Let Me Alone

CHAPTER 15

AT the end of the week Matthew came back to the bungalow. Anna saw him walking across the parched, open space. He was quite well-made, but with the ugly, clumsy sun-helmet on his head he looked foolish, top-heavy, curiously like some sort of mechanical toy. He was healthy and strong, the typical man of action, he walked rather like a wound-up machine.

She was repelled when he came into the drawing-room, his large fists dangling, his head dark and smooth, but not shiny, and his blue eyes glassy and bright. He seemed so unaware of her, like an animal. And yet his glance was so possessive, it sickened her with disgust. She was hostile to him, repelled by him, and yet indifferent.

He looked at the quiet, seemingly impassive girl, and he thought he had got the better of her. She noticed the complacent, proprietary, slightly suggestive regard which so disgusted her. She could not bear to think that she would have to tell him about the child. She felt that she would never bring herself to tell him.

‘Is there any news?’ he asked, smiling and showing his sharp teeth.

She shook her head.

He came and put his hand on her shoulder in a sort of caress, a heavy, clumsy touch from which she shuddered. She turned aside her head, hoping he would not kiss her. She felt as though she were bound up tightly, in a knot of distaste.

‘Nothing happened while I’ve been away?’

‘Nothing at all,’ she said, resisting him.

His hand tightened upon her. He tried to draw her against him.

A madness of opposition sprang up in her heart. She wrenched herself away. She knew she would never touch him again. Suddenly, she couldn’t endure to be touched by him. Her repugnance was like a madness in her. She was desolate and degraded. But she would never touch him again.

Her opposition would never waver. She knew that this was final. She saw nothing but a dead, dry ugliness in Matthew. He was utterly repellant to her. Every nerve in her body seemed to strain away from him.

Immediately, there was a flare of sheer conflict between them. Matthew stepped back. His face had gone stiff with rage. He turned his back on her and walked out of the room. Anna had bested him for the moment. But the ultimate struggle was postponed merely. Her heart was in a trance of despair, blank, ashy dejection. She wanted to die.

In the late afternoon Matthew went to the club. Anna stayed alone in the house, sitting quite quiet, white, and numb. Her emotions seemed to have become deadened, her spirit hard and cold. Her thoughts made her miserable, so she tried to think as little as possible. At the bottom of her heart a cold despair lay like a cold stone. She would never escape now, there was no hope for her. Her hope was laid away in the drawer with Catherine’s letter, there was nothing but opposition left in her. She would resist Matthew, he should not touch her, she would resist him for ever. This was all that remained, this cold, negative force of resistance. The vivid flame of her real life was extinguished. Her real self was lost and dead.

The miserable minutes passed, in the hot, empty, dilapidated house. It was insufferably hot. The punkah swung back and forward wearily. Back and forward, back and forward, the monotony caused a deep-seated physical ache in her. She went upstairs to put some eau-de-cologne on her forehead. The things on her dressing-table, the bottles and the silver-backed brushes, were almost too hot to touch. It was strangely dark.

She went to the window and looked out. Great clouds were moving across the sky, though the air was deathly still. A curious coppery film, like a veil of electricity made visible, hung in the upper air. The parrots were making a great noise.

She stood for a minute to watch the fluttering parrots. She had a sort of fondness for them, for the small, vivid, blue-green birds, so brilliant and jewel-green, darting and poising among the dry-as-dust branches of the tamarinds. She was sorry for them when, in the heat of the midday sun, they swooned with the heat, and fell down dizzily, small green-winged fallen angels, to lie half dead and palpitating on the ground. Now they were all dithering with excitement, for some reason, flashing and beating, and screeching their thin, sharp, frail little cries.

The whole pulse of the day seemed stifled, the air heavy with suspense, burning, sinister suspense vibrating in the air under the clouds, over the still, breathless plain. It was about the time of sunset, but in the west, and over the whole sky, the threatening mass of cloud had gathered: the dark clouds roofed over the world. They looked black and massive as iron, and heavy with an ominous, diabolic portentousness. Like the iron wings of demons. And underneath the clouds, between the clouds and the earth, the strange electric luminosity hung, phosphorescent, shedding a livid gleam upon everything.

