Читать книгу Shaken by the Wind - Ray Strachey - Страница 5

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The five people who knew about the midnight escapade dispersed at dawn, and four of them went back along the now dim corridor, while the fifth rose at last from his bed, and falling upon his bare knees upon the floor prayed ardently.

Flavilla and her friend went back to their own room and lay down side by side upon the bed they shared. They lay there as the light strengthened, and had no thought of sleeping, but whispered excitedly together.

Thomas and Sarah, too, returned to their bedroom, and lay down side by side. They talked too, at first, or at least Thomas did. But soon he turned sideways to sleep. His anger had been rather exhausting.

Sarah, however, was not sleepy. As she lay there waiting for the sounds of the stirring of the household she turned the new ideas over in her mind, and each moment they seemed more attractive. Some things she felt obscurely, others clearly enough, and what she wanted was to sort them out a little before they talked any more. The idea of celibate living, and of loving without sex attracted her immensely. She had never been able to get over a distaste, even a sort of disgust with everything connected with sex. It always seemed to her wrong, and rather shameful to think of men and women in terms of their bodies, and the new doctrine she had just heard made an instant appeal to the pruderies and inhibitions of her nature. Her married life with Thomas had by no means cured her of her dislikes; even at the first when she had loved him most she had shrunk from physical expression; kisses and innocent caresses would have satisfied her then, she believed; and now, when six years had passed, although she was well enough accustomed to her position, she was wearied beyond telling. How fine it would be if he and she could lead this new pure life henceforward! How she would work and pray!

Of the other side of the doctrine, with its promise of a substitute for bodily love, she thought less. It might be true that new spiritual affinities were open, that new spiritual matings were lawful. She was not interested in that. Thomas was her husband and little as she actually loved him she had not the faintest wish to seek for other affinities elsewhere; the weight of her respectable Puritan tradition held her still; and indeed she was as little interested in spiritual as in physical love-making. What she did care for, with all the passion and emotion of her being, was the approach to God. And perhaps this new way was a real short cut. It was an interesting, exciting thought.

At her side Thomas slept—and outside now the maids were beginning to sweep and clean, and she could hear the raking out of the kitchen fire below.

“Lord, show me Thy truths,” she murmured, and got out of bed to go and see to the proper waking and dressing of her son Edmund.

When Sarah returned to her own room Thomas was awake, and Thomas had a great deal to say to his wife. All this talk of carnal love being sinful in itself was nonsense, he maintained. The mere suggestion annoyed him deeply, and he grew hot and angry in combating Sarah’s silence. That the young girls had been doing nothing particularly wicked in the young preacher’s room he now reluctantly admitted; but that what they believed was true he absolutely denied. As he stamped to and fro in his dressing he paused frequently to emphasise his points, and only the enforced silence of shaving brought the tirade to a stop. However, he was going to take no public action about it, that much at least was an advantage, Sarah felt, though whether she was prepared to go all the way with the new doctrines she could not yet tell. All she knew was that suddenly Thomas’s opinion struck her as valueless. What he said had no weight, no real bearing on the case. She felt that he was arguing from an interested standpoint, that he had closed up his mind and arrayed his will against the new idea even before he had examined it. The queer tones of his voice showed it, the savage look on his face. There was an unrecognized something behind his arguments which moved him beyond reason, and vitiated his judgment. She knew all too well what it was.

There was constraint upon the conversation at breakfast, but the meal was barely over before Sarah found herself involved in a series of private conversations, first with the two young girls and then with Mr. Norris, and then with all three together. The more she saw of them and the more she heard the better she liked the doctrine, and though of course her husband’s attitude caused her uneasiness, she could not let that weigh against what might be a genuine revelation from the Lord. There was something increasingly attractive in the idea of purity and chastity of life.

Brought up, as Sarah had been, in severe Puritan modesty, shut off from all the literature of passion, and taught from her youth to distrust what was natural and pagan, the marriage relation had inevitably been a grave stumbling block to her. Her mind, therefore, was as prejudiced as her husband’s, her will as definitely predisposed to believe as his to reject the new doctrine. The opposition of their temperaments, which had been subconsciously known to them both, was now suddenly brought to light. Things never actually said between them were now on the tips of their tongues, and they knew that behind each spoken word lay a long series of troubled emotions. A chasm was opening in their apparently placid lives, and they were suddenly brought face to face with things they had most successfully hidden.

