Chapter 3

But sleep did not come to me. The dull, dead silence weighed upon instead of soothing me. My mind was terribly alive, in a ferment; and the contrast between my own excitement and the hushed peace of my environment was painful, was almost unbearable. I wished that a wind from the mountains were beating against the window-panes, and the rain lashing the house in fury. The black calm around was horrible, unnatural. The drizzling rain was now so small that I could not even hear its patter when I strained my ears. Margot had ceased to mutter, and lay perfectly still. How I longed to be able to read the soul hidden in her sleeping body, to unravel the mystery of the mind which I had once understood so perfectly! It is so horrible that we can never open the human envelope, take out the letter, and seize with our eyes upon its every word. Margot slept with all her secrets safeguarded, although she was unconscious, no longer watchful, on the alert. She was so silent, even her quiet breathing not reaching my ear, that I felt impelled to stretch out my hand beneath the coverlet and touch hers ever so softly. I did so.

Her hand was instantly and silently withdrawn. She was awake, then.

“Margot,” I said, “did I disturb you?”

There was no answer.

The movement, followed by the silence, affected me very disagreeably.

I lit the candle and looked at her. She was lying on the extreme edge of the bed, with her blue eyes closed. Her lips were slightly parted. I could hear her steady breathing. Yet was she really sleeping?

I bent lower over her, and as I did so a slight, involuntary movement, akin to what we call a shudder, ran through her body. I recoiled from the bed. An impotent anger seized me. Could it be that my presence was becoming so hateful to my wife that even in sleep her body trembled when I drew near it? Or was this slumber feigned? I could not tell, but I felt it impossible at that moment to remain in the room. I returned to my own, dressed, and descended the stairs to the door opening on to the terrace. I felt a longing to be out in the air. The atmosphere of the house was stifling.

Was it coming to this, then? Did I, a man, shrink with a fantastic cowardice from a woman I loved? The latent cruelty began to stir within me, the tyrant spirit which a strong love sometimes evokes. I had been Margot’s slave almost. My affection had brought me to her feet, had kept me there. So long as she loved me I was content to be her captive, knowing she was mine. But a change in her attitude toward me might rouse the master. In my nature there was a certain brutality, a savagery, which I had never wholly slain, although Margot had softened me wonderfully by her softness, had brought me to gentleness by her tenderness. The boy of years ago had developed toward better things, but he was not dead in me. I felt that as I walked up and down the terrace through the night in a wild meditation. If my love could not hold Margot, my strength should.

I drew in a long breath of the wet night air, and I opened my shoulders as if shaking off an oppression. My passion for Margot had not yet drawn me down to weakness; it had raised me up to strength. The faint fear of her, which I had felt almost without knowing it more than once, died within me. The desire of the conqueror elevated me. There was something for me to win. My paralysis passed away, and I turned toward the house.

And now a strange thing happened. I walked into the dark hall, closed the outer door, shutting out the dull murmur of the night, and felt in my pocket for my matchbox. It was not there. I must inadvertently have laid it down in my dressing-room and left it. I searched about in the darkness on the hall table, but could find no light. There was nothing for it, then, but to feel my way upstairs as best I could.

I started, keeping my hand against the wall to guide me. I gained the top of the stairs, and began to traverse the landing, still with my hand upon the wall. To reach my dressing-room I had to pass the apartment which had been my grandmother’s sitting-room.

When I reached it, instead of sliding along a closed door, as I had anticipated, my hand dropped into vacancy.

The door was wide open. It had been shut, like all the other doors in the house, when I had descended the stairs--shut and locked, as it always was at night-time. Why was it open now?

I paused in the darkness. And then an impulse seized me to walk forward into the room. I advanced a step; but, as I did so, a horrible low cry broke upon my ears out of the darkness. It came from immediately in front of me, and sounded like an expression of the most abject fear.

My feet rooted themselves to the ground.

“Who’s there?” I asked.

There came no answer.

