• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2283 0

a scene of carnage. (Why do I so much enjoy writing this down?) I told her from the start that I had no conception of marrying her. Was it blind stupid hope nevertheless which made her so infinitely kind to me? An ungrateful thought: I am sure she had no hope. I told her that the affair was temporary, that my love for her was temporary, and doubtless her love for me was temporary. I spoke of mortality and the fragile and shadowy nature of human arrangements and the jumbled unreality of human minds, while her large light brown eyes spoke to me of the eternal. She said, I want to be perfect for you so that you can leave me without pain, and this perfect expression of love simply irritated me. She said, I will wait forever, although I know . . . I am not . . . waiting for . . . anything. What a love duet, and how much I enjoyed it although in her suffering I suffered a little too. Certainly she concealed her pain as much as she could; but towards the end it was impossible. She cried before me with wide open eyes, not staunching the tears. Her tears fell on my sleeve, on my hand like storm rain. And when at last I told her to go she went like a shadow, with silent swift obedience. After that I went on my second visit to Japan. The taste of sake still makes me remember Lizzie’s tears.

She never prospered in the theatre after I went away. (All the ladies went downhill after I left them, except Rosina. Clement of course I never really left, even when we both had other lovers, which was rather horrid for the other lovers.) Two years after Lizzie’s apotheosis as Ariel they were asking, whatever happened to Lizzie Scherer? I was so grateful to her, and this alone has made her ‘last’ in my mind. The dear girl never made me feel guilty! A light of courage and truth shines on her in my memory. She is possibly the only woman (with one exception) who never lied to me. And the remembrance of her sufferings often filled me with a kind of tender joy, whereas when I think of the sufferings of other women I tend to feel indifference, even annoyance.

I wanted a wife once when I was young, but the girl fled. Since then I have never really seriously thought of marriage. My observation of the state never made me fancy it. The only happily married couples I know at all well are my Cambridge friends Victor and Julia Banstead, and, in the theatre, Sidney and Rosemary Ashe; and even they, who knows . . . People are so secretive. I might also count Will and Adelaide Boase, but they only survive because she gives in all the time, which I suppose is one method. What suits me best is the drama of separation, of looking forward to assignations and rendezvous. I cannot prefer the awful eternal presence of marriage to the magic of meetings and partings. I do not even care for sharing a bed, and I rarely want to spend the whole night with a woman I have made love to. In the morning she looks to me like a whore. Marriage is a sort of brainwashing which breaks the mind into the acceptance of so many horrors. How untidy and ugly and charmless married people often let themselves become without even noticing it. I sometimes reflect on these horrors simply in order to delight myself by thinking how I have escaped them!

In this respect Clement understood me perfectly, perhaps because she was always so excessively conscious of being ‘old enough to be my mother’. How often, glowing with that famous beauty and charm which she retained for so long, she battered me with that phrase! We knew that we would never marry and we knew that we would make each other suffer, yet we schemed for our happiness, we really used our joint intelligence on that problem. Of course in a way it was a hopeless case, but it was a hopeless case which marvellously lasted for the rest of Clement’s life, so I did not do too badly by that wonderful maddening woman. Was I a little cruel to her, never quite saying how much I loved her, always trying to keep her ‘on the hop’, puzzled, baffled, at a disadvantage? Perhaps. I was afraid of being ‘swallowed’. I went away, I came back, I went away