There was no one about. The world seemed swept clean of humanity. All at once a desolation had descended. Away in the village, gongs were rolling their heavy notes on the air.

Anna went downstairs again. The drawing-room was almost in darkness. She called a servant to open the shutters.

‘The rain is coming,’ said the man, stepping quickly about on his small, quick, silent feet. In him, too, the dark thrill of expectation and excitement was perceptible. The forbidden, obscure excitement of the old demon-worship. He opened the wooden shutters with deft, rapid motions. Anna could feel the secret, intense, febrile preoccupation in him, rather ghoulish and frightening. He hurried silently away. She was alone again.

Her mind and body alike were taut with suspense. It was almost more than she could bear. She did not know for what she was waiting — for the rains to break, or for the struggle with Matthew, or for her own destruction. All was strange, dreary, and desperate. Yet her inner pride held its own. Let her body be defiled, let her spirit be quenched; yet she would never yield, she would never really be touched. Just such a single, lonely spark of pure resistance glowed in her, indomitable.

She began to revive the memory of her past life. It was almost as though she evoked for the last time the spirit of her real self. It was as if, through her memories, she might return for a little to her true self, as she had been before the nightmare had enveloped her, before this doom had come upon her, this misery of thwarting and degradation.

She thought of her father and herself, and of Haddenham and her relations with Sidney and with Rachel Fielding, and of Blue Hills. And it seemed to her that her life had been a river flowing on strongly to some unknown but appropriate destination, from which her marriage had caused it to deviate. It was Lauretta who had diverted it from its proper course. But she felt no especial bitterness against Lauretta. Only she felt inclined to weep at the cruel purposelessness of her own frustration — why had it happened? And she wondered what her true life should have been, the course for which she had been destined.

It was a torment to her to recall the past. For it was like looking back on a life of lost opportunities. It had been beautiful and full of promise. She saw the promise of her beginning, which could never come to fulfilment, she saw its death. And the rare, fine self which she had lost had lived so briefly, she had not had time to realize it.

At length Matthew came back from the club. Hard and despairing and closed within herself, she waited for the start of the battle. She heard the heavy clatter of his footsteps outside. He did not look at her as he came in. His face was neat and unrevealing as ever, his eyes bright and blue and expressionless, his dark head was round and foolish-looking as it always was. But there was about him a dangerousness, a sullen, surly, slightly unbalanced air. He looked a bully. He glanced at Anna’s calm, abstracted face. Hysterical anger gushed up from his heart.

They sat down together to dinner. The lamplight fell on the heavy, gaol-made furniture, bringing out reddish gleams, like blood, in the dark wood. The heat was stifling, volcanic, like a molten mass pressing against the walls of the house. Anna felt she could not live. Outside the windows, pale flickerings of lightning came and went.

‘The rains are breaking,’ Matthew said.

‘Will the rain come to-night?’ she asked. It was difficult to speak to him.

‘Perhaps,’ he answered, churlish.

She felt she would die.

The servants hurried on with the meal. They seemed electric, vibrant with secret excitement; not so much human beings as living conductors of electricity. Anna looked at the thin, brown, delicate hands of the man who was serving her. She could not bear to take the dish from him, lest his hands should burn her with a fire of electricity, lest sparks should fly from his finger-tips.

Matthew sat silent in front of her. He was dressed in white, and his skin showed dark as leather against the white linen. She could feel the fierce, almost insane antagonism in him, the lust to conquer her. And she could feel her own resistance, unchanging, rocky.

She knew she would never let him touch her again. She would die rather. But he was so fixed, so mindless, and the stiffness of his body was so like an inanimate thing. And he was determined, obstinately, blindly determined. Her heart grew colder.

