Gerald! Could he fold her in his arms and sheathe her in sleep? Ha! He
needed putting to sleep himself--poor Gerald. That was all he needed.
What did he do, he made the burden for her greater, the burden of her
sleep was the more intolerable, when he was there. He was an added
weariness upon her unripening nights, her unfruitful slumbers. Perhaps
he got some repose from her. Perhaps he did. Perhaps this was what he
was always dogging her for, like a child that is famished, crying for
the breast. Perhaps this was the secret of his passion, his forever
unquenched desire for her--that he needed her to put him to sleep, to
give him repose.
What then! Was she his mother? Had she asked for a child, whom she must
nurse through the nights, for her lover. She despised him, she despised
him, she hardened her heart. An infant crying in the night, this Don
Juan.
Ooh, but how she hated the infant crying in the night. She would murder
it gladly. She would stifle it and bury it, as Hetty Sorrell did. No
doubt Hetty Sorrell's infant cried in the night--no doubt Arthur
Donnithorne's infant would. Ha--the Arthur Donnithornes, the Geralds of
this world. So manly by day, yet all the while, such a crying of
infants in the night. Let them turn into mechanisms, let them. Let them
become instruments, pure machines, pure wills, that work like
clock-work, in perpetual repetition. Let them be this, let them be
taken up entirely in their work, let them be perfect parts of a great
machine, having a slumber of constant repetition. Let Gerald manage his
firm. There he would be satisfied, as satisfied as a wheelbarrow that
goes backwards and forwards along a plank all day--she had seen it.
The wheel-barrow--the one humble wheel--the unit of the firm. Then the
cart, with two wheels; then the truck, with four; then the
donkey-engine, with eight, then the winding-engine, with sixteen, and
so on, till it came to the miner, with a thousand wheels, and then the
electrician, with three thousand, and the underground manager, with
twenty thousand, and the general manager with a hundred thousand little
wheels working away to complete his make-up, and then Gerald, with a
million wheels and cogs and axles.
Poor Gerald, such a lot of little wheels to his make-up! He was more
intricate than a chronometer-watch. But oh heavens, what weariness!
What weariness, God above! A chronometer-watch--a beetle--her soul
fainted with utter ennui, from the thought. So many wheels to count and
consider and calculate! Enough, enough--there was an end to man's
capacity for complications, even. Or perhaps there was no end.