Complete works of hall c.., p.508
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 508
I could not detach my eyes from his face, which, without eyes to relieve it, seemed to be almost repulsive now. It would be difficult to describe my sensations. I felt dreadfully humiliated. Even my personal pride was wounded. I remembered what Father Dan had said about husband and wife being one flesh, and told myself that this was what I belonged to, what belonged to me — this! Then I tried to reproach and reprove myself, but in order to do so I had to turn my eyes away.
Our road to Blackwater lay over the ridge of a hill much exposed to the wind from the south-west. When we reached this point the clouds seemed to roll up from the sea like tempestuous battalions. Torrential rain fell on the car and came dripping in from the juncture of the landaulette roof. Some of it fell on the sleeper and he awoke with a start.
“Damn—”
He stopped, as if, caught in guilt, and began to apologise again.
“Was I asleep? I really think I must have been. Stupid, isn’t it? Excuse me.”
He blinked his eyes as if to empty them of sleep, looked me over for a moment or two in silence, and then said with a smile which made me shudder:
“So you and I are man and wife, my dear!”
I made no answer, and, still looking fixedly at me, he said:
“Well, worse things might have happened after all — what do you think?”
Still I did not answer him, feeling a certain shame, not to say disgust. Then he began to pay me some compliments on my appearance.
“Do you know you’re charming, my dear, really charming!”
That stung me, and made me shudder, I don’t know why, unless it was because the words gave me the sense of having been used before to other women. I turned my eyes away again.
“Don’t turn away, dear. Let me see those big black eyes of yours. I adore black eyes. They always pierce me like a gimlet.”
He reached forward as he spoke and drew me to him. I felt frightened and pushed him off.
“What’s this?” he said, as if surprised.
But after another moment he laughed, and in the tone of a man who had had much to do with women and thought he knew how to deal with them, he said:
“Wants to be coaxed, does she? They all do, bless them!”
Saying this he pulled me closer to him, putting his arm about my waist, but once more I drew and forcibly pushed him from me.
His face darkened for an instant, and then cleared again.
“Oh, I see,” he said. “Offended, is she? Paying me out for having paid so little court to her? Well, she’s right there too, bless her! But never mind! You’re a decidedly good-looking little woman, my dear, and if I have neglected you thus far, I intend to make up for it during the honeymoon. So come, little gal, let’s be friends.”
Taking hold of me again, he tried to kiss me, putting at the same time his hand on the bosom of my dress, but I twisted my face aside and prevented him.
“Oh! Oh! Hurt her modesty, have I?” he said, laughing like a man who was quite sure both of himself and of me. “But my little nun will get over that by and by. Wait awhile! Wait awhile!”
By this time I was trembling with the shock of a terror that was entirely new to me. I could not explain to myself the nature of it, but it was there, and I could not escape from it.
Hitherto, when I had thought of my marriage to Lord Raa I had been troubled by the absence of love between us; and what I meant to myself by love — the love of husband and wife — was the kind of feeling I had for the Reverend Mother, heightened and deepened and spiritualised, as I believed, by the fact (with all its mysterious significance) that the one was a man and the other a woman.
But this was something quite different. Not having found in marriage what I had expected, I was finding something else, for there could be no mistaking my husband’s meaning when he looked at me with his passionate eyes and said, “Wait awhile!”
I saw what was before me, and in fear of it I found myself wishing that something might happen to save me. I was so frightened that if I could have escaped from the car I should have done so. The only thing I could hope for was that we should arrive at Blackwater too late for the steamer, or that the storm would prevent it from sailing. What relief from my situation I should find in that, beyond the delay of one day, one night (in which I imagined I might be allowed to return home), I did not know. But none the less on that account I began to watch the clouds with a feverish interest.
They were wilder than ever now — rolling up from the south-west in huge black whorls which enveloped the mountains and engulfed the valleys. The wind, too, was howling at intervals like a beast being slaughtered. It was terrible, but not so terrible as the thing I was thinking of. I was afraid of the storm, and yet I was fearfully, frightfully glad of it.
My husband, who, after my repulse, had dropped back into his own corner of the car, was very angry. He talked again of our “God-forsaken island,” and the folly of living in it, said our passage would be a long one in any case, and we might lose our connection to London.
“Damnably inconvenient if we do. I’ve special reasons for being there in the morning,” he said.
At a sharp turn of the road the wind smote the car as with an invisible wing. One of the windows was blown in, and to prevent the rain from driving on to us my husband had to hold up a cushion in the gap.
This occupied him until we ran into Blackwater, and then he dropped the cushion and put his head out, although the rain was falling heavily, to catch the first glimpse of the water in the bay.
It was in terrific turmoil. My heart leapt up at the sight of it. My husband swore.
We drew up on the drenched and naked pier. My husband’s valet, in waterproofs, came to the sheltered side of the car, and, shouting above the noises of the wind in the rigging of the steamer, he said:
“Captain will not sail to-day, my lord. Inshore wind. Says he couldn’t get safely out of the harbour.”
