Chapter 3

It was dark,” I answered.

“Dark!” she said.

“Yes, until I lit the candle. And you cried out when I was only in the
doorway. You could not see me there.”

“Why not? What has that got to do with it?” she murmured, still
trembling violently.

“You can see me in the dark?”

“Of course,” she said. “I don’t understand what you mean. Of course I
can see you when you are there before my eyes.”

“But----” I began; and then her obvious and complete surprise at my
questions stopped them. I still held her hands in mine, and their
extreme coldness roused me to the remembrance that she was unclothed.

“You will be ill if you stay here,” I said. “Come back to your room.”

She said nothing, and I led her back, waited while she got into bed, and
then, placing the candle on the dressing-table, sat down in a chair by
her side.

The strong determination to take prompt action, to come to an
explanation, to end these dreary mysteries of mind and conduct, was
still upon me.

I did not think of the strange hour; I did not care that the night was
gliding on towards dawn. I was self-absorbed. I was beyond ordinary
considerations.

Yet I did not speak immediately. I was trying to be quite calm, trying
to think of the best line for me to take. So much might depend upon our
mere words now. At length I said, laying my hand upon hers, which was
outside the coverlet:

“Margot, what were you doing in that room at such a strange hour? Why
were you there?”

She hesitated obviously. Then she answered, not looking at me:

“I missed you. I thought you might be there--writing.”

“But you were in the dark.”

“I thought you would have a light.”

I knew by her manner that she was not telling me the truth, but I went
on quietly:

“If you expected me, why did you cry out when I came to the door?”

She tried to draw her hand away, but I held it fast, closing, my fingers
upon it with even brutal strength.

“Why did you cry out?”

“You--you looked so strange, so cruel.”

“So cruel!”

“Yes. You frightened me--you frightened me horribly.”

She began suddenly to sob, like one completely overstrained. I lifted
her up in the bed, put my arms round her, and made her lean against me.
I was strangely moved.

“I frightened you! How can that be?” I said, trying to control a passion
of mingled love and anger that filled my breast. “You know that I love
you. You must know that. In all our short married life have I ever been
even momentarily unkind to you? Let us be frank with one another. Our
lives have changed lately. One of us has altered. You cannot say that it
is I.”

She only continued to sob bitterly in my arms. I held her closer.

“Let us be frank with one another,” I went on. “For God’s sake let us
have no barriers between us. Margot, look into my eyes and tell me--are
you growing tired of me?”

She turned her head away, but I spoke more sternly:

“You shall be truthful. I will have no more subterfuge. Look me in the
face. You did love me once?”

“Yes, yes,” she whispered in a choked voice.

“What have I done, then, to alienate you? Have I ever hurt you, ever
shown a lack of sympathy, ever neglected you?”

“Never--never.”

“Yet you have changed to me since--since----” I paused a moment, trying
to recall when I had first noticed her altered demeanour.

She interrupted me.

“It has all come upon me in this house,” she sobbed. “Oh! what is it?
What does it all mean? If I could understand a little--only a little--it
would not be so bad. But this nightmare, this thing that seems such a
madness of the intellect----”

Her voice broke and ceased. Her tears burst forth afresh. Such mingled
fear, passion, and a sort of strange latent irritation, I had never seen
before.

“It is a madness indeed,” I said, and a sense almost of outrage made my
voice hard and cold. “I have not deserved such treatment at your hands.”

“I will not yield to it,” she said, with a sort of desperation, suddenly
throwing her arms around me. “I will not--I will not!”

I was strangely puzzled. I was torn with conflicting feelings. Love and
anger grappled at my heart. But I only held her, and did not speak until
she grew obviously calmer. The paroxysm seemed passing away. Then I
said:

“I cannot understand.”

