CHAPTER XLV

 

April 14^th 1928

 

Happiness inexpressible – that was what her letter should have brought him.  But Hugh's face, as he walked – walked instead of having his lunch – up and down the long gallery of the Ethnographical Collection, was a mask of perplexity and distress.  The words of Helen's letter repeated themselves in his memory.  'Nobody cares a pin whether I'm alive or dead.'

      From the Mexican case the symbol of death in crystal and that other skull inlaid with turquoise stared out at him as he passed.  'Nobody cares …' It should have been his opportunity.  He had dreamt of her unhappiness – in an agony of commiseration, but also with hope.  Unhappy, she would turn to him.  'Nobody cares …'

      'Nobody except you.'  His exultant pride and pleasure in those words had been tempered, as he read on, by the realization that she didn't really understand how he cared, didn't appreciate the exact quality of his feeling.  'My mother?' she had written.  'But, after all, ever since she started talking that horrible stuff, she's somebody else – always was somebody else really, even when she was well (though of course not so else).  Just as I was always somebody else.  How could she care?  You're not selfish, Hugh.  You're …' But it wasn't a question merely of selfishness or unselfishness, he began to protest, with all the painted faces of the Peruvian vases staring down from the right with an unwinking intensity of frozen life.  It was a question of something different, something deeper and more spiritual.  On his left the trophies of the Papuan headhunters hung shrivelled, but fantastically painted, like the heads of decapitated clowns.  The skulls from the Torres Straits had been given round shining eyes of mother-of-pearl.  Yes, more spiritual, Hugh insisted, thinking of what he had written about her – lyrically, lyrically! - and of that subtle analysis of his own emotions.  The unselfishness was there, but melted down, as it were, in contemplation, refined into something aesthetic.  Unselfishness in a picture.  Unselfishness by Watteau, by Cima da Conegliano.  And she herself, the object of his contemplative and aesthetic unselfishness – she too, in his imaginings, in the accumulating pages of his manuscript, had possessed the quality of a picture or a piece of music; something that it would be sufficient happiness merely to look at for ever, to listen to; perhaps, occasionally, to touch, as though she were a statue, to caress with an almost imperceptible tenderness.  And sometimes in those imaginings was cold, was unhappy – nobody cared a pin – and she asked to be comforted and made warm, she crept into his arms; into those unselfish, contemplative, impalpable arms of his, and lay there safely, but naked, lay there a picture, virginal, ideal, but melting, melting … Feathered like an ambassador in full-dress uniform, with the beak of a bird, the teeth of a shark, this wooden mask had once made its wearer feel, as he danced, that he was more than human, akin to the gods.  'You've said you'd like to be always with me.  Well, I've been thinking about it a lot recently, and I believe that that's what I'd like too.  Dear Hugh, I'm not in love with you; but I like you more than anyone else.  I think you're nicer, kinder, gentler, less selfish.  And surely that's a good enough foundation to build on.'  The words, when he read them first, had filled him with a kind of panic; and it was with the same protesting agitation that he now walked between New Caledonia and the Solomon Islands.  In the belly of a wooden bonito fish the Melanesian widow opened a little door, and there, like a chamber-pot, was her husband's skull.  But it was always spiritually and aesthetically that he had wanted to be with her.  Hadn't she been able to understand that?  Surely he had made it clear enough?  'If you still want it, there I am – I want it too.'  It was terrible, he was thinking, terrible!  She was forcing a decision on him, making it impossible for him to say no by assuming that he had already said yes.  He felt himself hemmed in, driving into a corner.  Marriage?  But he would have to change his whole way of life.  The flat wouldn't be large enough.  She'd want to eat meat at night.  Mrs Barton would give notice.  Of the spears on his left some were tipped with obsidian, some with the spines of stingrays, some with human bone.  'You probably think I'm a fool, and flighty and irresponsible; and it's true, I have been up till now.  I'm hopeless.  But I wasn't born hopeless – I was made it, because of the kind of life I've lived.  Now I want to be something else, and I know I can be something else.  Sérieuse.  A good wife and all that, ridiculous and embarrassing as it sounds when one puts it down on paper.  But I refuse to be ashamed of goodness any longer.  I absolutely refuse.'  That irresponsibility, he was thinking, was one of the loveliest and most moving things about her.  It separated her from the common world, it promoted her out of vulgar humanity.  He didn't want her to be responsible and a good wife.  He wanted her to be like Ariel, like the delicate creature in his own manuscript, a being of another order, beyond good and evil.  Meanwhile he was walked into Africa.  The image of a Negress holding her long pointed breasts in her two hands glistened darkly from behind the confining glass.  Her belly was tattooed, her navel projected in a little cone.  The spears in the next case were headed with iron.  Like Ariel, he repeated to himself, like those Watteaus at Dresden, like Debussy.  For resonator, this xylophone had, not the usual gourd, but a human skull, and there were skulls festooned along the ivory fetish horns, thighbones around the sacrificial drum from Ashanti.  She was spoiling everything, he said to himself resentfully.  And suddenly, lifting his eyes, he saw that she was there, hurrying along the narrow passage between the cases to meet him.

      'You?' he managed to whisper.

      But Helen was too much perturbed to see the look of dismay, the pallor, and then the guilty blush, too intensely preoccupied with her own thoughts to hear the note of startled apprehension in his voice.

      'I'm sorry,' she said breathlessly, as she took his hand.  'I didn't mean to come and pester you here.  But you don't know what it's been like this morning at home.'  She shook her head; her lips trembled.  'Mother's been like a madwoman.  I can't tell you … You're the only person, Hugh …'

      Clumsily, he tried to console her.  But the reality was profoundly different from his imagination of her unhappiness.  The imagination had always been his delicious opportunity; the reality was the menace of an unavoidable doom.  Desperately, he tried the effect of changing the subject.  These things from Benin were rather interesting.  The ivory leopard, spotted with disks of copper inlay.  The Negro warriors, in bronze, with their leaf-shaped spears and swords, and the heads of their enemies hanging from their belts.  The Europeans, bearded and aquiline, in their high sixteenth-century morions and baggy hose, their matchlocks in their hands, and the cross hanging round their necks.  Comic, he remarked, parenthetically, that the only thing these blackamoors ever got out of Christianity should have been the art of crucifying people.  The punitive expedition of 1897 found the place full of crosses.  And this beautiful head of the young girl with her tapering Phrygian cap of coral beads …

      'Look at this,' Helen suddenly interrupted; and, pulling up her sleeve, she showed him too red semi-circular marks on the skin of her forearm a few inches above the wrist.  'That's where she bit me, when I tried to make her go back to bed.'

      Hugh was startled into pitying indignation.  'But it's awful!' he cried.  'It's too awful.'  He took her hand.  'My poor child!'  They stood for a moment in silence.  Then, suddenly, his pity was shot through by the realization that the thing had happened.  There could be no escape now.  He found himself thinking again of Mrs Barton.  If she were to give notice, what would he do?