is called sentiment as it had before, and was destined to have again;
and I imagine it was the same with her. I liked her with an intense
and destructive liking because she was life itself, and she had an
impersonal relish in existence which included me, the children, the
hills, the works of art, the Italian cooking and the witticisms of our
æsthetic and self-indulgent friends! Never before had she enjoyed life,
never had she trusted and believed in it, so much, never had she been
so willing to embrace it!
Yes, she was willing to embrace it! Or, rather, have life embrace her.
I saw that in her every attitude. Her feeling about literature and
art, about Nature; the love of beauty, always strong and pure in her,
was greatly intensified. And there was a subtle sensuousness in her
friendly relations with the contemplative men on the hills; a cool
freedom from any recognized bond. In her imagination she was as free
as air: I could see this in everything; in a glance, in a sensuous
movement towards a sunset, the kind of love she showed for a child,
as well as her quiet appreciation of the personalities about her.
That innate distrust of life which had always been hers, was in large
measure displaced by the fully accepted sensuousness of her experience;
art, children, the willingness to have lovers, the sense of freedom.
The sense of freedom! How vitalizing, how refreshing, how indispensable
to the living of every full life!
And this was in part the result of the sex crises we had had together
and these were in part due to my interest in the philosophy of the
proletariat! What a strange swing it is from the impersonal to the
personal and the other way round! How I had fiercely desired this and
how I feared it!
And that I feared it with reason was shown by the development of her
feeling for me. Her love for me seemed to increase in impersonal
warmth; she loved me more as she loved other things more, as she loved
life more, and other people more; but at the same time there was even
less dependency on me, a greater impersonality in her feeling for me!
Partly through other men and partly through my ideas she had achieved
an even more complete independence of me! This was beautiful: this is
beautiful to me now, and the very beauty of it stimulated my emulation.
I wanted to be as she was: I want to be as she is!
Let me not be hypocritical enough to say that that was the only reason
which now began to lead to more intimate relations between me and
other women than ever before. But it was one of the reasons. I was
ever struggling to be free of her in order more fully to enjoy her
without that intolerable pain. And certainly my deep and luxurious
intimacy with her had enabled me to understand other women better and
to approach them with greater sympathy--just as her experience with me
had rendered her a more attractive object to other men, more subtly
sensitive and understanding, more sensuous, with more of that amorous
pity which a finely balanced woman feels so thoroughly that she hardly
recognizes its specific character and is not inclined to think herself
in love.
And a developed sensuousness in all things leading to a general
Paganism gives to friendship between a man and a woman an almost
inevitable occasional sexuality. It is the condition of a fuller taste
of personality. So at any rate I have always felt it to be, and so as I
enjoyed her more and more fully, more and more did my friendship with
other women tend towards the possibility, but not the realization, of
the more intimate embrace! Never have I been able, as I have written,
to achieve emotional independence of her, but my social intimacy with
other women grew more and more intense and my relations with them were
limited not by my conscious will, but by that mysterious bond which
held my spirit and made it impossible for me to give my real self to
another. It affected even my physical make-up which in amorous play
will not respond to the conscious will but only to the unconscious
instinct. And she held that unconscious part of me on which even the
instinctive movements of my flesh were dependent--that part of me she
held in bond! How mysterious is that inevitable monogamy, and how it
shows that the real thing in us all is something spiritual! And how
it points to the impertinence of law and conventional morality which
insists on a condition already inevitable if of the spirit--and if it
is not of the spirit it is nothing.
On the top of one of the most beautiful hills of Italy we lived and
played, mentally and temperamentally. A few hours of writing in the
morning when we tried with sincerity to express our innermost feelings
about existence, I in psychological documents and she in fiction, and
then the long, late, cool summer afternoons when the sun changed from
the white scorching blaze of noon to the luminous ball throwing long,
cool shadows made of color and form over the earth, followed by the
fresh, warm night broken pleasantly in the early dawn by the noisy
nightingale or the shrill, clear clarion of the cock; removed from the
urgent call of economic need, with much unnecessary energy, and in
such an environment, why not play? How prevent, or why, the inevitable
movements of the human temperament, leading to the song and dance of
sex? It was this song and dance that sounded and vibrated rhythmically
all about, among these sensuous, disillusioned, self-indulgent ones,
and among the spontaneous peasantry on the olive-laden slopes.
I think it was her æsthetic sense, that inevitable response in her to
form, that determined for her the character of her social pleasures.
There were two men with whom she played in exquisite, amusing ways
that had its own subtle intensity, too. There was a passionate,
blue flame of a man who loved beauty as Shelley’s night loved the
morrow, the devotion to something afar from the sphere of our sorrow.
