CHAPTER XXXIX
When Helen kept her eyes
closed, the red darkness behind the lids came wildly and chaotically to
life. Like a railway station, it seemed,
full of hurrying people, loud with voices; and the colours glowed, the forms
stood sharply out, jewelled, with the more than real definition of forms and
colours under limelight. It was as
though the fever had assembled a crowd inside her head, had lighted lamps and
turned on the gramophone. On the
unnaturally brilliant stage the images came and went on their own initiative
and in ferocious disregard of Helen's own wishes. Came and went, talked, gesticulated, acted
out their elaborate, insane dramas, unceasingly, without mercy on her fatigue,
without consideration for her longing to be at rest and alone. Sometimes, in the hope that the outer world
would eclipse this scurrying lunacy within, she opened her eyes. But the light hurt her; and in spite of those
bunched roses on the wallpaper, in spite of the white counterpane and the knobs
at the end of the bedstead, in spite of the looking-glass, the hair brushes,
the bottle of eau-de-Cologne, those imagines on the other side of her eyes went
on living that private life of theirs, undisturbed. A vehement and crazy life
now utterly irrelevant, like a story invented by somebody else, then all at
once agonizingly to the point, agonizingly hers.
This morning, for example, this afternoon (which was it? time
was at once endless and non-existent: but at any rate it was just after Mme
Bonifay had been in to see her stinking, stinking of garlic and dirty
linen), there had been a huge hall, with statues. Gilded statues. She recognized Voltaire, fifty feet high, and
there was one of those Chinese camels, but enormous. People were standing in groups, beautifully
placed, like people on the stage.
Indeed, they were on the stage.
Acting a play of intrigue, a play with love-scenes and
revolvers. How bright the
spotlights were! how clearly and emphatically they
spoke the lines! Each word a bell, each
figure a shining lamp.
'Hands up
I love you
If she falls into the trap
' And yet who were
they, what were they saying? And now for
some extraordinary reason they were talking about arithmetic. Sixty-six yards of linoleum
at three and eleven a yard. And
the woman with the revolver was suddenly Miss Cosmas. There was no Voltaire, no gilded camel. Only the blackboard. Miss Cosmas had always hated her because she
was so bad at maths, had always been odious and unfair. 'At three and eleven,' Miss Comas shouted, 'at
three and eleven.' But Mme Bonifay's
number was eleven, and Helen was walking once again along the rue de la
Tombe-Issoire, feeling more and more sick with
apprehension at every step. Walking slowlier and slowlier in the hope of never getting there. But the houses came rushing down towards her,
like the walls of a moving staircase in the Underground. Came rushing towards her, and then, when
number eleven drew level, stopped dead, noiselessly. 'Mme Bonifay, Sage Femme de Iθre
Classe.' She stood looking at the words,
just as she had stood in reality, two days before; then walked on, just as she
had walked on then. Only one more minute,
she pleaded with herself, till she got over her nervousness, till she felt less
sick. Walked up the street again, and
was in a garden with her grandmother and Hugh Ledwidge. It was a walled garden with a pine wood at
one end of it. And a man came running
out of the wood, a man with some awful kind of skin disease on his face. Red blotches and scabs and scurf. Horrible!
But all her grandmother said was, 'God has spat in his face,' and
everyone laughed. But in the middle of
the wood, when she went on, stood a bed, and immediately, somehow, she was
lying on it, looking at a lot more people in another play, in the same play,
perhaps. Bright under
the spotlights, with voices like bells in her ears; but incomprehensible,
unrecognizable. And Gerry was
there, sitting on the edge of her bed, kissing her, stroking her shoulders, her
breasts. 'But, Gerry, you mustn't! All those people they can see us. Gerry, don't!' But when she tried to push him away, he was
like a block of granite, immovable; and all the time his hands, his lips were
releasing soft moths of quick and fluttering pleasure under her skin; and the
shame, the dismay of being seen by all those people, let loose at the same time
a special physical anguish of its own a finer-footed, wildlier-fluttering
sensation that was no longer a moth, but some huge beetle, revolting to the
touch, and yet revoltingly delicious.