“Nor I,” she answered, with a directness that had been foreign to her
of late, but that was part and parcel of her real, beautiful nature. “I
cannot understand. I only know there is a change in me, or in you to
me, and that I cannot help it, or that I have not been able to help it.
Sometimes I feel--do not be angry, I will try to tell you--a physical
fear of you, of your touch, of your clasp, a fear such as an animal
might feel towards the master who had beaten it. I tremble then at
your approach. When you are near me I feel cold, oh! so cold and--and
anxious; perhaps I ought to say apprehensive. Oh, I am hurting you!”

I suppose I must have winced at her words, and she is quick to observe.

“Go on,” I said; “do not spare me. Tell me everything. It is madness
indeed; but we may kill it, when we both know it.”

“Oh, if we could!” she cried, with a poignancy which was heart-breaking
to hear. “If we could!”

“Do you doubt our ability?” I said, trying to be patient and calm. “You
are unreasoning, like all women. Be sensible for a moment. You do me a
wrong in cherishing these feelings. I have the capacity for cruelty in
me. I may have been--I have been--cruel in the past, but never to you.
You have no right to treat me as you have done lately. If you examine
your feelings, and compare them with facts, you will see their
absurdity.”

“But,” she interposed, with a woman’s fatal quickness, “that will not do
away with their reality.”

“It must. Look into their faces until they fade like ghosts, seen only
between light and darkness. They are founded upon nothing; they are bred
without father or mother; they are hysterical; they are wicked. Think a
little of me. You are not going to be conquered by a chimera, to allow a
phantom created by your imagination to ruin the happiness that has been
so beautiful. You will not do that! You dare not!”

She only answered:

“If I can help it.”

A passionate anger seized me, a fury at my impotence against this child.
I pushed her almost roughly from my arms.

“And I have married this woman!” I cried bitterly. I got up.

Margot had ceased crying now, and her face was very white and calm; it
looked rigid in the faint candle-light that shone across the bed.

“Do not be angry,” she said. “We are controlled by something inside of
us; there are powers in us that we cannot fight against.”

“There is nothing we cannot fight against,” I said passionately. “The
doctrine of predestination is the devil’s own doctrine. It is the
doctrine set up by the sinner to excuse his sin; it is the coward’s
doctrine. Understand me, Margot, I love you, but I am not a weak fool.
There must be an end of this folly. Perhaps you are playing with me,
acting like a girl, testing me. Let us have no more of it.”

She said:

“I only do what I must.”

Her tone turned me cold. Her set face frightened me, and angered me, for
there was a curious obstinacy in it. I left the room abruptly, and did
not return. That night I had no sleep.

I am not a coward, but I find that I am inclined to fear that which
fears me. I dread an animal that always avoids me silently more than an
animal that actually attacks me. The thing that runs from me makes me
shiver, the thing that creeps away when I come near wakes my uneasiness.
At this time there rose up in me a strange feeling towards Margot.
The white, fair child I had married was at moments--only at
moments--horrible to me. I felt disposed to shun her. Something within
cried out against her. Long ago, at the instant of our introduction, an
unreasoning sensation that could only be called dread had laid hold
upon me. That dread returned from the night of our explanation, returned
deepened and added to. It prompted me to a suggestion which I had no
sooner made than I regretted it. On the morning following I told
Margot that in future we had better occupy separate rooms. She assented
quietly, but I thought a furtive expression of relief stole for a moment
into her face.

I was deeply angered with her and with myself; yet, now that I knew
beyond question my wife’s physical terror of me, I was-half afraid of
her. I felt as if I could not bring myself to lie long hours by her side
in the darkness, by the side of a woman who was shrinking from me, who
was watching me when I could not see her. The idea made my very flesh
creep.

Yet I hated myself for this shrinking of the body, and sometimes
hated her for rousing it. A hideous struggle was going on within me--a
struggle between love and impotent anger and despair, between the lover
and the master. For I am one of the old-fashioned men who think that a
husband ought to be master of his wife as well as of his house.

How could I be master of a woman I secretly feared? My knowledge of
myself spurred me through acute irritation almost to the verge of
madness.

