_Lago d’Iseo, August 14th_.
When I said good-by to you yesterday I promised to come back to Venice
in a week: I was to give you your answer then. I was not honest in
saying that; I didn’t mean to go back to Venice or to see you again.
I was running away from you--and I mean to keep on running! If _you_
won’t, _I_ must. Somebody must save you from marrying a disappointed
woman of--well, you say years don’t count, and why should they, after
all, since you are not to marry me?
That is what I dare not go back to say. _You are not to marry me_. We
have had our month together in Venice (such a good month, was it not?)
and now you are to go home and write a book--any book but the one
we--didn’t talk of!--and I am to stay here, attitudinizing among my
memories like a sort of female Tithonus. The dreariness of this enforced
immortality!
But you shall know the truth. I care for you, or at least for your love,
enough to owe you that.
You thought it was because Vincent Rendle had loved me that there was
so little hope for you. I had had what I wanted to the full; wasn’t that
what you said? It is just when a man begins to think he understands
a woman that he may be sure he doesn’t! It is because Vincent Rendle
_didn’t love me_ that there is no hope for you. I never had what I
wanted, and never, never, never will I stoop to wanting anything else.
Do you begin to understand? It was all a sham then, you say? No, it was
all real as far as it went. You are young--you haven’t learned, as you
will later, the thousand imperceptible signs by which one gropes one’s
way through the labyrinth of human nature; but didn’t it strike you,
sometimes, that I never told you any foolish little anecdotes about
him? His trick, for instance, of twirling a paper-knife round and round
between his thumb and forefinger while he talked; his mania for saving
the backs of notes; his greediness for wild strawberries, the little
pungent Alpine ones; his childish delight in acrobats and jugglers; his
way of always calling me _you--dear you_, every letter began--I never
told you a word of all that, did I? Do you suppose I could have helped
telling you, if he had loved me? These little things would have been
mine, then, a part of my life--of our life--they would have slipped out
in spite of me (it’s only your unhappy woman who is always reticent
and dignified). But there never was any “our life;” it was always “our
lives” to the end....
If you knew what a relief it is to tell some one at last, you would bear
with me, you would let me hurt you! I shall never be quite so lonely
again, now that some one knows.
Let me begin at the beginning. When I first met Vincent Rendle I was not
twenty-five. That was twenty years ago. From that time until his death,
five years ago, we were fast friends. He gave me fifteen years, perhaps
the best fifteen years, of his life. The world, as you know, thinks that
his greatest poems were written during those years; I am supposed
to have “inspired” them, and in a sense I did. From the first, the
intellectual sympathy between us was almost complete; my mind must have
been to him (I fancy) like some perfectly tuned instrument on which he
was never tired of playing. Some one told me of his once saying of me
that I “always understood;” it is the only praise I ever heard of his
giving me. I don’t even know if he thought me pretty, though I hardly
think my appearance could have been disagreeable to him, for he hated to
be with ugly people. At all events he fell into the way of spending more
and more of his time with me. He liked our house; our ways suited
him. He was nervous, irritable; people bored him and yet he disliked
solitude. He took sanctuary with us. When we travelled he went with
us; in the winter he took rooms near us in Rome. In England or on the
continent he was always with us for a good part of the year. In small
ways I was able to help him in his work; he grew dependent on me. When
we were apart he wrote to me continually--he liked to have me share in
all he was doing or thinking; he was impatient for my criticism of every
new book that interested him; I was a part of his intellectual life. The
pity of it was that I wanted to be something more. I was a young woman
and I was in love with him--not because he was Vincent Rendle, but just
because he was himself!
People began to talk, of course--I was Vincent Rendle’s Mrs. Anerton;
when the _Sonnets to Silvia_ appeared, it was whispered that I was
Silvia. Wherever he went, I was invited; people made up to me in the
hope of getting to know him; when I was in London my doorbell never
stopped ringing. Elderly peeresses, aspiring hostesses, love-sick girls
and struggling authors overwhelmed me with their assiduities. I hugged
my success, for I knew what it meant--they thought that Rendle was in
love with me! Do you know, at times, they almost made me think so too?
