She had believed that my wild poet's passion for her would make me her
slave; and that, being her slave, I should execute her will in all
things. With the essential shallowness of a negative, unimaginative
nature, she was unable to conceive the fact that sensibilities were
anything else than weaknesses. She had thought my weaknesses would
put me in her power, and she found them unmanageable forces. Our
positions were reversed. Before marriage she had completely mastered
my imagination, for she was a secret to me; and I created the unknown
thought before which I trembled as if it were hers. But now that her
soul was laid open to me, now that I was compelled to share the privacy
of her motives, to follow all the petty devices that preceded her words
and acts, she found herself powerless with me, except to produce in me
the chill shudder of repulsion-- powerless, because I could be acted
on by no lever within her reach. I was dead to worldly ambitions, to
social vanities, to all the incentives within the compass of her narrow
imagination, and I lived under influences utterly invisible to her.
She was really pitiable to have such a husband, and so all the world
thought. A graceful, brilliant woman, like Bertha, who smiled on
morning callers, made a figure in ball-rooms, and was capable of that
light repartee which, from such a woman, is accepted as wit, was secure
of carrying off all sympathy from a husband who was sickly, abstracted,
and, as some suspected, crack-brained. Even the servants in our house
gave her the balance of their regard and pity. For there were no
audible quarrels between us; our alienation, our repulsion from each
other, lay within the silence of our own hearts; and if the mistress
went out a great deal, and seemed to dislike the master's society, was
it not natural, poor thing? The master was odd. I was kind and just to
my dependants, but I excited in them a shrinking, half-contemptuous
pity; for this class of men and women are but slightly determined in
their estimate of others by general considerations, or even experience,
of character. They judge of persons as they judge of coins, and value
those who pass current at a high rate.
After a time I interfered so little with Bertha's habits that it might
seem wonderful how her hatred towards me could grow so intense and
active as it did. But she had begun to suspect, by some involuntary
betrayal of mine, that there was an abnormal power of penetration in
me--that fitfully, at least, I was strangely cognizant of her thoughts
and intentions, and she began to be haunted by a terror of me, which
alternated every now and then with defiance. She meditated continually
how the incubus could be shaken off her life--how she could be freed
from this hateful bond to a being whom she at once despised as an
imbecile, and dreaded as an inquisitor. For a long while she lived in
the hope that my evident wretchedness would drive me to the commission
of suicide; but suicide was not in my nature. I was too completely
swayed by the sense that I was in the grasp of unknown forces, to
believe in my power of self-release. Towards my own destiny I had
become entirely passive; for my one ardent desire had spent itself, and
impulse no longer predominated over knowledge. For this reason I never
thought of taking any steps towards a complete separation, which would
have made our alienation evident to the world. Why should I rush for
help to a new course, when I was only suffering from the consequences
of a deed which had been the act of my intensest will? That would have
been the logic of one who had desires to gratify, and I had no desires.
But Bertha and I lived more and more aloof from each other. The rich
find it easy to live married and apart.
That course of our life which I have indicated in a few sentences
filled the space of years. So much misery--so slow and hideous a growth
of hatred and sin, may be compressed into a sentence! And men judge
of each other's lives through this summary medium. They epitomize the
experience of their fellow-mortal, and pronounce judgment on him in
neat syntax, and feel themselves wise and virtuous--conquerors over
the temptations they define in well-selected predicates. Seven years
of wretchedness glide glibly over the lips of the man who has never
counted them out in moments of chill disappointment, of head and heart
throbbings, of dread and vain wrestling, of remorse and despair. We
learn _words_ by rote, but not their meaning; _that_ must be paid for
with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.
But I will hasten to finish my story. Brevity is justified at once to
those who readily understand, and to those who will never understand.
Some years after my father's death, I was sitting by the dim firelight
in my library one January evening--sitting in the leather chair that
used to be my father's--when Bertha appeared at the door, with a
candle in her hand, and advanced towards me. I knew the ball-dress she
had on--the white ball-dress, with the green jewels, shone upon by
the light of the wax candle which lit up the medallion of the dying
Cleopatra on the mantelpiece. Why did she come to me before going
out? I had not seen her in the library, which was my habitual place,
for months. Why did she stand before me with the candle in her hand,
with her cruel contemptuous eyes fixed on me, and the glittering
serpent, like a familiar demon, on her breast? For a moment I thought
this fulfilment of my vision at Vienna marked some dreadful crisis
in my fate, but I saw nothing in Bertha's mind, as she stood before
me, except scorn for the look of overwhelming misery with which I
sat before her . . . "Fool, idiot, why don't you kill yourself,
then?"--that was her thought. But at length her thoughts reverted to
her errand, and she spoke aloud. The apparently indifferent nature of
the errand seemed to make a ridiculous anticlimax to my prevision and
my agitation.
"I have had to hire a new maid. Fletcher is going to be married, and
she wants me to ask you to let her husband have the public-house and
farm at Molton. I wish him to have it. You must give the promise now,
because Fletcher is going to-morrow morning--and quickly, because I'm
in a hurry."