All calm was gone. I was alternately gentle to my wife and almost
ferocious towards her, ready to fall at her feet and worship her or to
seize her and treat her with physical violence. I only restrained myself
by an effort.

My variations of manner did not seem to affect her. Indeed, it sometimes
struck me that she feared me more when I was kind to her than when I was
harsh.

And I knew, by a thousand furtive indications, that her horror of me was
deepening day by day. I believe she could hardly bring herself to be in
a room alone with me, especially after nightfall.

One evening, when we were dining, the butler, after placing dessert upon
the table, moved to leave us. She turned white, and, as he reached the
door, half rose, and called him back in a sharp voice.

“Symonds!” she said.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“You are going?”

The fellow looked surprised.

“Can I get you anything, ma’am?”

She glanced at me with an indescribable uneasiness. Then she leaned back
in her chair with an effort, and pressed her lips together.

“No,” she said.

As the man went out and shut the door, she looked at me again from
under her eyelids; and finally her eyes travelled from me to a small,
thin-bladed knife, used for cutting oranges, that lay near her plate,
and fixed themselves on it. She put out her hand stealthily, drew it
towards her, and kept her hand over it on the table. I took an orange
from a dish in front of me.

“Margot,” I said, “will you pass me that fruit-knife?”

She obviously hesitated.

“Give me that knife,” I repeated roughly, stretching out my hand.

She lifted her hand, left the knife upon the table, and at the same
time, springing up, glided softly out of the room and closed the door
behind her.

That evening I spent alone in the smoking-room, and, for the first time,
she did not come to bid me good-night.

I sat smoking my cigar in a tumult of furious despair and love. The
situation was becoming intolerable. It could not be en-dured. I longed
for a crisis, even for a violent one. I could have cried aloud that
night for a veritable tragedy. There were moments when I would almost
have killed the child who mysteriously eluded and defied me. I could
have wreaked a cruel vengeance upon the body for the sin of the mind. I
was terribly, mortally distressed.

After a long and painful self-communion, I resolved to make another wild
effort to set things right before it was too late; and when the clock
chimed the half-hour after ten I went upstairs softly to her bedroom and
turned the handle of the door, meaning to enter, to catch Margot in my
arms, tell her how deep my love for her was, how she injured me by her
base fears, and how she was driving me back from the gentleness she had
given me to the cruelty, to the brutality, of my first nature.

The door resisted me: it was locked. I paused a moment, and then tapped
gently. I heard a sudden rustle within, as if someone hurried across the
floor away from the door, and then Margot’s voice cried sharply:

“Who’s that? Who is there?” “Margot, it is I. I wish to speak to you--to
say good-night.”

“Good-night,” she said. “But let me in for a moment.” There was a
silence--it seemed to me a long one; then she answered:

“Not now, dear; I--I am so tired.” “Open the door for a moment.” “I
am very tired. Good-night.” The cold, level tone of her voice--for the
anxiety had left it after that first sudden cry--roused me to a sudden
fury of action. I seized the handle of the door and pressed with all my
strength. Physically I am a very powerful man--my anger and despair
gave me a giant’s might. I burst the lock, and sprang into the room. My
impulse was to seize Margot in my arms and crush her to death, it might
be, in an embrace she could not struggle against. The blood coursed like
molten fire through my veins. The lust of love, the lust of murder even,
perhaps, was upon me. I sprang impetuously into the room.

No candles were alight in it. The blinds were up, and the chill
moonbeams filtered through the small lattice panes. By the farthest
window, in the yellowish radiance, was huddled a white thing.

A sudden cold took hold upon me. All the warmth in me froze up.

I stopped where I was and held my breath.

That white thing, seen thus uncertainly, had no semblance to humanity.
It was animal wholly. I could have believed for the moment that a white
cat crouched from me there by the curtain, waiting to spring.

What a strange illusion that was! I tried to laugh at it afterwards, but
at the moment horror stole through me--horror, and almost awe.

