The Twilight of the Souls Part 26

"Oh, don't sit there bothering!"

"I'm very fond of you, Gerrit. You're so...."

"Yes, I know what you're going to say. I'm off now...."

"Must you go?... I say, Gerrit, you have children, haven't you? I expect they're charming children."

He seemed to see mockery in the gleaming eyes.

"You drop it about my children, will you?"

"Mayn't I ask after them?"

"No."

"I saw them out walking the other day."

"Shut up!"

"I thought them so charming."

He swore at her, roughly and hoa.r.s.ely:

"Shut up, blast it, can't you?"

"Very well. ... Are you going?"

"Yes."

He was outside the door.

"Are you cross with me?"

"No, but this talkee-talkee bores me. That's not what I come to you for...."

"No, I know you don't. ... But, still, you can't mind my talking to you sometimes, Gerrit?..."

"Very likely, but not such twaddle. And I won't have you mention my children."

"I won't do it again. Good-bye, Gerrit."

"Good-night."

He looked round, in the pa.s.sage, and nodded to her. In the dim light of the room, he saw her standing, framed in the half-open doorway; she stood there, a handsome, slender, willowy figure, in a shimmer of dull gold: the light, the yellow tea-gown, the touches of gold lace round the very white neck, the strange gold hair round the powdered white face and, under the sharp line of the eyebrows, the golden eyes, with a golden gleam. Her voice, all the evening, had sounded very soft and coaxing in his ears, as though crooning a plaintive song, of youth, of memories, of the past, of longing for her native country ... and for him: all unnatural and impossible things in her, things which he only heard in her voice because of his confounded sentimentality, a sentimentality which, however deeply it might be hidden from everybody else, was clearly perceptible to himself....

And, outside, he thought:

"I must be careful with that girl. ... She is as dangerous as can be ...

to _me_...."

CHAPTER XV

Well, if he treated it like that, he thought, he could reduce the danger to a minimum. He had allowed himself to be taken in; and the only thing now was to disentangle himself, slowly, gradually; and he would certainly succeed in this, for none of them, not even Pauline, had ever held him for long. Though she had got him to come and see her, though he had gone back once or twice, he had shown her that she had no sort of power over him and that he remained his own master. His voice roared hers down, so that he did not even hear the coaxing, brooding tones; his robust cynicism was more than a match for his sentimental tendencies; and so her only hold was on his recrudescent sensuality, glowing with the memories that had been smouldering in his blood. But that would run its course in time; and meanwhile, as he would never really recapture those old sensations after twelve years, the charm, the enchantment of it would wear off ... and pretty quickly too.... Yes, she had grown old.

She had not gone through her twelve years in Paris with impunity. All that former freshness, as of a fruit into which he used to bite, had vanished; he could not endure the musty smell of the paint which she smeared on her face: he once roughly rubbed a towel over her cheeks till she had grown angry and locked herself in; and he had to go away and apologize next time. And he was struck above all by her timidity in revealing her body, her artfulness in retaining, even when in his arms, those laces and fripperies which were supposed to create a filmy haze all around her: a haze through which he was well able to see that she was no longer the girl of twelve years ago.... And, when he compared his recollections of that time with what she gave him now, he could not understand that he had allowed himself to be caught like that by her eyes, which had remained the same, though she now smeared black stuff round them; he did not understand how he had gone into the Woods with her; he did not understand how he had yielded to her entreaties that he should come to see her.... No, he would disentangle himself from this woman, from this faded courtesan, who was complicating his life, his life as a respectable husband and father, especially father. He would disentangle himself. It would not be difficult, now that the present gave him back so little of what had glowed in his memory.... But, just because of that, because it would be so easy, because the present was such dead ashes, a heavy melancholy fell around him like a curtain of twilight.... Great Lord, how rotten it was: that slow decay, that getting old, that dragging on of the days and years! How rotten that you had to pay for everything that life gave you, first with your youth and then with your prime, as if your life were a bank on which you drew bills of exchange, as if your existence were a capital on which you lived, without ever saving a farthing, so that, when you died, you would have squandered every little bit of it. Lord, how rotten! Not dying, which was nothing, after all; but just that slow decay, that confounded spending of your later years, for which you got nothing in return; for you had had everything already: your youth, your strength, your good spirits; and, as the years dragged and dragged along, you just jogged on towards the cheerless end; and there was nothing to do but look on while every day you spent one more day of your capital of later days and got nothing in return, while nothing remained but your memory of the youth which you had also squandered.... Lord, Lord, how dark it all grew around you, when you thought of such rotten things!... Oh, of course, there was one streak of light: he knew it, he saw it, saw the golden dawn, the dawn in his own house, the dawn of his children: light still shone from them; their circle was still moving within his circle, just for a time, for so long as their shining sphere touched his own sphere ... until later it would circle away, ever farther and farther, describing wider and wider revolutions, even as every sphere rolls away, rolls away from the centre!... That was how it would be ... when he had grown old, very old. It was not so yet: for the present, the bright-haired little tribe was still in its golden dawn.... Yes, for its sake too he would like to disentangle himself, to disentangle himself.

The thing that had never been able to hold him, would it hold him in his old age?... Well, there was no question of old age yet, even though he was getting on for fifty. But still it wasn't as it used to be: nothing was as it used to be, no, not even Pauline....

No, not even Pauline. When he went to her now, he took a malicious pleasure in telling her so, with rough words, in making her feel it ...

both in order to make himself appear rougher than he was and because of the resentment which always kept p.r.i.c.king him sharply.

"I say, you're not a bit like those old photographs of yours now!"

It gave her a shock when he said this. Nothing gave her such a blinding shock, as if the shock had plunged her into darkness and made everything go black and menacing as death.

She felt that it was cruel of him to throw it in her face like this; and she couldn't understand it in him. But, because her eyes were always laughing, even now they laughed their golden laugh....

"Ah, you don't believe it!... You just think you're exactly as you were, the same young and pretty girl.... Well, my beauty, you never made a greater mistake in your life!... But I see you don't believe me, you grin when I tell you, you think your charms are going to live for ever.... Everything wears, child.... However, you won't believe it: I can see your eyes mocking me now...."

Indeed, her eyes were laughing and the smouldering spark of mockery seemed to leap into flame. And, because he spoke like that, she laughed, a loud laugh with a shrill note which annoyed him, in which he heard mockery ... because, after all, though she no longer resembled her old photographs, she had caught him badly.

"Just come here," he said, roughly.

"Why?"

"Just come here."

She went up to him, trembling.

He took hold of her, a little more roughly than he intended, took her between his knees, looked her in the face:

"What do you make up for?" he asked.

"I don't make up."

"Oh, you don't, don't you? Do you think I can't see it?"

"No, I don't make up."

"Then what's that?"

He pointed to her cheek.

"That's only powder, which stays on because I use a face-cream first."

"Oh, really! And isn't that making up?"