She caught and gracefully responded to the aerial nature of his
feeling, humorously conscious of his fear of the full emotional or
physical caress. And the other was a relaxed sensualist of delicate
and civilized character whose French epigrams were the only enticing
things about him. Neither of these gentlemen was in deep need of
anything except the flitting pleasures of evanescent thought and
poetical expression, and she played with them with a smiling and rather
slighting sympathy. But the charm was at times great enough to hold
her in amusing converse below while the nursing baby above howled in
impotent rage because of food delayed. Her need for the amusement of
the mind was strong and constant, but I sometimes had sympathy for the
child.
And I went off through the wonderful nights to the cafés in Florence
to talk to the artists and the women, to taste the Chianti and the
Mazarin, and to indulge in that satisfying mixture of work and
play--where work is play and play is work, that would be the solution
of the labor problem, and is the highest form of an enjoyment that
has no sad reaction. But this passion which has followed me always
throughout life, to work on my pleasures and to be pleased in my work,
periodically ends in an unpremeditated, intenser situation which
destroys both work and play.
And in this lovely place I met a lady with whom I played and who played
with me. A certain note of frivolity, of the sad Watteau type, however,
insists on conveying itself to these pages dealing with this period
abroad. The profounder thing in passion is the product of a keen and
simple provincialism; where the spiritual lines are long and intense
and monotonous. In an old, civilized place, however, full of detailed
beauty, passion is broken up into picturesque and amusing half emotions
and incipient, laughing ideas which relieve the emotional strain. So I
find in writing of our European experience among the completer products
of human personality and art that there is an inevitable note of
frivolity, even though it has a touch of the sad and the pathetic; it
lacks passion and intensity.
We played together, this lady and I, but we were not on an equality,
for I was living with my wife--how strange and inadequate it seems to
refer to her as my wife!--and to this absorbing relation were added
my work and the children, and she, the lady with whom I played, was
living alone. In every way, except in the deeper need of the soul,
I was satisfied, and she was not in any way, and that formed an
unfair situation which always leads to pain and regret. Following the
conventional episode of sex which of course ensued, there came an
inevitable, emotional demand from her which I could not satisfy, try
as I might; for that called on instinctive depths which I could not
control and I had the humiliation of disappointing her, of leaving her
unsatisfied and resentful, and with reason. To arouse and not satisfy
a need is the deepest sin of all, and that any one who has experienced
knows and bitterly regrets. What I condemn even more strongly in
myself is that more than once, with others, I sinned in like manner,
not having learned my lesson, or, having learned it, not having enough
self-control and genuine kindness to take advantage of it.
I have no intention of going through the list of my experiences
with other women, of those warm friendships and impossible hopes of
emotional freedom and of periodic belief that never in her could I find
the reciprocal passion which my soul needed; with therefore serious
movements towards others. I touch and shall touch only upon such
aspects of these experiences as help to explain my love life, such
experiences as seem to me typical of the love life of all of us. And I
bring up especially the memory of the lady with whom I played at that
time, and with whom pain was the result, because of the surprising
effect that this affair had on Her, on the woman with whom I had been
playing for nine years, the complex, perturbed and difficult game of
life.
I had never felt it necessary to hide anything from her; I wanted my
relations to her to be of that inner truth which was independent of
all external manifestations and of all conventions, and her apparent
coolness towards me and the quality of impersonality in her feeling
gave me a greater fancied freedom both of act and of openness with her.
But when she found that I had had this affair, she staggered slightly,
as from a physical blow. I imagine that a part of my instinct in
telling her was that desire to disturb her, to make her feel, which is
a constant part of my relation to her. I have told how I threw cones at
her; but this one was of unexpected seriousness. I felt that something
had happened that had never happened before, something that was
destined to have portentous consequences; and it created in me a keen
sense of my brutality and at the same time a kind of fear, something
akin to panic, unfamiliar and disturbing. Never again, I felt, could I
be so open with her; for the first time I saw that at some points she,
like me, must be spared. Not that my perception had any great influence
at that time on my actions, but it did have upon my attitude.
And her gayety was gone. The sensuous lightness and aloof freedom of
her life abroad had flown. We were perhaps as close as ever, but it was
a sad closeness, with little of the lighter play in it. It was a time
of depression with her, and also a time of unconscious preparation
for the most serious episode in her life and in mine--an episode that
seemed to threaten at one time to put a final term to our relation. She
was not aware, I think, of her deep readiness to give to another what
I periodically felt she had never given to me; but it was deep indeed
in her, this unconscious, perhaps partly conscious readiness to lose
her aloofness, to give herself completely away, and the inevitable
followed, for that towards which one’s whole nature strains, is, in
some measure, bound to come.
_Chapter X_
Again I am aware of the selected character of all writing. No literary
attempt, no matter how successful, can do other than trace a thread
which runs in and out of a vast complex of experience remaining
unrecorded. My sincerity can do no more than catch a small though
important aspect of the relations between a man and a woman, and
in order to make vivid that aspect all else must fade into a gray
obscurity or into a nothingness which is far from corresponding to the
reality. That is why the most sincere writing automatically takes on
the quality of fiction.