All desire of violence left me. Heat was dead; I felt cold as stone. I
could not even speak a word.

Suddenly the white thing moved. The curtain was drawn sharply; the
moonlight was blotted out; the room was plunged in darkness--a darkness
in which that thing could see!

I turned and stole out of the room. I could have fled, driven by the
nameless fear that was upon me.

Only when the morning dawned did the man in me awake, and I cursed
myself for my cowardice.

*****

The following evening we were asked to dine out with some neighbours,
who lived a few miles off in a wonderful old Norman castle near the
sea. During the day neither of us had made the slightest allusion to
the incidents of the previous night. We both felt it a relief to go
into society, I think. The friends to whom we went--Lord and Lady
Melchester--had a large party staying with them, and we were, I believe,
the only outsiders who lived in the neighbourhood. One of their guests
was Professor Black, whose name I have already mentioned--a little,
dry, thin, acrid man, with thick black hair, innocent of the comb, and
pursed, straight lips. I had met him two or three times in London,
and as he had only just arrived at the castle, and scarcely knew his
fellow-visitors there, he brought his wine over to me when the ladies
left the dining-room, and entered into conversation. At the moment I
was glad, but before we followed the women I would have given a year--I
might say years--of my life not to have spoken to him, not to have heard
him speak that night.

How did we drift into that fatal conversation? I hardly remember. We
talked first of the neighbourhood, then swayed away to books, then to
people. Yes, that was how it came about. The Professor was speaking of
a man whom we both knew in town, a curiously effeminate man, whose every
thought and feeling seemed that of a woman. I said I disliked him,
and condemned him for his woman’s demeanour, his woman’s mind; but the
Professor thereupon joined issue with me.

“Pity the fellow, if you like,” he uttered, in his rather strident
voice; “but as to condemning him, I would as soon condemn a tadpole for
not being a full-grown frog. His soul is beyond his power to manage, or
even to coerce, you may depend upon it.”

Having sipped his port, he drew a little nearer to me, and slightly
dropped his voice.

“There would be less censure of individuals in this world,” he said,
“if people were only a little more thoughtful. These souls are like
letters, and sometimes they are sealed up in the wrong envelope. For
instance, a man’s soul may be put into a woman’s body, or _vice versâ_.
It has been so in D------‘s case. A mistake has been made.”

“By Providence?” I interrupted, with, perhaps, just a _soupçon_ of
sarcasm in my voice.

The Professor smiled.

“Suppose we imitate Thomas Hardy, and say by the President of the
Immortals, who makes sport with more humans than Tess,” he answered.
“Mistakes may be deliberate, just as their reverse may be accidental.
Even a mighty power may condescend sometimes to a very practical joke.
To a thinker the world is full of apple-pie beds, and cold wet
sponges fall on us from at least half the doors we push open. The
soul-juggleries of the before-mentioned President are very curious, but
people will not realize that soul transference from body to body is
as much a plain fact as the daily rising of the sun on one half of the
world and its nightly setting on the other.”

“Do you mean that souls pass on into the world again on the death of
the particular body in which they have been for the moment confined?” I
asked.

“Precisely: I have no doubt of it. Sometimes a woman’s soul goes into
a man’s body; then the man acts woman, and people cry against him for
effeminacy. The soul colours the body with actions, the body does not
colour the soul, or not in the same degree.”

“But we are not irresponsible. We can command ourselves.”

The Professor smiled dryly.

“You think so?” he said. “I sometimes doubt it.”

“And I doubt your theory of soul transference.”

“That shows me--pardon the apparent impertinence--that you have never
really examined the soul question with any close attention. Do you
suppose that D------ really likes being so noticeably different from
other men? Depend upon it,’ he has noticed in himself what we have
noticed in him. Depend upon it, he has tried to be ordinary, and found
it impossible. His soul manages him as a strong nature manages a
weak one, and his soul is a female, not a male. For souls have sexes,
otherwise what would be the sense of talking about wedded souls? I have
no doubt whatever of the truth of reincarnation on earth. Souls go on
and on following out their object of development.”