I listened for a moment, but did not hear the minutest sound. The desire for light was overpowering. I generally did my writing in this room, and knew the exact whereabouts of everything in it. I knew that on the writing-table there was a silver box containing wax matches. It lay on the left of my desk. I moved another step forward.

There was the sound of a slight rustle, as if someone shrank back as I advanced.

I laid my hand quickly on the box, opened it, and struck a light. The room was vaguely illuminated. I saw something white at the far end, against the wall. I put the match to a candle.

The white thing was Margot. She was in her dressing-gown, and was crouched up in an angle of the wall as far away from where I stood as possible. Her blue eyes were wide open, and fixed upon me with an expression of such intense and hideous fear in them that I almost cried out.

“Margot, what is the matter?” I said. “Are you ill?”

She made no reply. Her face terrified me.

“What is it, Margot?” I cried in a loud, almost harsh voice, determined to rouse her from this horrible, unnatural silence. “What are you doing here?”

I moved towards her. I stretched out my hands and seized her. As I did so, a sort of sob burst from her. Her hands were cold and trembling.

“What is it? What has frightened you?” I reiterated.

At last she spoke in a low voice.

“You--you looked so strange, so--so cruel as you came in,” she said.

“Strange! Cruel! But you could not see me. It was dark,” I answered.

“Dark!” she said.

“Yes, until I lit the candle. And you cried out when I was only in the doorway. You could not see me there.”

“Why not? What has that got to do with it?” she murmured, still trembling violently.

“You can see me in the dark?”

“Of course,” she said. “I don’t understand what you mean. Of course I can see you when you are there before my eyes.”

“But----” I began; and then her obvious and complete surprise at my questions stopped them. I still held her hands in mine, and their extreme coldness roused me to the remembrance that she was unclothed.

“You will be ill if you stay here,” I said. “Come back to your room.”

She said nothing, and I led her back, waited while she got into bed, and then, placing the candle on the dressing-table, sat down in a chair by her side.

The strong determination to take prompt action, to come to an explanation, to end these dreary mysteries of mind and conduct, was still upon me.

I did not think of the strange hour; I did not care that the night was gliding on towards dawn. I was self-absorbed. I was beyond ordinary considerations.

Yet I did not speak immediately. I was trying to be quite calm, trying to think of the best line for me to take. So much might depend upon our mere words now. At length I said, laying my hand upon hers, which was outside the coverlet:

“Margot, what were you doing in that room at such a strange hour? Why were you there?”

She hesitated obviously. Then she answered, not looking at me:

“I missed you. I thought you might be there--writing.”

“But you were in the dark.”

“I thought you would have a light.”

I knew by her manner that she was not telling me the truth, but I went on quietly:

“If you expected me, why did you cry out when I came to the door?”

She tried to draw her hand away, but I held it fast, closing, my fingers upon it with even brutal strength.

“Why did you cry out?”

“You--you looked so strange, so cruel.”

“So cruel!”

“Yes. You frightened me--you frightened me horribly.”

She began suddenly to sob, like one completely overstrained. I lifted her up in the bed, put my arms round her, and made her lean against me. I was strangely moved.

“I frightened you! How can that be?” I said, trying to control a passion of mingled love and anger that filled my breast. “You know that I love you. You must know that. In all our short married life have I ever been even momentarily unkind to you? Let us be frank with one another. Our lives have changed lately. One of us has altered. You cannot say that it is I.”

She only continued to sob bitterly in my arms. I held her closer.

“Let us be frank with one another,” I went on. “For God’s sake let us have no barriers between us. Margot, look into my eyes and tell me--are you growing tired of me?”

She turned her head away, but I spoke more sternly:

“You shall be truthful. I will have no more subterfuge. Look me in the face. You did love me once?”

“Yes, yes,” she whispered in a choked voice.

“What have I done, then, to alienate you? Have I ever hurt you, ever shown a lack of sympathy, ever neglected you?”

“Never--never.”

“Yet you have changed to me since--since----” I paused a moment, trying to recall when I had first noticed her altered demeanour.

She interrupted me.

