logic of what I am, must be, I know there is nothing to be done about the shape of fate: my truth is that I have been loved once, and now that is the end, and I must let myself sink towards a certain dryness, a coldness of intelligence – yes, you will soon develop into an upright, red-headed, very intelligent lady (though, of course, affected!) whose green eyes flash the sober fires of humorous comprehension. All the rest is over for you, now accept it and be done and do as well as you can the work you are given.
And then one night …
What? All that happened outwardly was that I sat opposite a man at a dinner party in a restaurant, and we talked and laughed as people do who meet each other casually at a dinner-table. But afterwards I went home with my soul on fire. I was on fire, being consumed … And what a miracle it was to me, being able to say, not: That is an attractive man, I want him, I shall have him, but: My house is on fire, that was the man, yes, it was he again, there he was, he has set light to my soul.
I simply let myself suffer for him, knowing he was worth it because I suffered – it had come to this, my soul had become its own gauge, its own measure of what was good: I knew what he was because of how my work was afterwards.
I knew him better than his wife did, or could (she was there too, a nice woman in such beautiful pearls) – I know him better than he does himself. I sat opposite him all evening. What was there to notice? An aging actress, pretty still, beautifully dressed (that winter I had a beautiful violet suit with mink cuffs) sitting opposite a charming man – handsome, intelligent and so on. One can use these adjectives of half the men one meets. But somewhere in him, in his being, something matched something in me, he had come into me, he had set me in motion. I remember looking down the table at his wife and thinking: Yes, my dear, but your husband is also my husband, for he walked into me and made himself at home in me, and because of him I shall act again from the depths of myself, I am sure of it, and I’m sure it will be the best work I can do. Though I won’t know until tomorrow night, on the stage.
For instance, there was one night when I stood on the stage and stretched up my slender white arms to the audience and (that is how they saw it, what I saw were two white-caked, raddled-with-cold arms that were, moreover, rather flabby) and I knew that I was, that night, nothing but an amateur. I stood there on the stage, as a woman holding out my pretty arms, it was Victoria Carrington saying: Look how poignantly I hold out my arms, don’t you long to have them around you, my slender white arms, look how beautiful, how enticing Victoria is! And then, in my dressing-room afterwards I was ashamed, it was years since I had stood on the stage with nothing between me, the woman, and the audience – not since I was a green girl had I acted so – why, then, tonight?
I thought, and I understood. The afternoon before a man (a producer from America, but that doesn’t matter) had come to see me in my dressing-room and after he left I thought: Yes, there it is again, I know that sensation, that means he has set the forces in motion and so I can expect my work to show it … It showed it, with a vengeance! Well, and so that taught me to discriminate, I learned I must be careful, must allow no second-rate man to come near me. And so put up barriers, strengthened around me the circle of cold, of impersonality, that should always lie between me and people, between me and the auditorium; I made a cool, bare space no man could enter, could break across, unless his power, his magic, was very strong, the true complement to mine.
Very seldom now do I feel my self alight, on fire, touched awake, created again by – what?
I live alone now. No, you would never be able to imagine how. For I knew when I saw you this evening that you exist, you are, only in relation to other people, you are always giving out to your work, your wife, friends, children, your wife has the face of a woman who gives, who is confident that what she gives will be received. Yes, I understand all that, I know how it would be living with you, I know you.
After we had all separated, and I had watched you drive off with your wife, I came home and … no, it would be no use telling you, after all. (Or anyone, except, perhaps, my colleague and rival Irma Painter!) But what if I said to you – but no, there are certain disciplines which no one can understand but those who use them.
So I will translate into your language, I’ll translate the truth so that it has the affected, almost embarrassing exaggerated ring that goes with the actress Victoria Carrington, and I’ll tell you how when I came home after meeting you my whole body was wrenched with anguish, and I lay on the floor sweating and shaking as if I had bad malaria, it was like knives of deprivation going through me, for, meeting you, it was being reminded again what it would be like to be with a man, really with him, so that the rhythm of every day, every night, carried us both like the waves of a sea.
Everything I am most proud of seemed nothing at all – what I have worked to achieve, what I have achieved, even the very core of what I am, the inner sensitive balance that exists like a sort of self-invented super instrument, or a fantastically receptive and cherished animal – this creation of myself, which every day becomes more involved, sensitive, and delicate, seemed absurd, paltry, spinsterish, a shameful excuse for cowardice. And my life, which so contents me because of its balance, its order, its steadily growing fastidiousness, seemed eccentrically solitary. Every particle of my being screamed out, wanting, needing – I was like an addict deprived of his drug.
I picked myself off the floor, I bathed myself, I looked after myself like an invalid or like a – yes, like a pregnant woman. These extraordinary fertilizations happen so seldom now that I cherish them, waste nothing of them, and I both long for and dread them. Every time it is like being killed, like being torn open while I am forced to remember what it is I voluntarily do without.
Every time it happens I swear I can never let it happen again, the pain is too terrible. What a flower, what a fire, what a miracle it would be if, instead of smiling (the ‘sweetly piercing’ smile of my dying beauty), instead of accepting, submitting, I should turn to you and say …
But I shall not, and so something very rare (something much more beautiful than your wife could ever give you, or any of the day-to-day wives could imagine) will never come into being.
Instead … I sit and consume my pain, I sit and hold it, I sit and clench my teeth and …
It is dark, it is very early in the morning, the light in my room is a transparent grey, like the ghost of water or of air, there are no lights in the windows I see from my own. I sit on my bed, and watch the shadows of the tree moving on the brick wall of the garden, and I contain pain and …
Oh my dear one, my dear one, I am a tent under which you lie, I am the sky across which you fly like a bird, I am …
My soul is a room, a great room, a hall – it is empty, waiting. Sometimes a fly buzzes across it, bringing summer mornings in another continent, sometimes a child laughs in it, and it is like the generations chiming together, child, youth, and old woman as one being. Sometimes you walk into it and I shut my eyes because of the sweet recognition in me of what you are, I feel what you are as if I stood near a tree and put my hand on its breathing trunk.
I am a pool of water in which fantastic creatures move, in which you play, a young boy, your brown skin glistening, and the water moves over your limbs like hands, my hands, that will never touch you, my hands that tomorrow night, in a pool of listening silence, will stretch up towards the thousand people in the auditorium, creating love for them from the consumed pain of my denial.
I am a room in which an old man sits, smiling, as he has smiled for fifty centuries, you, whose bearded loins created me.
I am a world into which you breathed life, have smiled life, have made me. I am, with you, what creates, every moment, a thousand animalcules, the creatures of our dispensation, and every one we have both touched with