“You believe that every soul is reincarnated?”

“A certain number of times.”

“That even in the animal world the soul of one animal passes into the
body of another?”

“Wait a minute. Now we are coming to something that tends to prove
my theory true. Animals have souls, as you imply. Who can know them
intimately and doubt it for an instant? Souls as immortal--or as
mortal--as ours. And their souls, too, pass on.”

“Into other animals?”

“Possibly. And eventually, in the process of development, into human
beings.”

I laughed, perhaps a little rudely. “My dear Professor, I thought that
old notion was quite exploded in these modern scientific days.”

“I found my beliefs upon my own minute observations,” he said rather
frigidly. “I notice certain animals masquerading--to some extent--as
human beings, and I draw my own conclusions. If they happen to fit in
at all with the conclusions of Pythagoras--or anyone else, for that
matter--well and good. If not, I am not much concerned. Surely
you notice the animal--and not merely the animal, but definite
animals--reproduced in man. There are men whose whole demeanour suggests
the monkey. I have met women who in manner, appearance, and even
character, were intensely like cats.”

I uttered a slight exclamation, which did not interrupt him.

“Now, I have made a minute study of cats. Of all animals they interest
me the most. They have less apparent intensity, less uttered passion,
than dogs, but in my opinion more character. Their subtlety is
extraordinary, their sensitiveness wonderful. Will you understand me
when I say that all dogs are men, all cats women? That remark expresses
the difference between them.”

He paused a moment.

“Go on--go on,” I said, leaning forward, with my eyes fixed upon his
keen, puckered face.

He seemed pleased with my suddenly-aroused interest..

“Cats are as subtle and as difficult to understand as the most complex
woman, and almost as full of intuitions. If they have been well treated,
there is often a certain gracious, condescending suavity in their
demeanour at first, even towards a total stranger; but if that stranger
is ill disposed toward them, they seem instinctively to read his soul,
and they are in arms directly. Yet they dissemble their fears in a cold
indifference and reserve. They do not take action: they merely abstain
from action. They withdraw the soul that has peeped out, as they can
withdraw their claws into the pads upon their feet. They do not show
fight as a dog might, they do not become aggressive, nor do they whine
and put their tails between their legs. They are simply on guard,
watchful, mistrustful. Is not all this woman?”

“Possibly,” I answered, with a painful effort to assume indifference.

“A woman intuitively knows who is her friend and who is her enemy--so
long, at least, as her heart is not engaged; then she runs wild, I
allow. A woman---- But I need not pursue the parallel. Besides, perhaps
it is scarcely to the point, for my object is not to bolster up an
absurd contention that all women have the souls of cats. No; but I have
met women so strangely like cats that their souls have, as I said before
souls do, coloured their bodies in actions. They have had the very look
of cats in their faces. They have moved like them. Their demeanour has
been patently and strongly feline. Now, I see nothing ridiculous in the
assumption that such women’s bodies may contain souls--in process of
development, of course--that formerly were merely cat souls, but that
are now gaining humanity gradually, are working their way upwards in
the scale. After all, we are not so much above the animals, and in our
lapses we often become merely animals. The soul retrogrades for the
moment.”

He paused again and looked at me. I was biting my lips, and my glass of
wine was untouched. He took my agitation as a compliment, I suppose, for
he smiled and said:

“Are you in process of conversion?”

I half shook my head. Then I said, with an effort: “It is a curious and
interesting idea, of course. But there is much to explain. Now, I should
like to ask you this: Do you--do you believe that a soul, if it passes
on as you think, carries its memory with it, its memory of former loves
and--and hates? Say that a cat’s soul goes to a woman’s body, and
that the cat has been--has been--well, tortured--possibly killed, by
someone--say some man, long ago, would the woman, meeting that man,
remember and shrink from him?”

