There seemed nothing more to say, and Charley was silent.
She planted her elbows on the red-and-white checkered table-cloth and rested her face on her hands.
Charley was sitting opposite to her and she gazed into his eyes with a long reflective look that seemed to bore into the depths of his being. “I didn’t mind as much as you might have thought I would.” She hesitated for an instant.
“I wanted to atone.”
Charley stared at her uncomprehendingly.
Her words, spoken hardly above a whisper, gave him a shock.
He had a sensation that he had never had before; it seemed to him that a veil that painted the world in pleasant, familiar colours had been suddenly rent and he looked into a convulsed and writhing darkness.
“What in God’s name do you mean?”
“Though I love Robert with all my heart, with all my soul, I know that he sinned.
I felt that the only way I could serve Robert now was by submitting to a degradation that was the most horrible I could think of.
At first I thought I would go to one of those brothels where soldiers go, and workmen, and the riffraff of a great city, but I feared I should feel pity for those poor people whose hurried, rare visits to such places afford the only pleasure of their cruel lives.
The Serail is frequented by the rich, the idle, the vicious.
There was no chance there that I should feel anything but hatred and contempt for the beasts who bought my body.
There my humiliation is like a festering wound that nothing can heal.
The brutal indecency of the clothes I have to wear is a shame that no habit can dull.
I welcome the suffering.
I welcome the contempt these men have for the instrument of their lust.
I welcome their brutality.
I’m in hell as Robert is in hell and my suffering joins with his, and it may be that my suffering makes it more easy for him to bear his.”
“But he’s suffering because he committed a crime.
You suffered enough for no fault of yours.
Why should you expose yourself to suffering unnecessarily?”
“Sin must be paid for by suffering.
How can you with your cold English nature know what the love is that is all my life?
I am his and he is mine.
I should be as vile as his crime was if I hesitated to share his suffering.
I know that my suffering as well as his is necessary to expiate his sin.”
Charley hesitated.
He had no particular religious feelings.
He had been brought up to believe in God, but not to think of him.
To do that would be—well, not exactly bad form, but rather priggish.
It was difficult for him now to say what he had in mind, but he found himself in a situation where it seemed almost natural to say the most unnatural things.
“Your husband committed a crime and was punished for it.
I daresay that’s all right.
But you can’t think that a—a merciful God demands atonement from you for somebody else’s misdeeds.”
“God?
What has God to do with it?
Do you suppose I can look at the misery in which the vast majority of the people live in the world and believe in God?
Do you suppose I believe in God who let the Bolsheviks kill my poor, simple father?
Do you know what I think?
I think God has been dead for millions upon millions of years.
I think when he took infinity and set in motion the process that has resulted in the universe, he died, and for ages and ages men have sought and worshipped a being who ceased to exist in the act of making existence possible for them.”
“But if you don’t believe in God I can’t see the point of what you’re doing.
I could understand it if you believed in a cruel God who exacted an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
Atonement, the sort of atonement you want to make, is meaningless if there’s no God.”
“You would have thought so, wouldn’t you?
There’s no logic in it.
There’s no sense.
And yet, deep down in my heart, no, much more than that, in every fibre of my body, I know that I must atone for Robert’s sin.
I know that that is the only way he can gain release from the evil that racks him.