The Doll: The Lost Short Stories

Then all at once she turned to me, her face pale, her eyes strangely alight. She said, “Is it possible to love someone so much, that it gives one a pleasure to hurt them? To hurt them by jealousy, I mean, and to hurt myself at the same time. Pleasure and pain, an equal mingling of pleasure and pain, just as an experiment, a rare sensation?

There have been men in arid deserts where the sun has so disfigured them that they have become things of horror – parched and blackened, twisted and torn. Their eyes run blood, their tongues are bitten through – and then they come upon water. I know, because I was one of their number.

You are such a part of me that to stand alone leaves me dumb, without speech, without eyes. Life is valueless unless I can share everything with you – beauty, ugliness, pain.

I loved you too much, wanted you too much, had for you too great a tenderness. Now all of this is like a twisted root in my heart, a deadly poison in my brain. You have made of me a madman. You fill me with a kind of horror, a devastating hate that is akin to love – a hunger that is nausea.

– if this was being grown up, then she was younger than she had ever been in her life, young with a hope born of inexperience, a glow within her bright as the unseen paradise. Now was the supreme moment, never equalled and never surpassed, as the train drew into Victoria.

He could see her planting violets on his grave, a solitary figure in a grey cloak. What a ghastly tragedy. A lump came to his throat. He became quite emotional thinking of his own death. He would have to write a poem about this. --from a Difference in Temperament

I’m forgetting days and weeks as I write this, nothing seems to have any sequence for me, it’s like rising from the dead, it’s like being reincarnated from dust and ashes to live it again, to live my whole cursed life again – for what was my life before I loved Rebecca, where was I, who was I?

You gave me a marvellous sensation when you played,” I told her, “it was beautiful, intoxicating, I shall never forget it. You have a rare – no – a very dangerous talent.” She was silent, and then spoke in her restrained, breathless little voice. “I played for you,” she said, “I wanted to see what it was like to play to a man.” Her words bewildered me, they seemed utterly inexplicable. She was not lying, her eyes looked straight into mine, and she was smiling.

I sat like a drugged man, incapable of movement. I don’t know what she played, but it was shattering – stupendous. I was not aware of anything but that I and Rebecca were together – out of the world, away, lost – lost in unutterable bliss. We were climbing, then flying, higher – higher.

How much could I write about Rebecca’s smile! It was so vivid, so intensely alive, and yet apart, unearthly, it had no relation to anything one said. Her eyes would be transfigured as if by a shaft of silver.

You would be fatal to any man. A spark that lights, and does not burn itself, a flame fanning other flames.

I want to know if men realise when they are insane.

Some inner sense warned them that in their ignorance dwelt security, a happiness that was never wild, never triumphant, but peaceful and silent.

Don’t you see," she would explain, "that when I see anything or do anything there is no joy in keeping it to myself? I want to give everything to you. If I am alone and I see a picture that I love, or I read some passage from a book, I think to myself there is no meaning in this unless he knows it too. You are such a part of me that to stand alone leaves me dumb, without speech, without eyes. A tree with hatched branches, like someone with no hands. Life is valueless unless I can share everything with you – beauty, ugliness, pain. There must be no shadows between us, no quiet corners in our hearts.

Who will ever know your heart, who will ever know your mind? You have that fatal quality of silence – of a tight repression that suggests a hidden fire – yes, a burning fire unquenchable.