"Very well; you may promise her," I said, indifferently, and Bertha
swept out of the library again.
I always shrank from the sight of a new person, and all the more when
it was a person whose mental life was likely to weary my reluctant
insight with worldly ignorant trivialities. But I shrank especially
from the sight of this new maid, because her advent had been announced
to me at a moment to which I could not cease to attach some fatality:
I had a vague dread that I should find her mixed up with the dreary
drama of my life--that some new sickening vision would reveal her to
me as an evil genius. When at last I did unavoidably meet her, the
vague dread was changed into definite disgust. She was a tall, wiry,
dark-eyed woman, this Mrs. Archer, with a face handsome enough to
give her coarse hard nature the odious finish of bold, self-confident
coquetry. That was enough to make me avoid her, quite apart from the
contemptuous feeling with which she contemplated me. I seldom saw her;
but I perceived that she rapidly became a favourite with her mistress,
and, after the lapse of eight or nine months, I began to be aware that
there had arisen in Bertha's mind towards this woman a mingled feeling
of fear and dependence, and that this feeling was associated with
ill-defined images of candle-light scenes in her dressing-room, and the
locking-up of something in Bertha's cabinet. My interviews with my wife
had become so brief and so rarely solitary, that I had no opportunity
of perceiving these images in her mind with more definiteness. The
recollections of the past become contracted in the rapidity of thought
till they sometimes bear hardly a more distinct resemblance to the
external reality than the forms of an oriental alphabet to the objects
that suggested them.
Besides, for the last year or more a modification had been going
forward in my mental condition, and was growing more and more marked.
My insight into the minds of those around me was becoming dimmer
and more fitful, and the ideas that crowded my double consciousness
became less and less dependent on any personal contact. All that was
personal in me seemed to be suffering a gradual death, so that I was
losing the organ through which the personal agitations and projects
of others could affect me. But along with this relief from wearisome
insight, there was a new development of what I concluded--as I have
since found rightly--to be a prevision of external scenes. It was
as if the relation between me and my fellow-men was more and more
deadened, and my relation to what we call the inanimate was quickened
into new life. The more I lived apart from society, and in proportion
as my wretchedness subsided from the violent throb of agonized passion
into the dulness of habitual pain, the more frequent and vivid became
such visions as that I had had of Prague--of strange cities, of sandy
plains, of gigantic ruins, of midnight skies with strange bright
constellations, of mountain-passes, of grassy nooks flecked with the
afternoon sunshine through the boughs: I was in the midst of such
scenes, and in all of them one presence seemed to weigh on me in all
these mighty shapes--the presence of something unknown and pitiless.
For continual suffering had annihilated religious faith within me:
to the utterly miserable--the unloving and the unloved--there is no
religion possible, no worship but a worship of devils. And beyond all
these, and continually recurring, was the vision of my death--the
pangs, the suffocation, the last struggle, when life would be grasped
at in vain.
Things were in this state near the end of the seventh year. I had
become entirely free from insight, from my abnormal cognizance of any
other consciousness than my own, and instead of intruding involuntarily
into the world of other minds, was living continually in my own
solitary future. Bertha was aware that I was greatly changed. To my
surprise she had of late seemed to seek opportunities of remaining
in my society, and had cultivated that kind of distant yet familiar
talk which is customary between a husband and wife who live in polite
and irrevocable alienation. I bore this with languid submission, and
without feeling enough interest in her motives to be roused into keen
observation; yet I could not help perceiving something triumphant and
excited in her carriage and the expression of her face--something too
subtle to express itself in words or tones, but giving one the idea
that she lived in a state of expectation or hopeful suspense. My chief
feeling was satisfaction that her inner self was once more shut out
from me; and I almost revelled for the moment in the absent melancholy
that made me answer her at cross purposes, and betray utter ignorance
of what she had been saying. I remember well the look and the smile
with which she one day said, after a mistake of this kind on my part:
"I used to think you were a clairvoyant, and that was the reason why
you were so bitter against other clairvoyants, wanting to keep your
monopoly; but I see now you have become rather duller than the rest of
the world."
I said nothing in reply. It occurred to me that her recent obtrusion
of herself upon me might have been prompted by the wish to test my
power of detecting some of her secrets; but I let the thought drop
again at once: her motives and her deeds had no interest for me, and
whatever pleasures she might be seeking, I had no wish to baulk her.
There was still pity in my soul for every living thing, and Bertha was
living--was surrounded with possibilities of misery.
Just at this time there occurred an event which roused me somewhat from
my inertia, and gave me an interest in the passing moment that I had
thought impossible for me. It was a visit from Charles Meunier, who had
written me word that he was coming to England for relaxation from too
strenuous labour, and would like to see me. Meunier had now a European
reputation; but his letter to me expressed that keen remembrance of
an early regard, an early debt of sympathy, which is inseparable from
nobility of character: and I too felt as if his presence would be to me
like a transient resurrection into a happier pre-existence.
