But still, indomitably, she renewed the attack. There might have been something grand about her unwavering determination—something grand, if it had not been grotesque. Providence was teaching me yet once more that the unsapient life is a dreary and hopeless business, and that it is, for all practical purposes, the only life—lived everywhere by all but a negligibly few exceptions. At least I presume that that is what Providence was trying to impress on me. But in the process it was using Mrs. Aldwinkle, I thought, rather hardly. I felt sorry for the poor lady. Some hidden irrational force within herself was compelling her to cut these capers, throw herself into these ludicrous postures, say these stupid words and contort her face into these grimaces; she was helpless. She just obeyed orders and did her best; but her best was ludicrous. And not merely ludicrous but appalling. She was like a buffoon carrying a skull.
Unflaggingly she played the deplorable part assigned to her. Every day she brought me flowers. “I want them to blossom in your verses,” she said. I assured her that the only scent which provoked me to write was that of the butchers’ shops on a winter’s evening along the Harrow Road. She smiled at me. “Don’t think I can’t understand you,” she said. “I do. I do.” She leaned forward; her eyes shone, her perfume enveloped me, she breathed heliotrope in my face. I could see with extraordinary distinctness the little wrinkles round her eyes, the careless smear of rouge at the corners of the mouth. “I do understand you,” she repeated.
She did understand me. … One night (it was at Montefiascone, on our way back from Rome), when I was reading in bed, I heard a sound; I looked up, and saw Mrs. Aldwinkle carefully closing the door behind her. She was wearing a dressing-gown of sea-green silk. Her hair hung in two thick plaits over her shoulders. When she turned round, I saw that her face had been coloured and powdered with more than ordinary care. In silence she advanced across the room, she sat down on the edge of my bed. An aura of ambergris and heliotrope surrounded her.
I smiled politely, closed my book (keeping a finger, however, between the pages to mark my place) and slightly raised my eyebrows in interrogation. To what, I made my face inquire, do I owe the honour? …
I owed it, it seemed, to my hostess’s urgently felt need to tell me yet once more that she understood me.
“I couldn’t bear,” she said breathlessly, “couldn’t bear to think of you here alone. With your secret misery.” And when I made as though to protest, she held up her hand. “Oh, don’t think I haven’t seen through your mask. Alone with your secret misery …”
“No, really …” I managed to put in. But Mrs. Aldwinkle would not suffer herself to be interrupted.
“I couldn’t bear to think of your terrible loneliness,” she went on. “I wanted you to know there was at least one person who understood.” She leaned towards me, smiling, but with lips that trembled. All at once her eyes filled with tears, her face contorted itself into the terrible grimace of misery. She made a little moaning noise and, letting herself fall forward, she hid her face against my knees. “I love you, I love you,” she repeated in a muffled voice. Her body was shaken by recurrent spasms of sobbing. I was left wondering what to do. This was not in the programme. When one goes out man-eating or pheasant-shooting, one has no business to weep over the victim. But the trouble is, of course, that the man-eater sees herself as the victim. Hinc illae lacrimae. It is impossible for two human beings to agree completely about anything. Quot homines, for now that the Dictionary of Familiar Quotations has been opened I may as well continue to make use of it, quot homines, tot disputandum est. There is no agreement even about the truths of science. One man is a geometrician; the other can only understand analysis. One is incapable of believing in anything of which he cannot make a working model; the other wants his truth as abstract as it is possible to make it. But when it comes to deciding which of two people is the victim and which the man-eater, there is nothing to be done but abandon the attempt. Let each party stick to his own opinion. The most successful men are those who never admit the validity of other people’s opinions, who even deny their existence.
“My dear Lilian,” I said (she had insisted on my calling her Lilian within a day or two of my arrival), “my dear Lilian …” I could find nothing more to say. A successful man, I suppose, would have said something frankly brutal, something that would have made it clear to Mrs. Aldwinkle which of the two, in his opinion, was the victim and which the carnivore. I lacked the force. Mrs. Aldwinkle went on sobbing.
“I love you. Couldn’t you love me a little? A little only? I would be your slave. Your slave; I’d be your slave,” she kept repeating.
What things she said! I listened to her, feeling pity—yes, pity no doubt—but still more, a profound embarrassment, and with it anger against the person who had thrust me into this untenable position.
“It’s no good,” I protested. “It’s impossible.”
She only began again, desperately.
How much further the scene might have prolonged itself and what