Commotion followed in the Sonning household, but not there alone. Thomas could not keep to his resolution of saying nothing of the doings he had brought to light. Enraged by the new development, and above all by the hold which he saw it was gaining upon his wife, he turned Norris and the others out of his house. The thing began to be talked of freely, and the Revival was eclipsed altogether by this new interest. Tongue-tied as the whole community was by its inability to use plain language, the people nevertheless managed to convey their meaning to each other. The men talked fairly freely together, and laughed; the women spoke in whispers, with omissions and paraphrases which yet made everything clear, and the whole place rocked with the debate. For a time there was a great tension in many families. Husbands were puzzled to know how to treat the new scruples of their wives; young men were at once dazzled and alarmed by the thought of spiritual affinities, and young girls, intoxicated by their imagination of sanctity, behaved in a way which scandalized their neighbours. “Bundling,” as the thing came to be called, had a brief and exciting vogue. Several cases of midnight visits, such as the one to Mr. Norris, came to light, and it was not always clear that they were innocent visits, and parents began to be very strict and stern. The ringleaders among the girls were sent away to visit distant relatives; the Perfectionist preachers were asked to leave the town, and under protest they went. And when they were gone the thing died down, and Delaville settled back into respectable orthodoxy once more.

In the Sonning household, however, things were not so simple nor so soon ended. There was no one to impose parental authority upon husband and wife, no one, that is, but the Lord. And He seemed to speak with conflicting voices.

Night after night, in the square, solid safety of their bedroom, Sarah and Thomas argued the point, and the more they argued the more surely did they drift away from the possibility of understanding one another. Too much feeling choked their thoughts, too many primitive and instinctive emotions clutched them, and their words could not correspond to their meanings. Above all, since each was reinforced by the Lord, neither could so much as try to sympathise with the other. One must be right and one wrong, for that was the nature of morality. And both were wretched.

About a fortnight after their visitors had gone the crisis came, and Sarah left her husband’s house. She could not live with him in physical intimacy now that she believed all such intercourse to be of Satan; and Thomas refused, and refused with bitterness, to be her spiritual husband. And so she felt she must leave him, and packing a few needful things in a small bag, and taking Edmund by the hand, she walked across the city to her sister’s house. And Anna, without asking for any explanations, took her in.

The same evening Thomas came to fetch them away. They were all at supper when he came, and although they had as yet had no talk upon the matter, James at once volunteered to go downstairs and see him on Sarah’s behalf. He stayed about a quarter of an hour, and returned saying that Thomas was gone home. It was the only comment he volunteered. This silence, after all the fret and fury of her battle with Thomas, was very grateful to Sarah, and yet in a way it was disappointing. She felt lonely in her decision. That night, however, Sarah prayed long and earnestly by the side of the bed in the spare room, and was a little comforted.

The next day, of course, the inevitable explanation with Anna took place, and the two sisters talked and wept together. It was evident from the first that Anna both disagreed and yet sympathised with her sister. She thought her belief quite false, but her action quite right, and by the curious logic of affection she was ready to support while she condemned her. Although she did not openly say so, it was clear that Anna disliked Thomas heartily, and she persisted in taking a human rather than a theological view of the quarrel. This attitude troubled Sarah not a little. Was a base, human motive really at the bottom of her action after all? Was it just a failure in wifely duty, a sin, in short, upon her own soul? Hastily as Sarah repudiated the idea, she could not forget it. Away from the exasperation of Thomas’s certainty of being right, Sarah was able to recognize that she herself was possibly wrong, and as the day went slowly by, lengthened out by the absence of her household duties, Sarah wondered more and more anxiously what her future would be. The dim plan she had had of becoming a preacher seemed impracticable now. The Lord Himself was not making things absolutely clear. She awaited James’s homecoming with impatience, hoping he would find for her the solution of all her troubles.