My husband swore violently. I was unused to oaths at that time and they cut me like whipcord, but all the same my pulse was bounding joyfully.
“Bad luck, my lord, but only one thing to do now,” shouted the valet.
“What’s that?” said my husband, growling.
“Sleep in Blackwater to-night, in hopes of weather mending in the morning.”
Anticipating this course, he had already engaged rooms for us at the “Fort George.”
My heart fell, and I waited for my husband’s answer. I was stifling.
“All right, Hobson. If it must be, it must,” he answered.
I wanted to speak, but I did not know what to say. There seemed to be nothing that I could say.
A quarter of an hour afterwards we arrived at the hotel, where the proprietor, attended by the manageress and the waiters, received us with rather familiar smiles.
THIRTY-FIFTH CHAPTER
When I began to write I determined to tell the truth and the whole truth. But now I find that the whole truth will require that I should invade some of the most sacred intimacies of human experience. At this moment I feel as if I were on the threshold of one of the sanctuaries of a woman’s life, and I ask myself if it is necessary and inevitable that I should enter it.
I have concluded that it is necessary and inevitable — necessary to the sequence of my narrative, inevitable for the motive with which I am writing it.
Four times already I have written what is to follow. In the first case I found that I had said too much. In the second I had said too little. In the third I was startled and shocked by the portrait I had presented of myself and could not believe it to be true. In the fourth I saw with a thrill of the heart that the portrait was not only true, but too true. Let me try again.
I entered our rooms at the hotel, my husband’s room and mine, with a sense of fear, almost of shame. My sensations at that moment had nothing in common with the warm flood of feeling which comes to a woman when she finds herself alone for the first time with the man she loves, in a little room which holds everything that is of any account to her in the world. They were rather those of a young girl who, walking with a candle through the dark corridors of an empty house at night, is suddenly confronted by a strange face. I was the young girl with the candle; the strange face was my husband’s.
We had three rooms, all communicating, a sitting-room in the middle with bedrooms right and left. The bedroom on the right was large and it contained a huge bed with a covered top and tail-boards. That on the left was small, and it had a plain brass and iron bedstead, which had evidently been meant for a lady’s maid. I had no maid yet. It was intended that I should engage a French one in London.
Almost immediately on entering the sitting-room my husband, who had not yet recovered from his disappointment, left me to go downstairs, saying with something like a growl that he had telegrams to send to London and instructions to give to his man Hobson.
Without taking off my outer things I stepped up to the windows, which were encrusted with salt from the flying spray. The hotel stood on a rocky ledge above the harbour, and the sound of the sea, beating on the outer side of the pier, came up with a deafening roar. The red-funnelled steamer we should have sailed by lay on the pier’s sheltered side, letting down steam, swaying to her creaking hawsers, and heaving to the foam that was surging against her bow.
I was so nervous, so flurried, so preoccupied by vague fears that I hardly saw or heard anything. Porters came up with our trunks and asked me where they were to place them, but I scarcely know how I answered them, although I was aware that everything — both my husband’s luggage and mine — was being taken into the large bedroom. A maid asked if she ought to put a light to the fire, and I said “Yes . . . no . . . yes,” and presently I heard the fire crackling.
After awhile my husband came back in a better temper and said:
“Confounded nuisance, but I suppose we must make the best of it.”
He laughed as he said this, and coming closer and looking me over with a smile which was at the same time passionate and proud, he whispered:
“Dare say we’ll not find the time long until to-morrow morning. What do you think, my little beauty?”
Something in his voice rather than in his question made my heart beat, and I could feel my face growing hot.
“Not taken off your things yet?” he said. “Come, let me help you.”
I drew out my hat-pins and removed my hat. At the same moment my husband removed my sables and cloak, and as he did so he put his arms about me, and held me close to him.
I shuddered. I tried not to, but I could not help it. My husband laughed again, and said:
“Not got over it yet, little woman? Perhaps that’s only because you are not quite used to me.”
Still laughing he pulled me still closer to him, and putting one of his hands under my chin he kissed me on the mouth.
It will be difficult and perhaps it will be ridiculous to say how my husband’s first kiss shocked me. My mouth felt parched, I had a sense of intense disgust, and before I was quite aware of what I was doing I had put up both hands to push him off.
“Come, come, this is going too far,” he said, in a tone that was half playful, half serious. “It was all very well in the automobile; but here, in your own rooms, you know. . . .”
He broke off and laughed again, saying that if my modesty only meant that nobody had ever kissed me before it made me all the more charming for him.
I could not help feeling a little ashamed of my embarrassment, and crossing in front of my husband I seated myself in a chair before the fire. He looked after me with a smile that made my heart tremble, and then, coming behind my chair, he put his arms about my shoulders and kissed my neck.
A shiver ran through me. I felt as if I had suffered a kind of indecency. I got up and changed my place. My husband watched me with the look of a man who wanted to roar with laughter. It was the proud and insolent as well as passionate look of one who had never so much as contemplated resistance.
