Dear Peter:
I knew it would come. But I wished to put it off until the chance for a
change was impossible. I’ve waited years for the time. I had planned in
my mind how I should do this thing I am about to do, with infinite care.
Each step was watched and taken even as the blind walk, even when I left
the house I intended to do this thing.
I wonder if you have ever read, “The Woman in White”? And if in the
reading you remember Count Fosco? You know he is the only fat villain in
any book. One thing he did I want to draw to your mind. It is the most
trivial thing in the whole book. You know, if you have read the book,
that after he was discovered and the things he had done were set before
him in all their hideousness, he sat down and wrote his confessions.
They covered innumerable sheets. The description by Collins of how he
gradually became buried in the pages is wonderfully drawn. You could see
him, Fosco, with the perspiration pouring down his fat face, and his
hand holding the pen flying over the sheets. I shall be Fosco buried in
sheets. That will, however, be my only likeness to him, for I do not
consider myself a villain. I am merely a woman.
Let’s see. This is a very difficult task. I do not know where to begin.
Shall I start at this end? Or shall I take it up from the time I left
the house? Our house. I was horribly alone. You will never understand
how poignantly alone I was; but that is neither here nor there.
I’ve decided, even in the writing of these first lines where I shall
begin. I am going to start with the now and go back. That is I mean to,
but I do not promise to keep it up. It is a long story—a miserable
history. I’ve sought for breaks in it, but I’ve discovered none.
Remember, Peter, I am not sorry. I feel precisely as I did about the
whole matter, as I did the day I walked from the house. I’ve not
relented, even at this late date. I am not sorry; I do not regret. I
repeat this statement in order that it may be impressed clearly upon
your mind. I don’t want you to think I am pleading for pity. I am not. I
neither crave your sympathy nor your change of feeling. I hope you get
this point exactly.
How time flies. You are sixty-two. I am forty-eight. We are both going
down the hill, and we are going down alone. It might have been
otherwise. The boy is twenty-three. I saw him when he was fifteen. I saw
him again when he was twenty, and again when he was twenty-one. I went
where he was out of idle curiosity. I wanted to see what this thing of
my flesh and blood had grown into. I was pleased and I was not. I
thought he ought to have looked better. I wondered what he would have
been under my influence, and had had the advantage of a mother’s love.
My friends tell me that a boy needs this sort of thing to lift him over
the hard places. Curiously enough I didn’t want to speak to him. I
didn’t long to hold him in my arms, nor did I feel any desire to have
him know me. I wonder whether that is normal. Most mothers, I suppose,
would have gone to him and taken him in their arms, and begged him in a
melodramatic way for his love. I desired no such thing. It may be that
my life has been confused. I don’t know. However, that is neither here
nor there. When I left you he was buried. I always looked upon him as a
disgrace. He was not in my mind purely born. He was my stigma. So, he is
of me and not of me. I will speak of him no more.
I look back upon my life as a series of developments. First, my
youth—full of hope, gay, protected, luxurious, a timid child with no
conception of life, a thing raised untutored, pushed into a willing
marriage. I wanted to marry you. It was a consuming desire upon my part.
I hoped so and I loved so. I thought you were wonderful. It gave me a
thrill when you came home. I looked upon you as a
super-man—unconquerable. Then gradually the veil was rent asunder. You
did the tearing and you did it thoroughly. You destroyed me. I, however,
felt it come and I tried hard to fight it out. My aim was to conquer the
thing so that you and I, Peter, should lead an ideal existence—that we
should have children, that love should radiate about us, like a glorious
sun, on a glorious summer day. You killed this. You wanted money,
success—futile, necessary money.
Remember, Peter, I don’t blame you for all the misfortune, as I may have
been equally at fault. I couldn’t advance as rapidly as you did. I
suppose it arose from the fact that I wanted you and not the world. I
wanted children, and I wanted a home. I wanted to be separated from the
frivolities of life. I wanted the burden of your happiness.
It may have been my fault in that I wanted to have you believe that in
me and in me alone was the lodestar of all your hopes. In the
development of that part of me, with no end of thought, I failed. I’ve
always failed. I can’t understand why, but the fact remains.
I remember—it was a long time ago, many, many years. With what
perturbation I was filled that first time you went away without kissing
me goodbye. That was a tiny omission, but it was an interstice. Then I
knew it came out of the blue. I knew I was slipping, that outside things
were grasping you, and I sensed this thing clearly. Then I fought—I
fought to recover, but although I fought I lost. I lost more and more.
Each losing infinitely small. I mean each slip towards the
disintegration; but to me these slips were monumental. I developed. I
passed in a few short moments into another stage.
My second stage. I wonder as I write this whether you will read it and
whether if you do you will be able to understand what I want to convey
to you. Sometimes as I read what I write I think I may have missed the
point.
In my second stage, I awoke from a poor bedraggled, dispirited woman. I
became mad. I lost all sense of proportion. I magnified things you had
done to me into things without proper ratios. I even had the temerity to
gloat while my Father died. This was a curious experience. I looked back
upon it with wonder. I can’t understand exactly how it could have
happened. I can’t exactly define my frame of mind. It must have arisen
because I blamed him, even as much as I did you, for the condition in
which I found myself.
