144
PARTISAN REVIEW
and sleep; but Clarisse's small, nervous body was not maternal. She
saw herself as misused by a parasite that was trying to gain a hold
on her, and she denied herself to him. She scorned the billowing
wash-house warmth in which he sought consolation. Perhaps it was
cruel of her. But she wanted to be the mate of a great man, and she
was wrestling with destiny.
Ulrich had offered Clarisse a cigarette. What more could he
have said after he had so uncompromisingly said what he thought?
The smoke of their cigarettes, floating up the beams of the evening
sun, united at some distance from them.
"How much does Ulrich know about it?" Clarisse wondered,
sitting on her little mound. "Oh, how could he possibly understand
anything about such battles?" She called to mind how Walter's face
disintegrated, racked to the point of extinction, when the agonies of
music and sensuality crowded upon him and her resistance left
him
with no way out. No, she assumed that Ulrich knew nothing of the
monstrosity of a love-play that was as though on the peaks of the
Himalayas, built of love, contempt, fear, and the obligations of the
sublime. She had no very favorable opinion of mathematics, and she
had never considered Ulrich as gifted as Walter. He was intelligent,
he was logical, and he knew a lot-but was that any more than
barbarism? Admittedly, in earlier days he had played tennis incom–
parably better than Walter, and she could remember sometimes when
he drove the ball with inexorable force how intensely she had felt
"this man will achieve what he wants," as she never felt it face to
face with Walter's painting, music or ideas. And she thought: "Per–
haps he does know all about us, and only says nothing!" After all,
just a moment ago he had quite distinctly alluded to her heroism.
This silence between them was now intensely exciting.
But Ulrich was thinking: "How nice Clarisse was ten years
ago-still half a child, with that raging, fiery belief in the future all
three of us would have." And actually he had only once found her
disagreeable, and that was when she and Walter had got married.
Then she had shown that tiresome egoism
a
deux
that often makes
young women ambitiously in love with their husbands so insufferable
to other men. "That has improved a good deal since then," he
thought.