With every deepening addition to our relation there has come to me
an ever intenser appreciation of her spiritual and physical beauty.
This is true even at the moment of great pain, of disappointment and
of anger, showing, perhaps, that my bond to her is æsthetic first and
last, a bond of pleasure complete though often unendurable to the
point of anguish; yet there was always in it a life-giving something.
She certainly came to me that existence might be more abundant. In an
indescribable, warm way she has always been for me the Woman, with all
the complex marvelousness that that means to the Man.
And in the year that followed, beginning with the shock to her from
the projectile of my amorous play, her increasingly alienating depth,
her steady recession from me, came to me not as something wrong or
ugly. There was a something wonderful in it on which I cannot lay my
analyzing touch.
And he, the man, who came at what is called the psychological moment,
he, too, now appears to me as even then he seemed, a being of
exceptional beauty. He was an old friend of mine from college days,
always bitter with nervous unbalance and impatient of the world’s
futilities, not strong enough to help to set them right, but keen to
all hypocrisy and false sentiment, full of ambition to achieve which
left him no peace and which prevented any quiet accomplishment. I had
loved him for his sensibility and his one-time nervous need of me, and
now after long years of separation he came to us, abroad, nervously
needing rest, broken down from inner strain and outer fruitless work.
And he loved Her, my Her, of course! And I loved him all the more!
Perhaps he liked her--that may be a fitter word to call it; but his
liking was that intense recognition of her quality which at the highest
point is greater than love; he liked her much as I liked her. She
pleased our taste so utterly! And I loved to have him so perfectly
appreciate her. She is deeper than either of us, he would say, and
I knew full well what he meant: I knew he saw how through her quiet
breathing personality all of the elements passed, held by her in
solution! I saw he felt her quiet unconscious power and I felt nearer
to him and no further from her on that account.
But then there came the old deep pain when I felt again the excluding
movement of their souls. I felt near to them, but their growing affair
steadily alienated them from me! He withdrew from me and I was hurt,
and she in equal measure went farther and farther into that unknown
land in which I had no home, and I was hurt more deeply still. As they
came together, each departed from me, and this caused again in me
that mysterious unthinking pang which by the shallow-minded is called
jealousy; but not to feel that pang when the best that one knows is
threatened is to lack life’s impulse. Oh, how may we be broad-minded,
tolerant and civilized, and yet keep our feet firmly on the basic
reality of our natures?
They came together as if they were spiritually brother and sister;
there is much loose talk about “affinities”; it is a vague word which
has become a banality, but between these two there was a spontaneous
bond which has never been between her and me. They were drawn together
by a nameless similarity; she and I were together, I think, mainly
because of my insistent love, perhaps because of a mutual strangeness.
I can never understand her and she can never understand me. They
understood one another at once; and of course I was therefore on the
outside, an interested spectator of a relation I did not understand,
but longed for.
When we dwell intensely on any human relation we touch upon a
fundamental mystery; but there is nothing more real than the mystery
of being in love. And although in after years she did not admit it, and
I think does not now admit it to herself even, yet I believe that for
the only time in her life she felt the strange, temperamental identity
of her soul with another. It is no mere accident that that man, long
years before I knew her, and all through our friendship, attracted me
with peculiar force, just as she attracted me; how ironical and yet how
natural that the man for whom I felt the most spontaneous liking should
be the one for whom she felt the nameless something she never felt for
me!
Well, we all met, as I have written, abroad, and her depression gave
way at once to a kind of strong excitement--the excitement of finding
an affinity! And I in the first stages of their affair played the part
of an encourager, of an abettor and promoter of their friendship. Then,
as always, I longed for her the fullest life, rejoiced in all that
heightened her feeling and caused a warmer glow in her physical and
moral nature; in anything that took her from her cooler depths. And my
ideas of freedom strengthened this attitude of mine, and both together
made it easy, at first, for them to come as close together as their
souls desired. I still hoped that she might have the bond with me that
was the ideal of my life as it touched the personal relation, and at
the same time follow all the inclinations of her temperament which were
not easily aroused nor too many. Is it an impossible hope, the sign of
a deep-seated idealistic folly? I confess, that as time passed and deep
emotional fatigue has come to me in ever fuller measure, that my hope
has waned, not indeed for its realization for others in the remoter
future, but for me, here, upon this stretch of time, in this our
present social state which so stubbornly declines to accept the light
of the higher reason.
