"And she loved you with all her heart."
He sprang to his feet and walked up and down the small room.
"I don"t want love. I haven"t time for it. It"s weakness.
I am a man, and sometimes I want a woman. When I"ve satisfied my pa.s.sion I"m ready for other things. I can"t overcome my desire, but I hate it; it imprisons my spirit; I look forward to the time when I shall be free from all desire and can give myself without hindrance to my work. Because women can do nothing except love, they"ve given it a ridiculous importance.
They want to persuade us that it"s the whole of life. It"s an insignificant part. I know l.u.s.t. That"s normal and healthy.
Love is a disease. Women are the instruments of my pleasure; I have no patience with their claim to be helpmates, partners, companions."
I had never heard Strickland speak so much at one time.
He spoke with a pa.s.sion of indignation. But neither here nor elsewhere do I pretend to give his exact words; his vocabulary was small, and he had no gift for framing sentences, so that one had to piece his meaning together out of interjections, the expression of his face, gestures and hackneyed phrases.
"You should have lived at a time when women were chattels and men the masters of slaves," I said.
"It just happens that I am a completely normal man."
I could not help laughing at this remark, made in all seriousness; but he went on, walking up and down the room like a caged beast, intent on expressing what he felt, but found such difficulty in putting coherently.
"When a woman loves you she"s not satisfied until she possesses your soul. Because she"s weak, she has a rage for domination, and nothing less will satisfy her. She has a small mind, and she resents the abstract which she is unable to grasp. She is occupied with material things, and she is jealous of the ideal. The soul of man wanders through the uttermost regions of the universe, and she seeks to imprison it in the circle of her account-book. Do you remember my wife?
I saw Blanche little by little trying all her tricks.
With infinite patience she prepared to snare me and bind me.
She wanted to bring me down to her level; she cared nothing for me, she only wanted me to be hers. She was willing to do everything in the world for me except the one thing I wanted: to leave me alone."
I was silent for a while.
"What did you expect her to do when you left her?"
"She could have gone back to Stroeve," he said irritably.
"He was ready to take her."
"You"re inhuman," I answered. "It"s as useless to talk to you about these things as to describe colours to a man who was born blind."
He stopped in front of my chair, and stood looking down at me with an expression in which I read a contemptuous amazement.
"Do you really care a twopenny d.a.m.n if Blanche Stroeve is alive or dead?"
I thought over his question, for I wanted to answer it truthfully, at all events to my soul.
"It may be a lack of sympathy in myself if it does not make any great difference to me that she is dead. Life had a great deal to offer her. I think it"s terrible that she should have been deprived of it in that cruel way, and I am ashamed because I do not really care."
"You have not the courage of your convictions. Life has no value. Blanche Stroeve didn"t commit suicide because I left her, but because she was a foolish and unbalanced woman.
But we"ve talked about her quite enough; she was an entirely unimportant person. Come, and I"ll show you my pictures."
He spoke as though I were a child that needed to be distracted. I was sore, but not with him so much as with myself.
I thought of the happy life that pair had led in the cosy studio in Montmartre, Stroeve and his wife, their simplicity, kindness, and hospitality; it seemed to me cruel that it should have been broken to pieces by a ruthless chance; but the cruellest thing of all was that in fact it made no great difference. The world went on, and no one was a penny the worse for all that wretchedness. I had an idea that Dirk, a man of greater emotional reactions than depth of feeling, would soon forget; and Blanche"s life, begun with who knows what bright hopes and what dreams, might just as well have never been lived. It all seemed useless and inane.
Strickland had found his hat, and stood looking at me.
"Are you coming?"
"Why do you seek my acquaintance?" I asked him. "You know that I hate and despise you."
He chuckled good-humouredly.
"Your only quarrel with me really is that I don"t care a twopenny d.a.m.n what you think about me."
I felt my cheeks grow red with sudden anger. It was impossible to make him understand that one might be outraged by his callous selfishness. I longed to pierce his armour of complete indifference. I knew also that in the end there was truth in what he said. Unconsciously, perhaps, we treasure the power we have over people by their regard for our opinion of them, and we hate those upon whom we have no such influence. I suppose it is the bitterest wound to human pride. But I would not let him see that I was put out.
"Is it possible for any man to disregard others entirely?"
I said, though more to myself than to him. "You"re dependent on others for everything in existence. It"s a preposterous attempt to try to live only for yourself and by yourself.
Sooner or later you"ll be ill and tired and old, and then you"ll crawl back into the herd. Won"t you be ashamed when you feel in your heart the desire for comfort and sympathy?
You"re trying an impossible thing. Sooner or later the human being in you will yearn for the common bonds of humanity."
"Come and look at my pictures."
"Have you ever thought of death?"
"Why should I? It doesn"t matter."
I stared at him. He stood before me, motionless, with a mocking smile in his eyes; but for all that, for a moment I had an inkling of a fiery, tortured spirit, aiming at something greater than could be conceived by anything that was bound up with the flesh. I had a fleeting glimpse of a pursuit of the ineffable. I looked at the man before me in his shabby clothes, with his great nose and shining eyes, his red beard and untidy hair; and I had a strange sensation that it was only an envelope, and I was in the presence of a disembodied spirit.
"Let us go and look at your pictures," I said.
Chapter XLII
I did not know why Strickland had suddenly offered to show them to me. I welcomed the opportunity. A man"s work reveals him.
In social intercourse he gives you the surface that he wishes the world to accept, and you can only gain a true knowledge of him by inferences from little actions, of which he is unconscious, and from fleeting expressions, which cross his face unknown to him. Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have a.s.sumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem. But in his book or his picture the real man delivers himself defenceless.
His pretentiousness will only expose his vacuity. The lathe painted to look like iron is seen to be but a lathe.
No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.
To the acute observer no one can produce the most casual work without disclosing the innermost secrets of his soul.
As I walked up the endless stairs of the house in which Strickland lived, I confess that I was a little excited.
It seemed to me that I was on the threshold of a surprising adventure. I looked about the room with curiosity. It was even smaller and more bare than I remembered it. I wondered what those friends of mine would say who demanded vast studios, and vowed they could not work unless all the conditions were to their liking.
"You"d better stand there," he said, pointing to a spot from which, presumably, he fancied I could see to best advantage what he had to show me.
"You don"t want me to talk, I suppose," I said.
"No, blast you; I want you to hold your tongue."
He placed a picture on the easel, and let me look at it for a minute or two; then took it down and put another in its place.
I think he showed me about thirty canvases. It was the result of the six years during which he had been painting. He had never sold a picture. The canvases were of different sizes.
The smaller were pictures of still-life and the largest were landscapes. There were about half a dozen portraits.
"That is the lot," he said at last.