For the next two weeks, until the time came to leave the house at Christchurch, Harriet contrived to keep her enamoured pupil in the same continual suspense and uncertainty. All that could be done to fire his ardour, by melting looks, chance contacts and caresses, was performed by her with ruthless generalship; and as often as he stooped to the lure he was rebuffed, mocked and turned away with a shrewd mixture of friendliness and raillery, so that he was left poised between hope and despair, between a half-awakened consciousness of his own attraction and a constant doubt of her feelings, but always in a state of sensual excitement.
He would have been astonished to know that she herself was in a condition which approximated his own. But her energies were bent as much on concealing her desires as on resisting them, and he knew nothing of the torments she endured every night in bed, of the temptations she withstood, or of the long and exhausting frictions of her clitoris to which she had recourse but which left her in a state rather of fatigue than of satisfaction; – still plagued by her erethism and already foreseeing the time when such practices would be no more effective for her than they were for Richard.
When they returned to London in September the autumn rains had already begun. As their cab rolled along the teeming streets whose lamps were reflected in the grimy water of drains and gutters, the tall housefronts of the great dark city seemed to be weeping tears of soot; passing through the squalid district of Cirencester Place and Great Titchfield Street on their way from the station, they saw on all sides the evidences of poverty and vice, –things which meant absolutely nothing to the boy but which filled the governess, as always, with revulsion and anger. A pair of streetwalkers, trailing bedraggled finery along the pavement, stopped and cried out to the two occupants of the cab as it slowed down at the comer of Clipstone Street.
“What did those women want, Harriet?” asked Richard naively.
Her eyes flashed. “I would not care to say. But I know what they should have, and what you should have too for asking such a question! Be silent, please.”
Already depressed by the long train journey and the chill bleakness of London, and with his spirits still further lowered by his companion’s stern and frigid air since that morning, Richard winced and shrank back in his seat, feeling now utterly miserable.
For a whole week his passion rose steadily. He was now obsessed by the idea of possessing his governess, and the seeming impossibility of this outrageous ambition threw him into a kind of gloomy desperation. Every afternoon he walked the streets listlessly. Never, he thought, had the city been more dismal, the passers–by more drab and forlorn; his feet merely obeyed the impulse of a leaden mood which drove him to keep in motion like an animal on a treadmill.
During this time he thought at intervals of her verdict as to the necessity of his being married; he recalled her actual words: “a woman who would keep you in order,” she had said. But that would mean someone to take her place, and he wanted no one but her. On occasions another idea flashed before him, but he put it aside immediately: that was an impossible solution, it had the air of something forbidden, almost the air of incest. And yet the idea kept returning to him, unbidden, still unformulated, but exciting and even frightening with its promise of an undreamed–of happiness.
It was at night, however, that his distress mounted to fever pitch. Then, in the warmth and lamplit intimacy of the house, he would be driven almost to madness by the discrepancy between its proffer of intimacy and the dreary truth of his inability to compass his desires. The ritual of their goodnights was the worst ordeal of all, – this bitter mockery of assuagement in which he underwent the visit she paid him in his bedroom, the soft embrace of her arms, the clinging warmth of her kiss.
One evening, when she had just taken her lips from his and was preparing to go, he burst into a storm of tears and with a gesture of abandon and despair pulled down the covers from his naked body, displaying his rigid member.
“Oh,” he cried, “please, please, Harriet–will you not help me–just once ...”
Seeing this marvellous glowing nudity, this proffered flesh centred by the urgently erected penis, she turned pale for an instant. She would have liked to throw herself on him in that very moment, to caress and guide this exquisite shaft into the whirlpool of her womb, and to let her whole being dissolve in the bliss of union: her breathing deepened, her eyes filmed over, –but on the very brink of capitulation she drew back with a superhuman effort.
“Why, Richard,” she said with an appearance of coldness which struck him to the heart, “as well as being childish, you are becoming quite indecent. I have told you already you are much too old for me to occupy myself with your genitals. Those days are past.”
He looked at her in absolute despair. “Then–then what shall I do? Harriet, what shall I do?”
In spite of her disturbance she was able to smile at his tone and attitude. “You must remember what I told you. You must marry.”
“But whom shall I marry?”
“Ah,” she shrugged, “you must decide that for yourself. But you should decide soon.”
“Soon?” His voice was agonised.
She looked at him coolly. “Yes. It is only a week now until your eighteenth birthday, when you will come into your fortune and my duties as trustee will be finished. You must decide on the kind of life you mean to lead.”
“I only wish to spend the rest of my life with you, Harriet...”
“That is impossible.”
“But why?”
She laughed shortly. “You idiot, I will soon no longer be either your governess or the trustee of your estate, I will have no business in your house. And I have no intention of being regarded as your mistress.”
“Then–then what will you do? Where will you go?”
“That is no concern of yours. You must think of yourself, and your best course will be to do as I have advised you, and be married.”
He looked at her speechlessly, and as he did so Harriet was overcome by such a wave of tenderness that she nearly took him in her arms; then she drew back, an expression of resolve coming into her face. Turning on her heel, she went to the door.
“In any event, your problems are hardly my concern any longer,” she said.
The next moment she was gone.
Long after this, Richard was at last able to sob himself to sleep in such a passion of misery and desolation as he had never known.