“It has all come upon me in this house,” she sobbed. “Oh! what is it? What does it all mean? If I could understand a little--only a little--it would not be so bad. But this nightmare, this thing that seems such a madness of the intellect----”

Her voice broke and ceased. Her tears burst forth afresh. Such mingled fear, passion, and a sort of strange latent irritation, I had never seen before.

“It is a madness indeed,” I said, and a sense almost of outrage made my voice hard and cold. “I have not deserved such treatment at your hands.”

“I will not yield to it,” she said, with a sort of desperation, suddenly throwing her arms around me. “I will not--I will not!”

I was strangely puzzled. I was torn with conflicting feelings. Love and anger grappled at my heart. But I only held her, and did not speak until she grew obviously calmer. The paroxysm seemed passing away. Then I said:

“I cannot understand.”

“Nor I,” she answered, with a directness that had been foreign to her of late, but that was part and parcel of her real, beautiful nature. “I cannot understand. I only know there is a change in me, or in you to me, and that I cannot help it, or that I have not been able to help it. Sometimes I feel--do not be angry, I will try to tell you--a physical fear of you, of your touch, of your clasp, a fear such as an animal might feel towards the master who had beaten it. I tremble then at your approach. When you are near me I feel cold, oh! so cold and--and anxious; perhaps I ought to say apprehensive. Oh, I am hurting you!”

I suppose I must have winced at her words, and she is quick to observe.

“Go on,” I said; “do not spare me. Tell me everything. It is madness indeed; but we may kill it, when we both know it.”

“Oh, if we could!” she cried, with a poignancy which was heart-breaking to hear. “If we could!”

“Do you doubt our ability?” I said, trying to be patient and calm. “You are unreasoning, like all women. Be sensible for a moment. You do me a wrong in cherishing these feelings. I have the capacity for cruelty in me. I may have been--I have been--cruel in the past, but never to you. You have no right to treat me as you have done lately. If you examine your feelings, and compare them with facts, you will see their absurdity.”

“But,” she interposed, with a woman’s fatal quickness, “that will not do away with their reality.”

“It must. Look into their faces until they fade like ghosts, seen only between light and darkness. They are founded upon nothing; they are bred without father or mother; they are hysterical; they are wicked. Think a little of me. You are not going to be conquered by a chimera, to allow a phantom created by your imagination to ruin the happiness that has been so beautiful. You will not do that! You dare not!”

She only answered:

“If I can help it.”

A passionate anger seized me, a fury at my impotence against this child. I pushed her almost roughly from my arms.

“And I have married this woman!” I cried bitterly. I got up.

Margot had ceased crying now, and her face was very white and calm; it looked rigid in the faint candle-light that shone across the bed.

“Do not be angry,” she said. “We are controlled by something inside of us; there are powers in us that we cannot fight against.”

“There is nothing we cannot fight against,” I said passionately. “The doctrine of predestination is the devil’s own doctrine. It is the doctrine set up by the sinner to excuse his sin; it is the coward’s doctrine. Understand me, Margot, I love you, but I am not a weak fool. There must be an end of this folly. Perhaps you are playing with me, acting like a girl, testing me. Let us have no more of it.”

She said:

“I only do what I must.”

Her tone turned me cold. Her set face frightened me, and angered me, for there was a curious obstinacy in it. I left the room abruptly, and did not return. That night I had no sleep.

I am not a coward, but I find that I am inclined to fear that which fears me. I dread an animal that always avoids me silently more than an animal that actually attacks me. The thing that runs from me makes me shiver, the thing that creeps away when I come near wakes my uneasiness. At this time there rose up in me a strange feeling towards Margot. The white, fair child I had married was at moments--only at moments--horrible to me. I felt disposed to shun her. Something within cried out against her. Long ago, at the instant of our introduction, an unreasoning sensation that could only be called dread had laid hold upon me. That dread returned from the night of our explanation, returned deepened and added to. It prompted me to a suggestion which I had no sooner made than I regretted it. On the morning following I told Margot that in future we had better occupy separate rooms. She assented quietly, but I thought a furtive expression of relief stole for a moment into her face.

