________________________________________________
_ But the bed I made up for myself was sufficiently
uncomfortable to give me a wakeful night, and I thought a good
deal of what the unlucky Dutchman had told me. I was not so
much puzzled by Blanche Stroeve's action, for I saw in that
merely the result of a physical appeal. I do not suppose she
had ever really cared for her husband, and what I had taken
for love was no more than the feminine response to caresses
and comfort which in the minds of most women passes for it.
It is a passive feeling capable of being roused for any object,
as the vine can grow on any tree; and the wisdom of
the world recognises its strength when it urges a girl to
marry the man who wants her with the assurance that love will follow.
It is an emotion made up of the satisfaction in security,
pride of property, the pleasure of being desired,
the gratification of a household, and it is only by an amiable
vanity that women ascribe to it spiritual value. It is an
emotion which is defenceless against passion. I suspected
that Blanche Stroeve's violent dislike of Strickland had in it
from the beginning a vague element of sexual attraction.
Who am I that I should seek to unravel the mysterious intricacies
of sex? Perhaps Stroeve's passion excited without satisfying
that part of her nature, and she hated Strickland because she
felt in him the power to give her what she needed. I think
she was quite sincere when she struggled against her husband's
desire to bring him into the studio; I think she was
frightened of him, though she knew not why; and I remembered
how she had foreseen disaster. I think in some curious way
the horror which she felt for him was a transference of the
horror which she felt for herself because he so strangely
troubled her. His appearance was wild and uncouth; there was
aloofness in his eyes and sensuality in his mouth; he was big
and strong; he gave the impression of untamed passion; and
perhaps she felt in him, too, that sinister element which had
made me think of those wild beings of the world's early
history when matter, retaining its early connection with the
earth, seemed to possess yet a spirit of its own. If he
affected her at all, it was inevitable that she should love or
hate him. She hated him.
And then I fancy that the daily intimacy with the sick man
moved her strangely. She raised his head to give him food,
and it was heavy against her hand; when she had fed him she
wiped his sensual mouth and his red beard. She washed his limbs;
they were covered with thick hair; and when she dried
his hands, even in his weakness they were strong and sinewy.
His fingers were long; they were the capable, fashioning
fingers of the artist; and I know not what troubling thoughts
they excited in her. He slept very quietly, without a
movement, so that he might have been dead, and he was like
some wild creature of the woods, resting after a long chase;
and she wondered what fancies passed through his dreams.
Did he dream of the nymph flying through the woods of Greece with
the satyr in hot pursuit? She fled, swift of foot and
desperate, but he gained on her step by step, till she felt
his hot breath on her neck; and still she fled silently, and
silently he pursued, and when at last he seized her was it
terror that thrilled her heart or was it ecstasy?
Blanche Stroeve was in the cruel grip of appetite.
Perhaps she hated Strickland still, but she hungered for him,
and everything that had made up her life till then became of
no account. She ceased to be a woman, complex, kind and
petulant, considerate and thoughtless; she was a Maenad.
She was desire.
But perhaps this is very fanciful; and it may be that she was
merely bored with her husband and went to Strickland out of a
callous curiosity. She may have had no particular feeling for
him, but succumbed to his wish from propinquity or idleness,
to find then that she was powerless in a snare of her own
contriving. How did I know what were the thoughts and
emotions behind that placid brow and those cool gray eyes?
But if one could be certain of nothing in dealing with
creatures so incalculable as human beings, there were
explanations of Blanche Stroeve's behaviour which were at all
events plausible. On the other hand, I did not understand
Strickland at all. I racked my brain, but could in no way
account for an action so contrary to my conception of him.
It was not strange that he should so heartlessly have betrayed
his friends' confidence, nor that he hesitated not at all to
gratify a whim at the cost of another's misery. That was in
his character. He was a man without any conception of
gratitude. He had no compassion. The emotions common to most
of us simply did not exist in him, and it was as absurd to
blame him for not feeling them as for blaming the tiger
because he is fierce and cruel. But it was the whim I could
not understand.
I could not believe that Strickland had fallen in love with
Blanche Stroeve. I did not believe him capable of love.
That is an emotion in which tenderness is an essential part,
but Strickland had no tenderness either for himself or for others;
there is in love a sense of weakness, a desire to protect,
an eagerness to do good and to give pleasure -- if not
unselfishness, at all events a selfishness which marvellously
conceals itself; it has in it a certain diffidence.
These were not traits which I could imagine in Strickland.
Love is absorbing; it takes the lover out of himself; the most
clear-sighted, though he may know, cannot realise that his love
will cease; it gives body to what he knows is illusion, and,
knowing it is nothing else, he loves it better than reality.
It makes a man a little more than himself, and at the same
time a little less. He ceases to be himself. He is no longer
an individual, but a thing, an instrument to some purpose
foreign to his ego. Love is never quite devoid of
sentimentality, and Strickland was the least inclined to that
infirmity of any man I have known. I could not believe that
he would ever suffer that possession of himself which love is;
he could never endure a foreign yoke. I believed him capable
of uprooting from his heart, though it might be with agony, so
that he was left battered and ensanguined, anything that came
between himself and that uncomprehended craving that urged him
constantly to he knew not what. If I have succeeded at all in
giving the complicated impression that Strickland made on me,
it will not seem outrageous to say that I felt he was at once
too great and too small for love.
But I suppose that everyone's conception of the passion is
formed on his own idiosyncrasies, and it is different with
every different person. A man like Strickland would love in a
manner peculiar to himself. It was vain to seek the analysis
of his emotion. _
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