case.’
He avoided my gaze.
‘You’ve got to know that too,’ I said.
‘Are you saying that she will go mad?’
‘Do you know’, I said, ‘when madness begins or ends?’ I went on: ‘If you ask me whether she’ll finish in an asylum, I should say no. But if you ask me what it would be like to go home to her after you were married, I tell you this: you would never know what you would find.’
I asked him if he had ever heard the word schizoid. I asked if he had noticed anything unusual about her actions. I told him stories of her. All the time my exultation was mounting higher still; from his whole bearing, I was certain that I had not misjudged him. He would never marry her, He wanted to escape, as soon as he decently could, from a storm of alien violence. He was out of his depth with both her and me. His feeling for her had always been mild; his desire to marry her not much more than a fancy; now I had destroyed it. He hated me, but I had destroyed it.
I despised him, in the midst of passionate triumph, in the midst of my mastery over her, for not loving her more. At that moment I felt nothing but contempt for him. I was on her side as I watched him begin to extricate himself.
‘I shall have to think it over,’ he said. ‘I suppose that it’s time I made up my mind.’
He knew that his decision was already taken. He knew that it was surrender. He knew that he would slip from her, and that I was certain of it.
I demanded that, as soon as he told her, he should tell me too.
‘It’s only between her and me,’ he said with an effort of defiance.
‘I must know.’
He hated me, but for the last time he gave way.
Right at the end, he asserted himself. He would not come with me to dinner, but went off on his own.
The next morning I went into court to hear a judgement. It was in one of the London police courts; the case was a prosecution for assault which I had won the week before; the defendant had been remanded for a medical report. He had been pronounced sane, and now the stipendiary sentenced him. There was a shadow of blackmail in the case, and the magistrate was stern. ‘It passes my comprehension how anyone can sink to such behaviour. No words are too strong to express the detestation which we all feel for such men as you—’
It had often seemed to me strange that men should be so brazen with their moral indignation. Were they so utterly cut off from their own experience that they could utter these loud, resounding, moral brays and not be forced to look within? What were their own lives like, that they could denounce so enthusiastically? If baboons learned to talk, the first words they spoke would be stiff with moral indignation. I thought it again, without remorse, as I sat in court that Thursday morning.