Oh, there was no phase of folly I didn’t go through. You can’t imagine
the excuses a woman will invent for a man’s not telling her that he
loves her--pitiable arguments that she would see through at a glance if
any other woman used them! But all the while, deep down, I knew he had
never cared. I should have known it if he had made love to me every day
of his life. I could never guess whether he knew what people said about
us--he listened so little to what people said; and cared still less,
when he heard. He was always quite honest and straightforward with me;
he treated me as one man treats another; and yet at times I felt he
_must_ see that with me it was different. If he did see, he made no
sign. Perhaps he never noticed--I am sure he never meant to be cruel. He
had never made love to me; it was no fault of his if I wanted more than
he could give me. The _Sonnets to Silvia_, you say? But what are they? A
cosmic philosophy, not a love-poem; addressed to Woman, not to a woman!
But then, the letters? Ah, the letters! Well, I’ll make a clean breast
of it. You have noticed the breaks in the letters here and there,
just as they seem to be on the point of growing a little--warmer?
The critics, you may remember, praised the editor for his commendable
delicacy and good taste (so rare in these days!) in omitting from the
correspondence all personal allusions, all those _détails intimes_ which
should be kept sacred from the public gaze. They referred, of course, to
the asterisks in the letters to Mrs. A. Those letters I myself prepared
for publication; that is to say, I copied them out for the editor, and
every now and then I put in a line of asterisks to make it appear
that something had been left out. You understand? The asterisks were a
sham--_there was nothing to leave out_.
No one but a woman could understand what I went through during those
years--the moments of revolt, when I felt I must break away from it
all, fling the truth in his face and never see him again; the inevitable
reaction, when not to see him seemed the one unendurable thing, and I
trembled lest a look or word of mine should disturb the poise of our
friendship; the silly days when I hugged the delusion that he _must_
love me, since everybody thought he did; the long periods of numbness,
when I didn’t seem to care whether he loved me or not. Between these
wretched days came others when our intellectual accord was so perfect
that I forgot everything else in the joy of feeling myself lifted up
on the wings of his thought. Sometimes, then, the heavens seemed to be
opened....
* * * * *
All this time he was so dear a friend! He had the genius of friendship,
and he spent it all on me. Yes, you were right when you said that I have
had more than any other woman. _Il faut de l’adresse pour aimer_, Pascal
says; and I was so quiet, so cheerful, so frankly affectionate with him,
that in all those years I am almost sure I never bored him. Could I have
hoped as much if he had loved me?
You mustn’t think of him, though, as having been tied to my skirts. He
came and went as he pleased, and so did his fancies. There was a girl
once (I am telling you everything), a lovely being who called his
poetry “deep” and gave him _Lucile_ on his birthday. He followed her to
Switzerland one summer, and all the time that he was dangling after her
(a little too conspicuously, I always thought, for a Great Man), he was
writing to _me_ about his theory of vowel-combinations--or was it his
experiments in English hexameter? The letters were dated from the very
places where I knew they went and sat by waterfalls together and he
thought out adjectives for her hair. He talked to me about it quite
frankly afterwards. She was perfectly beautiful and it had been a pure
delight to watch her; but she _would_ talk, and her mind, he said, was
“all elbows.” And yet, the next year, when her marriage was announced,
he went away alone, quite suddenly ... and it was just afterwards that
he published _Love’s Viaticum_. Men are queer!
After my husband died--I am putting things crudely, you see--I had a
return of hope. It was because he loved me, I argued, that he had
never spoken; because he had always hoped some day to make me his wife;
because he wanted to spare me the “reproach.” Rubbish! I knew well
enough, in my heart of hearts, that my one chance lay in the force of
habit. He had grown used to me; he was no longer young; he dreaded new
people and new ways; _il avait pris son pli_. Would it not be easier to
marry me?
I don’t believe he ever thought of it. He wrote me what people call “a
beautiful letter;” he was kind; considerate, decently commiserating;
then, after a few weeks, he slipped into his old way of coming in every
afternoon, and our interminable talks began again just where they had
left off. I heard later that people thought I had shown “such good
taste” in not marrying him.
So we jogged on for five years longer. Perhaps they were the best years,
for I had given up hoping. Then he died.