She sat at the table without eating or speaking. The lightning flickered incessantly upon the silver and on the blades of the knives.

Finally the meal came to an end. They went back to the drawing-room, which was a dark, asphyxiating tank of heavy heat. They seemed to fall into a trough of sheer ghastliness.

Anna took a book and pretended to read. The presence of Matthew was like a pressure on her head. She was all the time aware of his eyes watching with a blank, unmoving hostility. Her heart seemed to die in a last despair.

As she sat over her book the wind rose, in a sudden crash, there was a noise of something banging at the back of the house, the trees made strange rushing sounds. She looked up, startled. Matthew got to his feet.

‘I shall go to bed,’ he said. ‘I’m tired, and I want to get some sleep before the thunder begins. Once the storm starts in earnest there’ll be no rest for anybody.’

A ghastliness came over her. She was overcome by the imminence of the cruel struggle. A deep, helpless misery rose up in her. But she was quite steadfast, firmly set on her rock of resistance. He should not touch her.

They went upstairs, and she stood in her own room, very quiet, awaiting, as it seemed, his onslaught upon her. She did not begin to undress.

She looked out of the window at the black sky where great gusts of wind were tearing about. Vast hollow noises of wind or thunder were crashing behind the rushing of the trees. The lightning was beating nearer, like livid wings beating in the sky.

Matthew came into the room. She was unaware. She was watching the void of roaring darkness. He saw her grave, jewel-hard face turned to the night, her slim body straight against the dark window. Her face was so abstracted and cold, the expression of her face seemed sinister, apart from humanity. The sound of the wind was like voices which she seemed to understand, like voices calling to her. She looked intent.

Matthew stood motionless. He was half afraid. He half wanted to go away from her. But he could not. He could not go away. A sort of hysteria was goading him, goading him towards her desperately. His face was blank; there was darkness in his heart.

At last he said:

‘Why haven’t you started to undress?’

She looked round as if a shadow had spoken. Matthew stood stiff, just inside the doorway.

She looked at him. But she hardly seemed to see him. She took no heed of him. He was affronted; his heart black and angry.

‘Are you waiting for me to help you?’ he asked, with a vicious leer. And a sharp pain leapt within her. She knew what was coming — she would have to fight him. He should not touch her.

‘I was watching the storm,’ she said coldly.

Matthew watched her with a queer smile on his face. But it was a smile of enmity. He came a little nearer.

‘Let me help you,’ he said. ‘Let me take off your dress.’ And he smiled suggestively, with suggestive anticipation, as he advanced to take her by the arm. But she stepped quickly away.

‘Let me alone, she said.

‘Don’t be absurd,’ he said, angrily. He contrived to put a nasty threat into the words.

She said nothing, but watched him. He should not touch her.

‘Come!’ he said menacingly. He was half afraid of his seething rage against her.

Anna watched him with cold grey eyes. And once more he attempted to take hold of her, coming very near, so that his brownish, neat face was close to hers.

‘Please go away,’ she said, avoiding him.

‘Why should I go?’ cried Matthew, looking at the silent girl with a grimace of fury. Her indifferent face looked back at him, pale and stubborn.

‘Why should I go away?’ Am I to be turned out of my own house by my own wife?’ There was a dangerous menace in the ridiculous question.

Anna stood still, her heart cold as stone. She felt that the strain of the suspense and the unpleasantness must kill her. She wondered whether she ought to tell him about the child. But she did not. She could not bring herself to tell him.

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.

At last she forced herself upstairs. It seemed a long, long way — a wearisome pilgrimage. Once she fancied that Matthew was calling to her. How thankful she was that he did not appear. She lay on her bed, shivering with cold, for a long time. Then she fell into a heavy, uncomfortable sleep.

She was rather ill for a few days, not delirious, but feverish and strange. A strange sense of inappropriateness haunted her like a persistent ache. She ought to have died that night in the rain. Why had she not died? She seemed to have suffered an unnatural partial death. Her spirit was dead. Why did her body still linger in life?