They sat at it long that night, and at first it was Sarah who talked, explaining the doctrines, and her reasons for accepting them; explaining, too, Thomas’s objection, and her reasons for rejecting his judgment. She brought out her Bible and read verse after verse to justify her position, and they did not attempt to contradict her. She had no feeling of being hurried, even misunderstood, and yet somehow the very freedom of her exposition took away some of her enthusiasm. It had been much easier to defend her belief against the rage and fury of Thomas than it was against this quiet attention, and as she went on her explanations grew a little apologetic, a little hesitating. She hoped still that the Lord was on her side, but she was not really quite sure that He was. When she came to the end she asked James, quite humbly, what he thought of it all, and whether he would advise her as to her future course.

James was reluctant to speak. He knew well enough what had to be said, but he was anxious to put it so as to make it acceptable to Sarah. He felt so sorry for her—for he, like his wife, disliked Thomas. It would be a hard fate to go back to such a man, he well knew. And yet all this nonsense could only lead to a worse disaster.

“I am a medical man, Sarah, and you must pardon me if I speak as such,” he said at last. “To me the facts of human life cannot be repulsive, for they are all the works of God.” He paused on this and looked across at her kindly. “To me there is nothing virtuous in the single life,” he went on, “indeed I know it to be the source of much trouble of mind. Sex, you know, lies very deep in mankind, and half the madness, the frenzy, the trouble of the world springs from it. To starve it is as disastrous in its way as to indulge it. Your doctrine, Sarah, flies in the face of nature, and thereby, I believe, of God.”

The argument did not touch her, he could see. She was not angry, but she was not moved. He was merely talking according to this world. But he had not finished yet.

“If you examine the religions of the world,” he began, and by that he caught her full attention, “if you look at primitive races, at pagans and at the whole history of Christianity itself, you will see traces of this impulse to which you have yielded. Sex and religion being both such tremendous forces have been mingled, again and again; but always it has ended in ruin. Look at the worship of Isis, of Venus, of Dionysus——” but Sarah had heard of none of these gods. He saw that she was shocked. “You may say that Pagan rites have nothing to do with true doctrine,” he began again, trying to recover the lost ground, “but surely you will agree that the monks and nuns, the celibate priesthood and all the Orders of the Roman Church are founded on a theory such as yours?”

This, he could see, was a new and terrible idea to Sarah. She had heard of the Church of Rome; she thought it was the gateway of Hell.

“All through the ages, Sarah,” James went on, “men and women have tried to find holiness by denying the flesh. But none have found it by that road. It is a snare and a delusion.” He was sure of his ground, and at some length he worked it out, putting before her a mass of facts and instances of which she had no conception at all. The history of thought, of ritual, or dogma was all a sealed book, and Sarah was dumbfounded by the turn the conversation had taken. The range of thoughts James had revealed was altogether outside her experience, and for the moment her chief impression was terror. She had not known her brother to be so fully an infidel, and she was appalled.

“I thought you were a Christian, James,” was what she said.

“James is a Christian,” Anna interrupted. “He is only telling us facts, nothing more. There is no infidelity in knowing what has happened in the world, so long as you don’t believe in it. It may help us to avoid errors ourselves; it helps him.” Anna had thought this painfully out for herself, long ago when she had first become aware of her husband’s studies, and she brought it out now with a fury of partisanship which made James smile.

“Yes, Sarah, I trust I am a Christian,” he said, “but do not let us discuss my beliefs. What I want you to see is that the intermixture of sex and religion, however it is turned about, whether as a positive orgy, or as a negative self-denial, is really a confusion of issues. Sex heightens emotions of every kind, even religious emotion. Just as your husband’s anger is greater than it need be because it is a sex question which is at issue between you, so the ecstacies of devotion of that young preacher appear greater than they really are for the same reason. It is not God who moves him to eloquence, Sarah, it is his own unsatisfied desires. I speak as a doctor, plainly.”

There was a silence upon this, for the sequence of James’s argument was clear. There might indeed be something in what he said. She must think it over. But there was a question to be answered first.