“That is a very interesting and curious problem, and one which I do not
pretend to have solved. I can, therefore, only suggest what might be,
what seems to me reasonable.

“I do not believe that the woman would remember positively, but I think
she might have an intuition about the man. Our intuitions are, perhaps,
sometimes only the fragmentary recollections of our souls, of what
formerly happened to them when in other bodies. Why, otherwise, should
we sometimes conceive an ardent dislike of some stranger--charming to
all appearance--of whom we know no evil, whom we have never heard of nor
met before? Intuitions, so called, are often only tattered memories.
And these intuitions might, I should fancy, be strengthened, given
body, robustness, by associations--of place, for example. Cats become
intensely attached to localities, to certain spots, a particular house
or garden, a particular fireside, apart from the people who may be
there. Possibly, if the man and the woman of whom you speak could
be brought together in the very place where the torture arid death
occurred, the dislike of the woman might deepen into positive hatred.
It would, however, be always unreasoning hatred, I think, and even quite
unaccountable to herself. Still----”

But here Lord Melchester rose from the table. The conversations broke
into fragments. I felt that I was pale to the lips.

We passed into the drawing-room. The ladies were grouped together at one
end, near the piano. Margot was among them. She was, as usual, dressed
in white, and round the bottom of her gown there was an edging of
snow-white fur. As we came in, she moved away from the piano to a
sofa at some distance, and sank down upon it. Professor Black, who had
entered the room at my side, seized my arm gently.

“Now, that lady,” he whispered in my ear--“I don’t know who she may
be, but she is intensely cat-like. I observed it before dinner. Did you
notice the way she moved just then--the soft, yielding, easy manner in
which she sat down, falling at once, quite naturally, into a charming
pose? And her china-blue eyes are----”

“She is my wife, Professor,” I interrupted harshly.

He looked decidedly taken aback.

“I beg your pardon; I had no idea. I did not enter the drawing-room
to-night till after you arrived. I believed that lady was one of
my fellow-guests in the house. Let me congratulate you. She is very
beautiful.”

And then he mingled rather hastily in the group near the piano.

The man is mad, I know--mad as a hatter on one point, like so many
clever men. He sees the animal in every person he meets just because his
preposterous theory inclines him to do so. Having given in his adherence
to it, he sees facts not as they are, but as he wishes them to be; but
he shall not carry me with him. The theory is his, not mine. It does not
hold water for a moment. I can laugh at it now, but that night I confess
it did seize me for the time being. I could scarcely talk; I found
myself watching Margot with a terrible intentness, and I found myself
agreeing with the Professor to an extent that made me marvel at my own
previous blindness.

There was something strangely feline about the girl I had married--the
soft, white girl who was becoming terrible to me, dear though she still
was and must always be. Her movements had the subtle, instinctive and
certain grace of a cat’s. Her cushioned step, which had often struck me
before, was like the step of a cat. And those china-blue eyes! A sudden
cold seemed to pass over me as I understood why I had recognised
them when I first met Margot. They were the eyes of the animal I
had tortured, the animal I had killed. Yes, but that proved nothing,
absolutely nothing. Many people had the eyes of animals--the soft eyes
of dogs, the furtive, cruel eyes of tigers. I had known such people. I
had even once had an affair with a girl who was always called the shot
partridge, because her eyes were supposed to be like those of a dying
bird. I tried to laugh to myself as I remembered this. But I felt cold,
and my senses seemed benumbed as by a great horror. I sat like a stone,
with my eyes fixed upon Margot, trying painfully to read into her all
that the words of Professor Black had suggested to me--trying, but
with the wish not to succeed. I was roused by Lady Melchester, who came
toward me asking me to do something, I forget now what. I forced myself
to be cheerful, to join in the conversation, to seem at my ease; but I
felt like one oppressed with nightmare, and I could scarcely withdraw
my eyes from the sofa where my wife was sitting.