After his death--this is curious--there came to me a kind of mirage of
love. All the books and articles written about him, all the reviews of
the “Life,” were full of discreet allusions to Silvia. I became again
the Mrs. Anerton of the glorious days. Sentimental girls and dear lads
like you turned pink when somebody whispered, “that was Silvia you were
talking to.” Idiots begged for my autograph--publishers urged me to
write my reminiscences of him--critics consulted me about the reading
of doubtful lines. And I knew that, to all these people, I was the woman
Vincent Rendle had loved.
After a while that fire went out too and I was left alone with my
past. Alone--quite alone; for he had never really been with me. The
intellectual union counted for nothing now. It had been soul to soul,
but never hand in hand, and there were no little things to remember him
by.
Then there set in a kind of Arctic winter. I crawled into myself as into
a snow-hut. I hated my solitude and yet dreaded any one who disturbed
it. That phase, of course, passed like the others. I took up life again,
and began to read the papers and consider the cut of my gowns. But there
was one question that I could not be rid of, that haunted me night and
day. Why had he never loved me? Why had I been so much to him, and no
more? Was I so ugly, so essentially unlovable, that though a man might
cherish me as his mind’s comrade, he could not care for me as a woman? I
can’t tell you how that question tortured me. It became an obsession.
My poor friend, do you begin to see? I had to find out what some other
man thought of me. Don’t be too hard on me! Listen first--consider. When
I first met Vincent Rendle I was a young woman, who had married early
and led the quietest kind of life; I had had no “experiences.” From the
hour of our first meeting to the day of his death I never looked at any
other man, and never noticed whether any other man looked at me. When
he died, five years ago, I knew the extent of my powers no more than a
baby. Was it too late to find out? Should I never know _why?_
Forgive me--forgive me. You are so young; it will be an episode, a mere
“document,” to you so soon! And, besides, it wasn’t as deliberate, as
cold-blooded as these disjointed lines have made it appear. I didn’t
plan it, like a woman in a book. Life is so much more complex than any
rendering of it can be. I liked you from the first--I was drawn to you
(you must have seen that)--I wanted you to like me; it was not a mere
psychological experiment. And yet in a sense it was that, too--I must
be honest. I had to have an answer to that question; it was a ghost that
had to be laid.
At first I was afraid--oh, so much afraid--that you cared for me only
because I was Silvia, that you loved me because you thought Rendle had
loved me. I began to think there was no escaping my destiny.
How happy I was when I discovered that you were growing jealous of my
past; that you actually hated Rendle! My heart beat like a girl’s when
you told me you meant to follow me to Venice.
After our parting at Villa d’Este my old doubts reasserted themselves.
What did I know of your feeling for me, after all? Were you capable of
analyzing it yourself? Was it not likely to be two-thirds vanity and
curiosity, and one-third literary sentimentality? You might easily
fancy that you cared for Mary Anerton when you were really in love with
Silvia--the heart is such a hypocrite! Or you might be more calculating
than I had supposed. Perhaps it was you who had been flattering _my_
vanity in the hope (the pardonable hope!) of turning me, after a decent
interval, into a pretty little essay with a margin.
When you arrived in Venice and we met again--do you remember the music
on the lagoon, that evening, from my balcony?--I was so afraid you
would begin to talk about the book--the book, you remember, was your
ostensible reason for coming. You never spoke of it, and I soon saw your
one fear was _I_ might do so--might remind you of your object in being
with me. Then I knew you cared for me! yes, at that moment really cared!
We never mentioned the book once, did we, during that month in Venice?
I have read my letter over; and now I wish that I had said this to you
instead of writing it. I could have felt my way then, watching your face
and seeing if you understood. But, no, I could not go back to Venice;
and I could not tell you (though I tried) while we were there together.
I couldn’t spoil that month--my one month. It was so good, for once in
my life, to get away from literature....
You will be angry with me at first--but, alas! not for long. What I have
done would have been cruel if I had been a younger woman; as it is, the
experiment will hurt no one but myself. And it will hurt me horribly
(as much as, in your first anger, you may perhaps wish), because it has
shown me, for the first time, all that I have missed....