pg28948 [74]
He ground his soul in uneasiness and fear. But she rose to a real outburst of house-work, turning him away as she shoved the furniture aside to her broom. He stood hanging miserable near. He wanted her back. Dread, and desire for her to stay with him, and shame at his own dependence on her drove him to anger. He began to lose his head. The wonder was going to pass away again. All the love, the magnificent new order was going to be lost, she would forfeit it all for the outside things. She would admit the outside world again, she would throw away the living fruit for the ostensible rind. He began to hate this in her. Driven by fear of her departure into a state of helplessness, almost of imbecility, he wandered about the house.
And she, with her skirts kilted up, flew round at her work, absorbed.
"Shake the rug then, if you must hang round," she said.
And fretting with resentment, he went to shake the rug. She was blithely unconscious of him. He came back, hanging near to her.
"Can't you do anything?" she said, as if to a child, impatiently. "Can't you do your wood-work?"
"Where shall I do it?" he asked, harsh with pain.
"Anywhere."
How furious that made him.
"Or go for a walk," she continued. "Go down to the Marsh. Don't hang about as if you were only half there."
He winced and hated it. He went away to read. Never had his soul felt so flayed and uncreated.
And soon he must come down again to her. His hovering near her, wanting her to be with him, the futility of him, the way his hands hung, irritated her beyond bearing. She turned on him blindly and destructively, he became a mad creature, black and electric with fury. The dark storms rose in him, his eyes glowed black and evil, he was fiendish in his thwarted soul.
There followed two black and ghastly days, when she was set in anguish against him, and he felt as if he were in a black, violent underworld, and his wrists quivered murderously. And she resisted him. He seemed a dark, almost evil thing, pursuing her, hanging on to her, burdening her. She would give anything to have him removed.
"You need some work to do," she said. "You ought to be at work. Can't you do something?"
His soul only grew the blacker. His condition now became complete, the darkness of his soul was thorough. Everything had gone: he remained complete in his own tense, black will. He was now unaware of her. She did not exist. His dark, passionate soul had recoiled upon itself, and now, clinched and coiled round a centre of hatred, existed in its own power. There was a curiously ugly pallor, an expressionlessness in his face. She shuddered from him. She was afraid of him. His will seemed grappled upon her.
She retreated before him. She went down to the Marsh, she entered again the immunity of her parents' love for her. He remained at Yew Cottage, black and clinched, his mind dead. He was unable to work at his wood-carving. He went on working monotonously at the garden, blindly, like a mole.
As she came home, up the hill, looking away at the town dim and blue on the hill, her heart relaxed and became yearning. She did not want to fight him any more. She wanted love—oh, love. Her feet began to hurry. She wanted to get back to him. Her heart became tight with yearning for him.
He had been making the garden in order, cutting the edges of the turf, laying the path with stones. He was a good, capable workman.
"How nice you've made it," she said, approaching tentatively down the path.
But he did not heed, he did not hear. His brain was solid and dead.
"Haven't you made it nice?" she repeated, rather plaintively.
He looked up at her, with that fixed, expressionless face and unseeing eyes which shocked her, made her go dazed and blind. Then he turned away. She saw his slender, stooping figure