We played for a time abroad; but it was not a light and cheerful
play. Somber and intense chords were throbbing beneath our frivolous
talk together in the cafés of Paris, and in and out of our wine
suppers there was simmering a more destructive flame than that of the
spirit of the grape. We tried to pass it off in external gayety and
sensuous pleasure, but sad intensity lived in all of us. In me the
deeper jealousy was threatening to overcome my assumed and superficial
civilization. And in him I felt the strong and nervous impulse to
make a radical break, to insist on a new deal which would nullify the
past and open up for him and her--my Her!--a remote and faery life
apart from all the world! And in her there began a self-destructive
schism, an unexpressed struggle which meant for her something far more
strenuous than any other situation of her life.
He demanded silently, and more and more in words; it was a fiercely
expressed demand, and as his demand grew, mine became definitely
aroused, and she was drawn and quartered between the two. This is
roughly put, but the expression is not as roughly cruel as the reality.
Her nature was made for breathing harmony, for abiding, breathing
peace, and here in a deep soul, full of unconventional, sincere
feeling, was a conflict which threatened, and later almost took, her
life.
We and he separated for a period; he stayed in Europe, and, our time
abroad being up, we returned to America, and to a Middle Western
town in the midst of those monotonous, passionate plains which so
intensely affect the sensitive temperament. Here there was nothing of
the civilized charm of the old countries, a charm which relieves the
devouring central passions, and renders them relatively harmless.
From the beginning, she hated her environment. She bitterly missed the
picturesque detail of Europe, and the long, melancholy lines of the
Middle Western landscape fanned her smoldering resentment against me
and tortured her with the intense new need which he had aroused, and
which his eager, passionate letters sustained and stimulated. It was
a baleful music in her soul, and the few people she consented to know
in this, her new home, were caught up in the fierce simplicity of the
plains and harmonized with and strengthened her mood.
It was a mood of concentrated pain. I felt the inner struggle that was
testing her harmonizing resources to the uttermost, and yet I could
not relieve her. I could not fail to let her feel my deepening need
exasperated by the seriousness of her feeling for him. Scene after
scene made vivid to her the reality of my egotistic passion and his
letters were one intense, white flame. When he came again to be with
us she could not fail to feel increasingly the sharpness of these two
conflicting needs. He then had come to know that she to him was all,
and with a beautiful recklessness which charmed and terrified my soul
he desired with no retreating doubt to take her completely into his
life. It had ceased to be an affair with him and had become the serious
business of his existence.
Now indeed was she disturbed, this quiet and brooding woman! The
stronger elements of feeling which I had ever hoped for her and to
attain which I had thrown so many cones were now indeed a menace to
her very being. She was at last disturbed so deeply that the wreck of
all was imminent. When I saw in her lingering look at him the same
wondering doubt of what her destiny was to be, sharp memory brought to
me that look of hers when I returned long years before and felt her
wondering whether after all she was destined to live with me!--that
look which was the beautiful, symbolic forerunner of the honeymoon now
and forever a sensuous, lyrical joy to me! And here again her nature
was accepting, she was unconsciously prepared to see with sympathy this
other man, prepared to give herself again, this time with the greater,
fuller intensity of the intervening years of experience!
But this time to give herself meant a destructive inner conflict. As he
well said, hers was a nature of sincere depth, incapable of frivolity.
She could not leave me spiritually nor could she leave the children;
she could not break the interwoven threads of those twelve years of
pain and joy together. She could not refuse my demand, nor could she
refuse his demand; she was not capable of the easy relation with him
that was not inharmonious with my feeling. For that she cared too much
for him. Had she taken him lightly, involving the sexual relation,
I could by that time have been reconciled, seen it as not meaning
the destruction of the bond I wanted. But this she could not do. She
knew as I did that her feeling for him was inconsistent with that she
had for me. She was aware of excluding me when with him! It was this
awareness that shook her to the depths. She did not want it so! It went
against her unconscious will. That she could not fill the deeper need
of both of us--and neither of us would accept the lesser thing, even if
she could give it--this filled her with a disappointment so keen that
it racked her to the uttermost. He wanted all and so did I, and this
she knew could never be; and yet she longed for both! She wanted the
accepted and redolent past, the old bond, but her temperament eagerly
desired the new, the beckoning lover!
_Chapter XI_
It was him she gave up and then she broke. Ever since the far distant
day in Europe when they met, the struggle in her soul had stirred and
steadily grown until her nervous system could bear no more. She has
often said that in part that terrible situation was due to her physical
state, but I think it was the other way round, that her physical state
was a result of the unsolvable situation.
At any rate we were all aware that she was very ill. Her calm was
gone, and she was utterly disturbed to the very marrow. At last she
was what I had so often desired and to attain which I had thrown so
many cones--taken completely away from the reserved depths which so
often had irritated me. Now indeed she talked, but her talk to me was
torture. The self-restraint was gone, which had always been hers, and
with an almost terrified fascination I listened to her; listened to her
for many weeks while I helped to nurse her back to life and calmness.