the error of taking the new conventions at their face value and fell from his natural frankness into a fantastic propriety. One thing in particular helped to make his attitude to women excessively correct. A man who has been accustomed to steal to his sweetheart under cover of night insensibly comes to associate love with loosened hair on pillows and matches clandestinely struck, and the sight of a young lady, correctly dressed, walking towards him through the crowd, which he has been watching for the last ten minutes, awakens in him quite a different train of thoughts and conducts him into a world from which there is no bridge to the world of love as he has known it. And that bridge being unthinkable, he comes in time to conceive of the transition to the physical rites of love as a perfectly arbitrary step not provided for by the convention, a blind leap out of one world into another, a violent settlement of a question for which there is no legitimate solution. Tom, in other words, simply could not imagine himself lying in bed with the stylishly dressed girls whom he walked out – at least while he was walking them out; or rather he could not imagine the process which would lead to that consummation: day and night attire having for him almost the force of two absolute conditions – the present in which he was embedded, and the past from which he had been roused for ever. And even when he fell in love with Helen his feelings still remained in this suspended state, and it was only when she granted him a little more than he had reckoned upon that Glasgow and its conventions began to irk him: the small draught of freedom represented by a special kind of kiss was enough to make him feel his bonds.
They must have kissed sooner or later; but while in the world which Tom had known an ardent kiss was only the prelude to a more intimate caress, to Helen it seemed to be the end. And the passion with which she flung herself upon it had something of despair and renunciation. It was as though in a fury of make-believe she hoped to transform it without anyone’s knowledge, even her own, into that ultimate surrender which she allowed to enter her imagination only as a legendary happening. To Tom this final and sterile kiss, rehearsed so often, gave a momentary appeasement, an appeasement which was half torture, however, for it seemed to have so little meaning; it was followed by a feeling of apprehension which he could not shake off. It was as though he had gone with Helen into the house of love, thinking at first: This is only the ante-room, but presently discovering that it was the only chamber in the house. For though there is another door in the inner wall of this room so much frequented by young couples in the larger towns of Scotland, a door leading presumably to other chambers, when one examines it one finds that it is only painted, very realistically, on the wall. There is even, it may be, a handle affixed to this door, but if there is, the handle is false too, it turns round and round accommodatingly as long as one chooses to turn it, but nothing happens: it is wooden, the ante-room is wooden, the whole house is wooden, a long narrow wooden shell with a splendid façade. Behind this façade, in such a long and shallow room, Tom and Helen performed their passionate and sterile rites.
Yet at certain moments, when two lovers strain against the painted door, there must come, no matter how convincingly their conscience assures them of the contrary, the urgent knowledge that the door is real after all, that other rooms lie beyond it, and that if they could awaken they might find themselves, with fear and trembling, but with definite relief, ensconced there. And while to all appearances they are quite happy in the bright room, and feel privileged to be there, in secret they are thinking of those other chambers whose existence they never admit to each other, and which have become a subterranean domain through which their thoughts can licentiously roam while they stand so chastely clasped. In time their embraces become merely a device to gain them admittance to that place, where they can wander in solitary thought, and where, if they ever met, they could not greet each other. So as they stand pressed so closely they are as far apart as secret drinkers indulging their craving in shameful privacy. Once, it is true, when desire first threw them together, they gave themselves when they kissed, but now, while still pretending to give, they are merely filching from each other something they are ashamed of and wish to hide. So when she casts herself into his arms with the splendid gesture of one who surrenders everything, offering her breasts to him as though each were a precious gift which he must accept with homage, she is merely making a breach in her own body through which that secret world may break in and become a private garden where she can wander at her pleasure, but where she had no further need of him, where indeed he would be a burdensome intruder, now that he has been the means through which she has found her way into it. And when she kisses him she closes her eyes as though to hide something, and if she could she would conceal her face as well, for she cannot keep the waves of passion from flowing over it, from rippling under that smooth mask like the muscles under the hide of some lovely animal.
Such secret pleasures are exciting, but they leave a sense of guilt towards the object that was employed to produce them. Tom was filled with shame that such thoughts should come into his mind when he was with Helen, and told himself that he was a waster. He felt that he had desecrated their love, and the fact that she did not know it made his treachery only the worse. Yet sometimes, almost drowned by his self-reproaches, a feeling that he had been betrayed would rise in him; and then the country girls that he had lain with, frank whether in conferring or refusing their favours, would seem to him innocent compared with this Glasgow girl, superior as she was to them, and unassailable as was her virtue. And if they had been within reach he would have gone to them to be cured.
But, although he observed them, the conventions of the city were still strange to him, and so he accepted this as one of them. Certainly it seemed a queer arrangement that young fellows courting should go about for years with their senses aroused under their clothes and pay no more attention to it than to a slight physical inconvenience, a corn or an attack of indigestion. But no doubt they got used to it; perhaps it was a normal drawback of love that had to be accepted with the rest; still it was queer to think of so many of them, dressed in their best, bow ties neatly in place, every button fastened, trousers creased, and all the time— The Rabelaisian picture, comic and yet sordid, imprinted a sheepish grin on his mouth whenever he realised that he was one of that ignominious army. It was a quite definite sense of solidarity, and although it humiliated him it gave him a satisfaction as of revenge, though on what or whom he could not have said. It was unpleasant to remember Helen at those times.
But to Helen those limitations of love were far less irksome. As she climbed the stairs, turned the key in the door of her lodgings, lit the gas in her room and absently looked round her, she still breathed that richer atmosphere which the touch of Tom’s lips and arms had distilled, an atmosphere that she inhaled effortlessly through every pore of her body, giving her a dreamful sense of lightness. It was only when she was undressing, still in a dream, that the weight of her body began to return; and the undoing of her corsets, and all the trifling acts of liberation which had to be accomplished before she could lie outstretched in bed, were like a series of infinitely complicated petty problems that she could never hope to solve. When at last she lay between the smooth sheets, every inch of her body seemed weighed down by a separate burden, lay there dead and impenetrable, a foreign load attached to her, a trunk which was of no further use, for it had been ethereally decapitated; and her lips, on which the savour of Tom’s kisses was slowly fading, seemed alone to harbour any life, seemed alone dedicated to love, a solitary beacon in the darkness. When she turned on her other side for relief it seemed an ignominious thing that she had to turn all her body; it was a conscious and deliberate act that was shameful and also in some way perilous. And she plunged into sleep like a stone falling into an abyss.
Sensual images came to her very seldom, but when they did they were brutally vivid. She saw Tom before her stripped naked, his head cropped like a boxer’s, his flesh leaden. But worst of all were the times when his nakedness was persistently obstructed by some trifle, a collar fastened by a stud round his neck, or a sock on one foot; for that was like a dismemberment, as though the collar severed his head from his shoulders and the sock darkly conjured his foot away. These startling materialisations terrified her at the rare moments when she remembered them, and it seemed impossible that she should have seen or imagined them – she, the girl who stood in the ante-chamber of love.
It is in the hand that the human will is most unequivocally incarnated, so unequivocally, indeed, that we are often held responsible even for its involuntary motions. So