Of course, my Mother was a negligible quantity in my life. And from the
things I have learned concerning her since her death, her sorrow over
the tragedies that surrounded her life were but passing affairs which
did not seem in any way to approach her. She seemed to sense nothing
except her material side. Everything was cast from her as a snake sheds
its skin. From her I received life and from her I got nothing except
life.
It was different in the case of my Father. He loved me, and I know now
as I look back that he adored me. His one ambition in life was to make
existence for me as free from all source of worry as the human can. But
he failed, and he failed because his perspective was bad. He didn’t
understand the longings of a real woman. He knew the world from a man’s
point of view. There he stopped. He knew nothing of it from a love’s
point of view. He loved, but he loved materially. I asked him once
whether he loved Mother as much as when he married her. He could not
answer. He knew his love had left her and centered about his own
success, which meant money and position—the flattery of men.
I am hastening these two developments because I want to tell you of the
third stage of my life—the third development, and what it has cost me,
how I arrived at this stage at which I find myself and what if anything
I have gained by my conduct towards you.
There is a curious thing comes to my mind. It may not strike you exactly
as it does me. But I am going to mention it for the reason that it
interests me. You, Peter, even today, are the only thing in life as far
as I am concerned, and it took the greatest amount of determination to
withstand the temptation which assailed me.
Many times in the past twenty-odd years I have gotten out of my bed with
the firm determination to come back to you. To say that probably after
all I was wrong, that I laid too much stress upon the condition in which
I found myself. You know, or probably you have not thought it out—that
once a woman gives herself to a man, once she has borne him children,
her whole heart, her whole life is wrapped up in the one experience.
Women are not like men. They are monogamous. There is barely a woman in
the world who has given herself to one man, and afterwards goes through
a divorce court or leaves him, that at times she does not feel within
herself an urge that is nearly unconquerable to go back to that man.
Women re-marry and they live in what is supposed to be contentment, but
in their hearts there is no contentment.
You will never know the tugs I have had or the strength I have used to
carry out this thing to its bitter end, but I was certain to do this.
Eight years after I had gone from the house, I stood for hours outside
the wall. I looked through the bars of the gate. I looked upon the
garden. There was a light in the room in which you had placed the
divan—the dear old divan, with the soft light burning behind it. I stood
for hours on a clear night. The moon shone through the trees, and I
could see the flowers. I could even make out the fountain around which
we had walked and you had told me of what you had done during the day.
This only happened once—a walk such as this. What joy that walk gave me.
I feel it even now. The great door was open. The light beckoned to me.
It invited me to come. It seemed to say, “Enter, and you will be
forgiven. Love waits for you.” I shook with fear. For I was afraid that
I might weaken.
I walked furiously up and down the pavement. My eyes were pinned upon
that light, and except for the light that fled through the front doors
everything else was dark. Nowhere was there a single light except in
that one room. I thought I could see you in it. I wondered whether you
were happy. I didn’t believe you were. Somehow I saw you much changed.
You were gray. Your shoulders were not full. You seemed to me to be
stooped. I wondered if I went in how you would greet me. I was afraid.
It was late when I left. Midnight. The light still burned. It struck me
as curious. I wondered why this was so. After I went away, I knew I had
made a mistake. I should have gone in to you. I should have walked up to
that little room and sat myself down upon the divan, and if you were not
there I should have waited. I believe now and I believed then that you
would have taken me in your arms and comforted me. You would not have
berated me. You didn’t know how lonely I had been. But, Peter, I failed
you. You told me so.
I left as I say, at midnight. I walked past my father’s house. Some one
was laughing in there. New people. People who had children. Life. The
lights were all lit. It looked so gay. I believe I wept. A man came out
upon the porch. I could see him from the lodge gates. He put out his
hand as if to see if it rained. He did not see the moon. I thought that
so funny. He went back again, closed the door and after sometime the
lights began to go down one by one, and finally the house became dark.
It was so peaceful. And I was so unhappy. So lacking in peace.
I thought of all that I had done in that old house. I saw my early life
again. I felt its happiness creep over me. I felt my father at my side.
I saw him stand by me. I could almost feel the grasp of his hand. His
breath fanned my cheek. And it seemed to me he whispered in my ear. He
said with such depth in his voice, “I forgive you Clarinda. I pity you.
Go back.” The thing became so vivid to me, that I turned and ran. I
don’t know how far I ran; but I ran until a man stopped me. He said,
“Why do you run? Are you scared? Has anything happened to you?”
I fled from him. I ran further until I was nearly dropping with
exhaustion, then I stopped. I was far from your house. Far down in the
city. It was terrible to me. Then I walked rapidly. It was getting late.
A bell in a tower near by struck two.
I have never been back since. That happened years ago. But even although
it happened years ago, it is as fresh in my mind as if it took place
yesterday. I conquered myself. I didn’t go back to you. My second
development had taken place. My second stage had been gone through with.
I was different. I was no more the Clarinda you married. My old self had
died. You would not have loved me any more. It would have been
impossible.
It is night, Peter. Good-night.