“And what do you do?”
“Just get away as fast as I can.”
“But do you think Lesbian women any worse than homosexual men?”
“I do! Because I’ve suffered more from them. In the abstract, I’ve no idea. When I get with a Lesbian woman, whether she knows she’s one or not, I see red. No, no! But I wanted to have nothing to do with any woman any more. I wanted to keep to myself: keep my privacy and my decency.”
He looked pale, and his brows were sombre.
“And were you sorry when I came along?” she asked.
“I was sorry and I was glad.”
“And what are you now?”
“I’m sorry, from the outside: all the complications and the ugliness and recrimination that’s bound to come, sooner or later. That’s when my blood sinks, and I’m low. But when my blood comes up, I’m glad. I’m even triumphant. I was really getting bitter. I thought there was no real sex left: never a woman who’d really ‘come’ naturally with a man: except black women, and somehow, well, we’re white men: and they’re a bit like mud.”
“And now, are you glad of me?” she asked.
“Yes! When I can forget the rest. When I can’t forget the rest, I want to get under the table and die.”
“Why under the table?”
“Why?” he laughed. “Hide, I suppose. Baby!”
“You do seem to have had awful experiences of women,” she said.
“You see, I couldn’t fool myself. That’s where most men manage. They take an attitude, and accept a lie. I could never fool myself. I knew what I wanted with a woman, and I could never say I’d got it when I hadn’t.”
“But have you got it now?”
“Looks as if I might have.”
“Then why are you so pale and gloomy?”
“Bellyful of remembering: and perhaps afraid of myself.”
She sat in silence. It was growing late.
“And you do think it’s important, a man and a woman?” she asked him.
“For me it is. For me it’s the core to my life: if I have a right relation with a woman.”
“And if you didn’t get it?”
“Then I’d have to do without.”
Again she pondered, before she asked:
“And do you think you’ve always been right with women?”
“God, no! I let my wife get to what she was: my fault a good deal. I spoilt her. And I’m very mistrustful. You’ll have to expect it. It takes a lot to make me trust anybody, inwardly. So perhaps I’m a fraud too. I mistrust. And tenderness is not to be mistaken.”
She looked at him.
“You don’t mistrust with your body, when your blood comes up,” she said. “You don’t mistrust then, do you?”
“No, alas! That’s how I’ve got into all the trouble. And that’s why my mind mistrusts so thoroughly.”
“Let your mind mistrust. What does it matter!”
The dog sighed with discomfort on the mat. The ash-clogged fire sank.
“We are a couple of battered warriors,” said Connie.
“Are you battered too?” he laughed. “And here we are returning to the fray!”
“Yes! I feel really frightened.”
“Ay!”
He got up, and put her shoes to dry, and wiped his own and set them near the fire. In the morning he would grease them. He poked the ash of pasteboard as much as possible out of the fire. “Even burnt, it’s filthy,” he said. Then he brought sticks and put them on the hob for the morning. Then he went out a while with the dog.
When he came back, Connie said:
“I want to go out too, for a minute.”
She went alone into the darkness. There were stars overhead. She could smell flowers on the night air. And she could feel her wet shoes getting wetter again. But she felt like going away, right away from him and everybody.
It was chilly. She shuddered, and returned to the house. He was sitting in front of the low fire.
“Ugh! Cold!” she shuddered.
He put the sticks on the fire, and fetched more, till they had a good crackling chimneyful of blaze. The rippling running yellow flame made them both happy, warmed their faces and their souls.
“Never mind!” she said, taking his hand as he sat silent and remote. “One does one’s best.”
“Ay!”—He sighed, with a twist of a smile.
She slipped over to him, and into his arms, as he sat there before the fire.
“Forget then!” she whispered. “Forget!”
He held her close, in the running warmth of the fire. The flame itself was like a forgetting. And her soft, warm, ripe weight! Slowly his blood turned, and began to ebb back into strength and reckless vigour again.
“And perhaps the women really wanted to be there and love you properly, only perhaps they couldn’t. Perhaps it wasn’t all their fault,” she said.
“I know it. Do you think I don’t know what a broken-backed snake that’s been trodden on I was myself!”
She clung to him suddenly. She had not wanted to start all this again. Yet some perversity had made her.
“But you’re not now,” she said. “You’re not that now: a broken-backed snake that’s been trodden on.”
“I don’t know what I am. There’s black days ahead.”
“No!” she protested, clinging to him. “Why? Why?”
“There’s black days coming for us all and for everybody,” he repeated with a prophetic gloom.
“No! You’re not to say it!”
He was silent. But she could feel the black void of despair inside him. That was the death of all desire, the death of all love: this despair that was like the dark cave inside the men, in which their spirit was lost.
“And you talk so coldly about sex,” she said. “You talk as if you had only wanted your own pleasure and satisfaction.”
She was protesting nervously against him.
“Nay!” he said. “I wanted to have my pleasure and satisfaction of a woman, and I never got it: because I could never get my pleasure and satisfaction of her unless she got hers of me at the same time. And it never happened. It takes two.”
“But you never believed in your women. You don’t even believe really in me,” she said.
“I don’t know what believing
