The Moon and Sixpence
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.
Chapter XXXI
Next day, though I pressed him to remain, Stroeve left me. I offered to
fetch his things from the studio, but he insisted on going himself; I
think he hoped they had not thought of getting them together, so that
he would have an opportunity of seeing his wife again and perhaps
inducing her to come back to him. But he found his traps waiting for
him in the porter’s lodge, and the concierge told him that Blanche had
gone out. I do not think he resisted the temptation of giving her an
account of his troubles. I found that he was telling them to everyone
he knew; he expected sympathy, but only excited ridicule.
He bore himself most unbecomingly. Knowing at what time his wife did
her shopping, one day, unable any longer to bear not seeing her, he
waylaid her in the street. She would not speak to him, but he insisted
on speaking to her. He spluttered out words of apology for any wrong he
had committed towards her; he told her he loved her devotedly and
begged her to return to him. She would not answer; she walked
hurriedly, with averted face. I imagined him with his fat little legs
trying to keep up with her. Panting a little in his haste, he told her
how miserable he was; he besought her to have mercy on him; he
promised, if she would forgive him, to do everything she wanted. He
offered to take her for a journey. He told her that Strickland would
soon tire of her. When he repeated to me the whole sordid little scene
I was outraged. He had shown neither sense nor dignity. He had omitted
nothing that could make his wife despise him. There is no cruelty
greater than a woman’s to a man who loves her and whom she does not
love; she has no kindness then, no tolerance even, she has only an
insane irritation. Blanche Stroeve stopped suddenly, and as hard as she
could slapped her husband’s face. She took advantage of his confusion
to escape, and ran up the stairs to the studio. No word had passed her
lips.
When he told me this he put his hand to his cheek as though he still
felt the smart of the blow, and in his eyes was a pain that was
heartrending and an amazement that was ludicrous. He looked like an
overblown schoolboy, and though I felt so sorry for him, I could hardly
help laughing.
Then he took to walking along the street which she must pass through to
get to the shops, and he would stand at the corner, on the other side,
as she went along. He dared not speak to her again, but sought to put
into his round eyes the appeal that was in his heart. I suppose he had
some idea that the sight of his misery would touch her. She never made
the smallest sign that she saw him. She never even changed the hour of
her errands or sought an alternative route. I have an idea that there
was some cruelty in her indifference. Perhaps she got enjoyment out of
the torture she inflicted. I wondered why she hated him so much.
I begged Stroeve to behave more wisely. His want of spirit was
exasperating.
“You’re doing no good at all by going on like this,” I said. “I think
you’d have been wiser if you’d hit her over the head with a stick. She
wouldn’t have despised you as she does now.”
I suggested that he should go home for a while. He had often spoken to
me of the silent town, somewhere up in the north of Holland, where his
parents still lived. They were poor people. His father was a carpenter,
and they dwelt in a little old red-brick house, neat and clean, by the
side of a sluggish canal. The streets were wide and empty; for two
hundred years the place had been dying, but the houses had the homely
stateliness of their time. Rich merchants, sending their wares to the
distant Indies, had lived in them calm and prosperous lives, and in
their decent decay they kept still an aroma of their splendid past. You
could wander along the canal till you came to broad green fields, with
windmills here and there, in which cattle, black and white, grazed
lazily. I thought that among those surroundings, with their
recollections of his boyhood, Dirk Stroeve would forget his
unhappiness. But he would not go.
“I must be here when she needs me,” he repeated. “It would be dreadful
if something terrible happened and I were not at hand.”
“What do you think is going to happen?” I asked.
“I don’t know. But I’m afraid.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
For all his pain, Dirk Stroeve remained a ridiculous object. He might
have excited sympathy if he had grown worn and thin. He did nothing of
the kind. He remained fat, and his round, red cheeks shone like ripe
apples. He had great neatness of person, and he continued to wear his
spruce black coat and his bowler hat, always a little too small for
him, in a dapper, jaunty manner. He was getting something of a paunch,
and sorrow had no effect on it. He looked more than ever like a
prosperous bagman. It is hard that a man’s exterior should tally so
little sometimes with his soul. Dirk Stroeve had the passion of Romeo
in the body of Sir Toby Belch. He had a sweet and generous nature, and
yet was always blundering; a real feeling for what was beautiful and
the capacity to create only what was commonplace; a peculiar delicacy
of sentiment and gross manners. He could exercise tact when dealing
with the affairs of others, but none when dealing with his own. What a
cruel practical joke old Nature played when she flung so many
contradictory elements together, and left the man face to face with the
perplexing callousness of the universe.
Chapter XXXII
I did not see Strickland for several weeks. I was disgusted with him,
and if I had had an opportunity should have been glad to tell him so,
but I saw no object in seeking him out for the purpose. I am a little
shy of any assumption of moral indignation; there is always in it an
element of self-satisfaction which makes it awkward to anyone who has a
sense of humour. It requires a very lively passion to steel me to my
own ridicule. There was a sardonic sincerity in Strickland which made
me sensitive to anything that might suggest a pose.
But one evening when I was passing along the Avenue de Clichy in front
of the café which Strickland frequented and which I now avoided, I ran
straight into him. He was accompanied by Blanche Stroeve, and they were
just going to Strickland’s favourite corner.
“Where the devil have you been all this time?” said he. “I thought you
must be away.”
His cordiality was proof that he knew I had no wish to speak to him. He
was not a man with whom it was worth while wasting politeness.
“No,” I said; “I haven’t been away.”
“Why haven’t you been here?”
“There are more cafés in Paris than one, at which to trifle away an
idle hour.”
Blanche then held out her hand and bade me good-evening. I do not know
why I had expected her to be somehow changed; she wore the same gray
dress that she wore so often, neat and becoming, and her brow was as
candid, her eyes as untroubled, as when I had been used to see her
occupied with her household duties in the studio.
“Come and have a game of chess,” said Strickland.
I do not know why at the moment I could think of no excuse. I followed
them rather sulkily to the table at which Strickland always sat, and he
called for the board and the chessmen. They both took the situation so
much as a matter of course that I felt it absurd to do otherwise. Mrs.
Stroeve watched the game with inscrutable face. She was silent, but she
had always been silent. I looked at her mouth for an expression that
could give me a clue to what she felt; I watched her eyes for some
tell-tale flash, some hint of dismay or bitterness; I scanned her brow