She was dead, and yet she was alive. Her body held her to life, in spite of herself. There was all the time a sense of falsity, of unreality. Why did her body persist in living? She had come to the end of everything. There was no object left in life. It was only decent that she should die. But her boay nailed her to life, nailing her down.

There would be no child. She was glad of that. She was glad that Matthew had not known about the child, that no one had known. It would be a secret now, for ever. A secret shame at the bottom of her heart. She tried to push the secret down, deeper, deeper, within herself. She wanted to hide it even from herself.

Then suddenly she thought of Catherine. In a vivid flash she realized that Catherine could now come to her. Catherine could come and deliver her from the nightmare and from Matthew. Her spirit stirred in its death-trance. She began to come back to personal life. But for some time she did nothing. There was a period of waiting — a strange waiting for life to swing back. She could not find herself at first.

Then she wrote out a cable and sent one of the servants with it to the station. She said nothing to Matthew, to anyone. She waited a few days in a state of passive suspense. She was not anxious or excited. Only she waited with all her being. It was the final crisis of her existence. If Catherine came, she would live. If not, let this be the end. At last it seemed that a decision was being made for her, outside her. She was almost at peace in her profound waiting, her sense of approaching finality. She had touched bottom at last.

One evening a cable arrived from Catherine: ‘I am coming on the next boat.’ The old flame sprang up again in her. Her life was not finished then. It went on. Hope came back to her a little, like an old warmth renewed. It was good that the nightmare had not destroyed her. A glow of warmth and vitality went through her blood.

She must tell Matthew about the cable. She wondered vaguely how he would react. But she did not trouble about his attitude. She was not interested. He did not affect her any more. Since she had conquered him, since she had bested him in the struggle for dominance, he seemed obliterated. The recognition of her victory killed the cocksureness in him. He had no more power over her, she knew she had subdued him to her for ever, her victory was final and complete. And he himself seemed aware of this. He knew he would never be able to touch her again. He did not really want to touch her. She had taken the heart out of him in her victory. He succumbed to her.

There was no reality in their relationship one to another. Matthew came into Anna’s room, where she was in bed ill. He was stiff and obliterated. He did not look at her. He could not bear to look at her cold, enigmatic, indifferent face. He had no assurance, no support. He never looked at Anna, if he could help it, while he talked to her. She was a horror and a humiliation to him. He was afraid of her. He wanted to run away and hide himself from the horror and the humiliating slight of her victorious disregard. He felt that she had humiliated him for ever. He was strangely effaced before her.

They talked civilly, quietly, to one another, about ordinary affairs, as two strangers might speak. They were like two strangers who were obliged temporarily to live in the same house. And all the time he wanted to hide himself from her.

Calmly, without misgiving or anxiety, she told him that Catherine was coming. His heart went small and painful at the realization of her contempt for him. He knew he counted for less than nothing.

‘I am not enough for you, then,’ he said, in a childish, querulous voice, resentful.

She looked at him across the room, studying him. He stood stiffly, his shoulders set square, the light behind his dark, round, inhuman head. She saw him. She saw him so distinctly that he was almost pitiful to her. She wanted to like him, to be friends with him. But she could not. Insensitive, blank, meaningless, there he stood like a queer effigy of himself. ‘A queer fish.’ It was so fatally true.

‘It’s the loneliness,’ she said. ‘I can’t stand being so much alone.’ She wanted to let him down lightly.

‘You haven’t done with me?’ he asked at length, turning his head. ‘Because this girl comes you haven’t finished with me? It won’t make any difference?’ His pride was broken; she had conquered him, but he clung to the wraith of his complacency. It was pathetic.

‘No,’ she answered, lying to him. She was sorry for him. She wanted to say more. But she knew that everything was finished. What was the good of talking? And her own hope was stirring warmly, beautifully within her. She had her own thoughts to attend to.