I was deeply angered with her and with myself; yet, now that I knew beyond question my wife’s physical terror of me, I was-half afraid of her. I felt as if I could not bring myself to lie long hours by her side in the darkness, by the side of a woman who was shrinking from me, who was watching me when I could not see her. The idea made my very flesh creep.

Yet I hated myself for this shrinking of the body, and sometimes hated her for rousing it. A hideous struggle was going on within me--a struggle between love and impotent anger and despair, between the lover and the master. For I am one of the old-fashioned men who think that a husband ought to be master of his wife as well as of his house.

How could I be master of a woman I secretly feared? My knowledge of myself spurred me through acute irritation almost to the verge of madness.

All calm was gone. I was alternately gentle to my wife and almost ferocious towards her, ready to fall at her feet and worship her or to seize her and treat her with physical violence. I only restrained myself by an effort.

My variations of manner did not seem to affect her. Indeed, it sometimes struck me that she feared me more when I was kind to her than when I was harsh.

And I knew, by a thousand furtive indications, that her horror of me was deepening day by day. I believe she could hardly bring herself to be in a room alone with me, especially after nightfall.

One evening, when we were dining, the butler, after placing dessert upon the table, moved to leave us. She turned white, and, as he reached the door, half rose, and called him back in a sharp voice.

“Symonds!” she said.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“You are going?”

The fellow looked surprised.

“Can I get you anything, ma’am?”

She glanced at me with an indescribable uneasiness. Then she leaned back in her chair with an effort, and pressed her lips together.

“No,” she said.

As the man went out and shut the door, she looked at me again from under her eyelids; and finally her eyes travelled from me to a small, thin-bladed knife, used for cutting oranges, that lay near her plate, and fixed themselves on it. She put out her hand stealthily, drew it towards her, and kept her hand over it on the table. I took an orange from a dish in front of me.

“Margot,” I said, “will you pass me that fruit-knife?”

She obviously hesitated.

“Give me that knife,” I repeated roughly, stretching out my hand.

She lifted her hand, left the knife upon the table, and at the same time, springing up, glided softly out of the room and closed the door behind her.

That evening I spent alone in the smoking-room, and, for the first time, she did not come to bid me good-night.

I sat smoking my cigar in a tumult of furious despair and love. The situation was becoming intolerable. It could not be en-dured. I longed for a crisis, even for a violent one. I could have cried aloud that night for a veritable tragedy. There were moments when I would almost have killed the child who mysteriously eluded and defied me. I could have wreaked a cruel vengeance upon the body for the sin of the mind. I was terribly, mortally distressed.

After a long and painful self-communion, I resolved to make another wild effort to set things right before it was too late; and when the clock chimed the half-hour after ten I went upstairs softly to her bedroom and turned the handle of the door, meaning to enter, to catch Margot in my arms, tell her how deep my love for her was, how she injured me by her base fears, and how she was driving me back from the gentleness she had given me to the cruelty, to the brutality, of my first nature.

The door resisted me: it was locked. I paused a moment, and then tapped gently. I heard a sudden rustle within, as if someone hurried across the floor away from the door, and then Margot’s voice cried sharply:

“Who’s that? Who is there?” “Margot, it is I. I wish to speak to you--to say good-night.”

“Good-night,” she said. “But let me in for a moment.” There was a silence--it seemed to me a long one; then she answered:

“Not now, dear; I--I am so tired.” “Open the door for a moment.” “I am very tired. Good-night.” The cold, level tone of her voice--for the anxiety had left it after that first sudden cry--roused me to a sudden fury of action. I seized the handle of the door and pressed with all my strength. Physically I am a very powerful man--my anger and despair gave me a giant’s might. I burst the lock, and sprang into the room. My impulse was to seize Margot in my arms and crush her to death, it might be, in an embrace she could not struggle against. The blood coursed like molten fire through my veins. The lust of love, the lust of murder even, perhaps, was upon me. I sprang impetuously into the room.

