Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys [15]
As we were going out of the convent gate he said in a careless voice, ‘I have asked some English friends to spend next winter here. You won’t be dull.’
‘Do you think they’ll come? I said doubtfully
‘One of them will. I’m certain of that.’
It may have been the way he smiled, but again a feeling of dismay, sadness, loss, almost choked me. This time I did not let him see it.
It was like that morning when I found the dead horse. Say nothing and it may not be true.
But they all knew at the convent. The girls were very curious but I would not answer their questions and for the first time I resented the nuns’ cheerful faces.
They are safe. How can they know what it can be like outside?
This was the second time I had my dream.
Again I have left the house at Coulibri. It is still night and I am walking towards the forest. I am wearing a long dress and thin slippers, so I walk with difficulty, following the man who is with me and holding up the skirt of my dress. It is white and beautiful and I don’t wish to get it soled. I follow him, sick with fear but I make no effort to save myself; if anyone were to try to save me, I would refuse. This must happen. Now we have reached the forest. We are under the tall dark trees and there is no wind. ‘Here?’ He turns and looks at me, his face black with hatred, and when I see this I begin to cry. He smiles slyly. ‘Not here, not yet,’ he says, and I follow him, weeping. Now I do not try to hold up my dress, it trails in the dirt, my beautiful dress. We are no longer in the forest but in an enclosed garden surrounded by a stone wall and the trees are different trees. I do not know them. There are steps leading upwards. It is dark to see the wall or the steps, but I know they are there and I think, ‘It will be when I go these steps. At the top.’ I stumble over my dress and cannot get up. I touch a tree and my arms hold on to it. ‘Here, here.’ But I think I will not go any further. The tree sways and jerks as if it is trying to throw me off. Still I cling and the seconds pass and each one is a thousand years. ‘Here, in here,’ a strange voice said, and the tree stopped swaying and jerking.
Now Sister Marie Augustine is leading me out of the dormitory, asking if I am ill, telling me that I must not disturb the others and though I am still shivering I wonder if she will take me behind the mysterious curtains to the place where she sleeps. But no. She seats me in a chair, vanishes, and after a while comes back with a cup of hot chocolate
I said, ‘I dreamed I was in Hell.’
‘That dream is evil. Put it from your mind – never think of it again,’ and she rubbed my cold hands to warm them.
She looks as usual, composed and neat, and I want to ask her if she get up before dawn or hasn’t been to bed at all.
‘Drink your chocolate.’
While I am drinking it I remember that after my mother’s funeral, very early in the morning, almost as early as this, we went home to drink chocolate and eat cakes. She died last year, no one told me how, and I didn’t ask. Mr Mason was there and Christophine, no one else. Christophine cried bitterly but I could not. I prayed, but the words fell to the ground meaning nothing.
Now the thought of her is mixed up with my dream.
I saw her in her mended habit riding a borrowed horse, trying to wave at the head of the cobblestoned road at Coulibri, and tears came to my eyes again. ‘Such terrible things happen,’ I said. ‘Why? Why?’
‘You must not concern yourself with that mystery,’ said Sister Maria Augustine. ‘We do not know why the devil must have his little day. Not yet.’
She never smiled as much as the others, now she was not smiling at all. She looked sad.
She said, as if she was talking to herself, ‘Now go quietly back to bed. Think of calm, peaceful things and try to sleep. Soon I will give the signal. Soon it will be tomorrow morning.’
Part Two
So it was all over, the advance and retreat, the doubts and hesitations. Everything finished, for better or for worse. There we were, sheltering from the heavy rain under a large mango tree, myself, my wife Antoinette and a little half-caste servant who was called Am