between the sonata and the chain.”
Brenner was silent.
She sobbed.
“Do not weep,” he said, angrily.
“What of my needs?” she asked.
“They are not permitted to exist,” said Brenner.
She threw her head back, against the covers.
“They are nothing,” said Brenner.
“And what of yours?” she asked.
“They, too,” said he, “must be nothing.”
“But you have chained me,” she said.
“A moment’s aberration,” he said.
He then, suddenly, turned away, again. He went to the side of the room. He kept his back to her.
“You act as though you are weak,” she said. “I wonder if you truly are.”
“Weakness is true strength,” said Brenner. “The proper employment of masculine power is self-subversion. Manhood’s greatest triumph is to overcome itself. The truest man is he who is least like a man.”
“That is stupid,” she said.
Brenner did not respond to this. The slogans he had uttered had, to be sure, rung hollowly, even in his own ears. He supposed they had been invented as political instruments, to serve one end or another. Too, they provided valuable rationalizations for certain sorts of males, for example, those whose low drive levels would never enable them to comprehend greater forces, those active in creatures of stronger passion. It seemed they did not even, really, share the same form of life. For a moment Brenner envied the creatures of low drives, those who had never experienced more than ripples and stirrings, those who had no concept of tidalities, of hurricanes, of raging seas. Then he did not envy them, no more than the hawk would envy the worm, no more than the lion the lamb.
“You chained me,” she said.
Brenner was silent.
“You chained me,” she said. “Come, look upon me.”
Brenner did not move. He did not even wish to turn about, to see her lying there, covered with the sheet.
“From the first moment you saw me,” she said, “surely you must have been curious as to what I would look like, in chains.”
Brenner was silent. There was a sense, he supposed, in which this, or something like it, was true. He had found her attractive, even as long ago as their brief encounter in the rain, in the muddy street. And chains, though they are surely, indisputably, effective custodial devices, both from the point of view of he who chains and she who is chained, are, perhaps even more, a symbol amongst symbols for a symbol-using animal. They speak of a relationship, of a propriety deeper than those of convention, of a claim of an animal of its rightful complement, and the expression of this claim in terms as graphic, as explicit and real as the piling of stones to mark a border, as the touch of steel in the conferring of knighthood, as the exchanging of a handful of earth between lord and vassal. He had, of course, wondered what she might look like, stripped, and his, and, in the sense in which chains would make clear by whom she was claimed, to whom she was subject, it was in its way true. In this sense one might, metaphorically, consider the woman as, so to speak, “in chains.” Earlier, of course, when he had imagined the directress on the ship, and later, of course, when he had been downstairs in the bar, his thoughts along these lines had been much more explicit. Then he had, not only symbolically, and metaphorically, but literally, thought of explicit signs of claiming, and ownership, and chains, of course, in their beauty, their primitiveness, their simplicity, like vines, like cords or ropes, come quickly, naturally, to mind.
“You chained me,” she said, irritably. “Surely you must have been curious to see what I would look like, in chains.”
Brenner was silent.
“So, come, look upon me,” she said.
He turned about, angrily, and went to the side of the bed. She looked up at him, defiantly.
“Look upon me!” she challenged.
He drew down the sheet a little, from about her throat. He could then see the metal collar on her neck. To the side, half lost under her hair, was the ring by means of which it was attached to the chain. Then the chain went up, behind her, to where it was fastened about the bar at the head of the bed.
“Look upon me!” she challenged.
He put his hand to the sheet, and then, after holding it a moment, tore it down and away. She cried out, startled, a little frightened, for she had not anticipated that this action would be done so suddenly, so decisively. She lay there before him. He noted