No candles were alight in it. The blinds were up, and the chill moonbeams filtered through the small lattice panes. By the farthest window, in the yellowish radiance, was huddled a white thing.

A sudden cold took hold upon me. All the warmth in me froze up.

I stopped where I was and held my breath.

That white thing, seen thus uncertainly, had no semblance to humanity. It was animal wholly. I could have believed for the moment that a white cat crouched from me there by the curtain, waiting to spring.

What a strange illusion that was! I tried to laugh at it afterwards, but at the moment horror stole through me--horror, and almost awe.

All desire of violence left me. Heat was dead; I felt cold as stone. I could not even speak a word.

Suddenly the white thing moved. The curtain was drawn sharply; the moonlight was blotted out; the room was plunged in darkness--a darkness in which that thing could see!

I turned and stole out of the room. I could have fled, driven by the nameless fear that was upon me.

Only when the morning dawned did the man in me awake, and I cursed myself for my cowardice.

*****

The following evening we were asked to dine out with some neighbours, who lived a few miles off in a wonderful old Norman castle near the sea. During the day neither of us had made the slightest allusion to the incidents of the previous night. We both felt it a relief to go into society, I think. The friends to whom we went--Lord and Lady Melchester--had a large party staying with them, and we were, I believe, the only outsiders who lived in the neighbourhood. One of their guests was Professor Black, whose name I have already mentioned--a little, dry, thin, acrid man, with thick black hair, innocent of the comb, and pursed, straight lips. I had met him two or three times in London, and as he had only just arrived at the castle, and scarcely knew his fellow-visitors there, he brought his wine over to me when the ladies left the dining-room, and entered into conversation. At the moment I was glad, but before we followed the women I would have given a year--I might say years--of my life not to have spoken to him, not to have heard him speak that night.

How did we drift into that fatal conversation? I hardly remember. We talked first of the neighbourhood, then swayed away to books, then to people. Yes, that was how it came about. The Professor was speaking of a man whom we both knew in town, a curiously effeminate man, whose every thought and feeling seemed that of a woman. I said I disliked him, and condemned him for his woman’s demeanour, his woman’s mind; but the Professor thereupon joined issue with me.

“Pity the fellow, if you like,” he uttered, in his rather strident voice; “but as to condemning him, I would as soon condemn a tadpole for not being a full-grown frog. His soul is beyond his power to manage, or even to coerce, you may depend upon it.”

Having sipped his port, he drew a little nearer to me, and slightly dropped his voice.

“There would be less censure of individuals in this world,” he said, “if people were only a little more thoughtful. These souls are like letters, and sometimes they are sealed up in the wrong envelope. For instance, a man’s soul may be put into a woman’s body, or _vice versâ_. It has been so in D------‘s case. A mistake has been made.”

“By Providence?” I interrupted, with, perhaps, just a _soupçon_ of sarcasm in my voice.

The Professor smiled.

“Suppose we imitate Thomas Hardy, and say by the President of the Immortals, who makes sport with more humans than Tess,” he answered. “Mistakes may be deliberate, just as their reverse may be accidental. Even a mighty power may condescend sometimes to a very practical joke. To a thinker the world is full of apple-pie beds, and cold wet sponges fall on us from at least half the doors we push open. The soul-juggleries of the before-mentioned President are very curious, but people will not realize that soul transference from body to body is as much a plain fact as the daily rising of the sun on one half of the world and its nightly setting on the other.”

“Do you mean that souls pass on into the world again on the death of the particular body in which they have been for the moment confined?” I asked.

“Precisely: I have no doubt of it. Sometimes a woman’s soul goes into a man’s body; then the man acts woman, and people cry against him for effeminacy. The soul colours the body with actions, the body does not colour the soul, or not in the same degree.”

“But we are not irresponsible. We can command ourselves.”

The Professor smiled dryly.

“You think so?” he said. “I sometimes doubt it.”

“And I doubt your theory of soul transference.”