'Don't, Gerry, don't!' And
suddenly she remembered everything that night after the kitten had died, and
all the other nights, and then the first signs, the growing anxiety, and the
day she had telephoned to him and been told that he'd gone to Canada, and
finally the money, and that evening when her mother
'I hate you!' she cried;
but as she managed with a last violent effort to push him away, she felt a stab
of pain so excruciating that for a moment she forgot her delirium and was
wholly at the mercy of immediate, physical reality. Slowly the pain died down; the other-world of
fever closed in on her again. And it
wasn't Gerry any more, it was Mme Bonifay.
Mme Bonifay with that thing in her hand. Je vous feria un
peu mal. And it wasn't the bed or
the pine wood but the couch in Mme Bonifay's sitting-room. She clenched her teeth, just as she had
clenched them then. Only this time it
was worse, because she knew what was going to happen. And under the limelight the people were still
there, acting their play. And lying
there on the couch she herself was part of the play, outside,
and at last was no longer her self, but someone else, someone in a
bathing-dress, with enormous breasts, like Lady Knipe's. And what was there to prevent her
breasts from getting to be like that?
Bell-clear, but incomprehensible, the actors discussed the nightmarish
possibility. The
possibility of Helen with enormous breasts, of Helen with thick rolls of fat
round her hips, of Helen with creases in her thighs, of Helen with rows and
rows of children howling all the time; and that disgusting smell of curdled
milk; and their diapers. And
here, all of a sudden, was Joyce wheeling the pram along the streets of
The surgeon had been called in time, and Helen was now out of
all danger. Reassured, Mme Bonifay had
resumed the motherly and Rabelaisian good humour that was natural to her.
It was almost with a wink that she now talked of the operation
that had saved Helen's life. 'Ton
petit curetage,' she would say with a kind of jovial archness, as though
she were talking of some illicit pleasure.
For Helen, every tone of that fat, jolly voice was yet another insult,
yet a further humiliation. The fever had
left her; her present weakness was lucid; she inhabited the real world once
more. Turning her head, she could see
herself reflected in the wardrobe mirror.
It gave her a certain satisfaction to see how thin she was, how pale,
what blue transparent shadows there were under the eyes, and the eyes
themselves, how lifelessly without lustre.
She could have powdered herself now, painted her lips a little, and
rouged her cheeks, brushed back the gloss into her dull untidy hair; but,
perversely, she preferred her sick pallor and dishevelment. 'Like the kitten,' she kept thinking. Reduced to a dirty little rag of limp flesh,
transformed from a bright living creature into something repellent, into the
likeness of kidneys, of that unspeakable thing that Mme Bonifay
She
shuddered. And now ton
petit curetage in the same tone as ton petit amoureux. It was horrible, the final humiliation. She loathed the beastly woman, but at the
same time was glad that she was so awful.
That cheerful gross vulgarity was somehow appropriate in keeping with
all the rest. But when Mme Bonifay had
left the room she would start crying, silently, in an agony of self-pity.
Returning unexpectedly, Mme Bonifay found her, that second morning
after the petit curetage, with the tears streaming down her face. Genuinely distressed, she offered
comfort. But the comfort smelt, as
usual, of onions. Physically disgusted
as well as resentful of the intrusion upon the privacy of her unhappiness,
Helen turned aside, and when Mme Bonifay tried to force consolation upon her,
she shook her head and told her to go away.
Mme Bonifay hesitated for a moment, then
obeyed, but with a Parthian insult in the form of a tenderly suggestive remark
about the letter she had brought and which she now laid on Helen's pillow. From him, without a
doubt. A good heart, in spite of
everything
The letter, it turned out, was from Hugh. 'A holiday in
'I've never told you before (was afraid you'd laugh and you
may laugh; I don't mind: for after all it's your laughter), but the
truth is that I sit sometimes, spinning stories to myself stories in which
I'm always with you, as I've told you, keeping you from harm, and in return
being refreshed by your loveliness, and warmed by your fire, and dazzled by
your bright purity
'
Angrily, as though the irony in it had been intentional, Helen
threw the letter aside. But an hour
later she had picked it up again and was re-reading it from the beginning. After all, it was comforting to know that
there was somebody who cared.