“Do you not believe in the revelation of the Bible, James?” she said.

At that he was sadly tempted. He was a truthful man, and the answer which came to his lips was the true one. But if he said it he well knew that his influence would be gone. And besides, even to Anna he had never made that plain. He therefore made no answer, but reaching out his hand for the Book he opened it and searched awhile through its pages.

“And the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone,’ he read; ‘I will make him an helpmeet for him.’ ”

“Yes,” said Sarah eagerly, “a helpmeet, not a wife!”

But James only turned the pages and read again. “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and wife, and were not ashamed.”

Sarah sighed profoundly and shook her head. It was so hard to know the truth.

There was a little pause of silence. Then Anna spoke.

“James has said his say,” she began, “but I think he has forgotten, and surely you, too, Sarah, have forgotten the greatest argument of all. To my mind there is one thing which makes your new theory quite impossible, and that is—children. If you want to leave your own husband because you can’t bear him, well, that’s one thing. But to pretend that you are doing so because God means there to be no more children, and that it is wicked to bring them into the world, I cannot and will not countenance.”

“Oh, Anna, I don’t——” began Sarah, and then stopped short, realizing that she did. She looked from one to the other, and her eyes filled with tears. “What am I to do?” she said piteously.

It was late, and James thought they had said enough.

“You must think it over, Sarah, and seek guidance within yourself,” he said gravely.

“You must pray, sister, and ask the Lord,” said Anna, putting her hand upon her knee.

Sarah bowed her head. “I will,” she murmured, and began to cry outright.

James left at that and Anna stayed with her sister for awhile, kissing her and comforting her as best she could. She went with her to the spare room and stayed while she undressed.

Edmund was sleeping quietly in the corner, but while they were there he half woke and murmured something unintelligible in his sleepy child’s voice and turned upon his side. His mother, instead of going across to him, fell upon her knees by her own bed and buried her face against her arms. Anna took the candle with her and went out. There was nothing more to be done for Sarah that night.

Left alone in the darkness, Sarah wept for the illusion which she knew to be shattered. It was not the arguments of James, powerful though they were, which had opened her eyes, but those few plain words of Anna’s. She could not resist the thought of children; her own baby there in the corner who had murmured and moved only now—how could she have thought that God was against such as he? The whole fabric which had sustained her rebellion had crumbled away, and she was left face to face with the knowledge of her real situation. What was it that Anna had said? “If you want to leave your own husband because you can’t bear him, that’s one thing.” Surely that was not her case?

Sarah was not as a rule given to self-pity, but the full force of that demon fell upon her that night. In vain she told herself that now she saw her duty she would be able to return to it; something very seductive within her continued to repeat that it was hard, that she did not deserve to suffer, that she was meant for higher things than to be the wife of an uncongenial man. How could she progress in holiness if she was to be for ever fretted by the exactions of Thomas? Instead of praying, as she had meant to pray, Sarah let herself be swept off into wholesale criticism of the man she had lived quietly with for so long, and into fanciful scenes in which she would demonstrate his faults and her own virtues. She fell asleep in the enjoyment of this reverie, and woke some time later cold, cramped and ashamed. Everything was black around her, and Edmund’s light breathing was only just audible. She remembered with distaste the thoughts with which she had fallen asleep, but as she was climbing into bed the memory of God came into her mind, and the glow of joy which it carried banished remorse and every other consideration.

“Lord! Lord!” she cried in her heart; “save me, help me, comfort me!”

The bed was soft and pleasant, the covers grew warm around her, and Sarah recognized that her struggle was over. The Lord had come back again to her soul. He had forgiven her, and He would make her life easy and clear. What did it matter if she found the outside world troublesome and wearying?

The Lord was the lover of her soul, and He would keep her safe. And with that comfortable knowledge came a new and secret thought, which brought her a thrill of such exquisite and human joy as she had never experienced before. Children! He would send her children to be her comfort. Not Edmund only, that dear child whom she had, but others, little soft creatures whom she would hold at her breast. On this rapturous thought she slept again. Her decision was taken.

The next day she returned to her husband.