“Well, this is funny,” he said. “But we’ll see presently! We’ll see!”
A waiter came in for orders, and early as it was my husband asked for dinner to be served immediately. My heart was fluttering excitedly by this time and I was glad of the relief which the presence of other people gave me.
While the table was being laid my husband talked of the doings of the day. He asked who was “the seedy old priest” who had given us “the sermon” at the wedding breakfast — he had evidently forgotten that he had seen the Father before.
I told him the “seedy old priest” was Father Dan, and he was a saint if ever there was one.
“A saint, is he?” said my husband. “Wish saint were not synonymous with simpleton, though.”
Then he gave me his own views of “the holy state of matrimony.” By holding people together who ought to be apart it often caused more misery and degradation of character than a dozen entirely natural adulteries and desertions, which a man had sometimes to repair by marriage or else allow himself to be regarded as a seducer and a scoundrel.
I do not think my husband was conscious of the naive coarseness of all this, as spoken to a young girl who had only just become his wife. I am sure he was not aware that he was betraying himself to me in every word he uttered and making the repugnance I had begun to feel for him deepen into horror.
My palms became moist, and again and again I had to dry them with my handkerchief. I was feeling more frightened and more ashamed than I had ever felt before, but nevertheless when we sat down to dinner I tried to compose myself. Partly for the sake of appearance before the servants, and partly because I was taking myself to task for the repugnance I felt towards my husband, I found something to say, though my voice shook.
My husband ate ravenously and drank a good deal. Once or twice, when he insisted on pouring out champagne for me, I clinked glasses with him. Although every moment at table was increasing my fear and disgust, I sometimes allowed myself to laugh.
Encouraged by this he renewed his endearments even before the waiters had left the room, and when they had gone, with orders not to return until he rang, and the door was closed behind them, he switched off the lights, pushed a sofa in front of the fire, put me to sit on it, sat down beside me and redoubled his tenderness.
“How’s my demure little nun now?” he said. “Frightened, wasn’t she? They’re all frightened at first, bless them!”
I could smell the liquor he had been drinking. I could see by the firelight the prominent front tooth (partly hidden by his moustache) which I had noticed when I saw him first, and the down of soft hair which grew as low on his hands as his knuckles. Above all I thought I could feel the atmosphere of other women about him — loose women, bad women as it seemed to me — and my fear and disgust began to be mixed with a kind of physical horror.
For a little while I tried to fight against this feeling, but when he began to put his arms about me, calling me by endearing names, complaining of my coldness, telling me not to be afraid of him, reminding me that I belonged to him now, and must do as he wished, a faintness came over me, I trembled from head to foot and made some effort to rise.
“Let me go,” I said.
“Nonsense,” he said, laughing and holding me to my seat. “You bewitching little woman! You’re only teasing me. How they love to tease, these charming little women!”
The pupils of his eyes were glistening. I closed my own eyes in order to avoid his look. At the next moment I felt his hand stray down my body and in a fury of indignation I broke out of his arms and leapt to my feet.
When I recovered my self-possession I was again looking out of the window, and my husband, who was behind me, was saying in a tone of anger and annoyance:
“What’s the matter with you? I can’t understand. What have I done? Good heavens, we are man and wife, aren’t we?”
I made no answer. My heart which had been hot with rage was becoming cold with dread. It seemed to me that I had suffered an outrage on my natural modesty as a human being, a sort of offence against my dignity as a woman.
It was now dark. With my face to the window I could see nothing. The rain was beating against the glass. The sea was booming on the rocks. I wanted to fly, but I felt caged — morally and physically caged.
My husband had lit a cigarette and was walking up and down the sitting-room, apparently trying to think things out. After awhile he approached me, out his hand on my shoulder and said:
“I see how it is. You’re tired, and no wonder. You’ve had a long and exhausting day. Better go to bed. We’ll have to be up early.”
Glad to escape from his presence I allowed him to lead me to the large bedroom. As I was crossing the threshold he told me to undress and get into bed, and after that he said something about waiting. Then he closed the door softly and I was alone.
THIRTY-SIXTH CHAPTER
There was a fire in the bedroom and I sat down in front of it. Many forces were warring within me. I was trying to fix my thoughts and found it difficult to do so.
Some time passed. My husband’s man came in with the noiseless step of all such persons, opened one of the portmanteaux and laid out his master’s combs and brushes on the dressing table and his sleeping suit on the bed. A maid of the hotel followed him, and taking my own sleeping things out of the top tray of my trunk she laid them out beside my husband’s.
“Good-night, my lady,” they said in their low voices as they went out on tiptoe.
I hardly heard them. My mind, at first numb, was now going at lightning speed. Brought face to face for the first time with one of the greatest facts of a woman’s life I was asking myself why I had not reckoned with it before.
I had not even thought of it. My whole soul had been so much occupied with one great spiritual issue — that I did not love my husband (as I understood love), that my husband did not love me — that I had never once plainly confronted, even in my own mind, the physical fact that is the first condition of matrimony, and nobody had mentioned it to me or even hinted at it.