He came, and as far as possible, I renewed our old pleasure of making
_tete-a-tete_ excursions, though, instead of mountains and glacers
and the wide blue lake, we had to content ourselves with mere slopes
and ponds and artificial plantations. The years had changed us both,
but with what different result! Meunier was now a brilliant figure
in society, to whom elegant women pretended to listen, and whose
acquaintance was boasted of by noblemen ambitious of brains. He
repressed with the utmost delicacy all betrayal of the shock which
I am sure he must have received from our meeting, or of a desire to
penetrate into my condition and circumstances, and sought by the
utmost exertion of his charming social powers to make our reunion
agreeable. Bertha was much struck by the unexpected fascinations of a
visitor whom she had expected to find presentable only on the score of
his celebrity, and put forth all her coquetries and accomplishments.
Apparently she succeeded in attracting his admiration, for his
manner towards her was attentive and flattering. The effect of his
presence on me was so benignant, especially in those renewals of our
old _tete-a-tete_ wanderings, when he poured forth to me wonderful
narratives of his professional experience, that more than once, when
his talk turned on the psychological relations of disease, the thought
crossed my mind that, if his stay with me were long enough, I might
possibly bring myself to tell this man the secrets of my lot. Might
there not lie some remedy for me, too, in his science? Might there
not at least lie some comprehension and sympathy ready for me in his
large and susceptible mind? But the thought only flickered feebly now
and then, and died out before it could become a wish. The horror I had
of again breaking in on the privacy of another soul, made me, by an
irrational instinct, draw the shroud of concealment more closely around
my own, as we automatically perform the gesture we feel to be wanting
in another.
When Meunier's visit was approaching its conclusion, there happened
an event which caused some excitement in our household, owing to
the surprisingly strong effect it appeared to produce on Bertha--on
Bertha, the self-possessed, who usually seemed inaccessible to feminine
agitations, and did even her hate in a self-restrained hygienic manner.
This event was the sudden severe illness of her maid, Mrs. Archer.
I have reserved to this moment the mention of a circumstance which
had forced itself on my notice shortly before Meunier's arrival,
namely, that there had been some quarrel between Bertha and this
maid, apparently during a visit to a distant family, in which she had
accompanied her mistress. I had overheard Archer speaking in a tone of
bitter insolence, which I should have thought an adequate reason for
immediate dismissal. No dismissal followed; on the contrary, Bertha
seemed to be silently putting up with personal inconveniences from
the exhibitions of this woman's temper. I was the more astonished to
observe that her illness seemed a cause of strong solicitude to Bertha;
that she was at the bedside night and day, and would allow no one else
to officiate as head-nurse. It happened that our family doctor was
out on a holiday, an accident which made Meunier's presence in the
house doubly welcome, and he apparently entered into the case with an
interest which seemed so much stronger than the ordinary professional
feeling, that one day when he had fallen into a long fit of silence
after visiting her, I said to him--
"Is this a very peculiar case of disease, Meunier?"
"No," he answered, "it is an attack of peritonitis, which will be
fatal, but which does not differ physically from many other cases that
have come under my observation. But I'll tell you what I have on my
mind. I want to make an experiment on this woman, if you will give me
permission. It can do her no harm--will give her no pain--for I shall
not make it until life is extinct to all purposes of sensation. I want
to try the effect of transfusing blood into her arteries after the
heart has ceased to beat for some minutes. I have tried the experiment
again and again with animals that have died of this disease, with
astounding results, and I want to try it on a human subject. I have the
small tubes necessary, in a case I have with me, and the rest of the
apparatus could be prepared readily. I should use my own blood--take
it from my own arm. This woman won't live through the night, I'm
convinced, and I want you to promise me your assistance in making the
experiment. I can't do without another hand, but it would perhaps not
be well to call in a medical assistant from among your provincial
doctors. A disagreeable foolish version of the thing might get abroad."
"Have you spoken to my wife on the subject?" I said, "because she
appears to be peculiarly sensitive about this woman: she has been a
favourite maid."
"To tell you the truth," said Meunier, "I don't want her to know about
it. There are always insuperable difficulties with women in these
matters, and the effect on the supposed dead body may be startling. You
and I will sit up together, and be in readiness. When certain symptoms
appear I shall take you in, and at the right moment we must manage to
get every one else out of the room."
I need not give our farther conversation on the subject. He entered
very fully into the details, and overcame my repulsion from them, by
exciting in me a mingled awe and curiosity concerning the possible
results of his experiment.
We prepared everything, and he instructed me in my part as assistant.
He had not told Bertha of his absolute conviction that Archer would not
survive through the night, and endeavoured to persuade her to leave the
patient and take a night's rest. But she was obstinate, suspecting the
fact that death was at hand, and supposing that he wished merely to
save her nerves. She refused to leave the sick-room. Meunier and I sat
up together in the library, he making frequent visits to the sick-room,
and returning with the information that the case was taking precisely
the course he expected. Once he said to me, "Can you imagine any cause
of ill-feeling this woman has against her mistress, who is so devoted
to her?"
"I think there was some misunderstanding between them before her
illness. Why do you ask?"
"Because I have observed for the last five or six hours--since, I
fancy, she has lost all hope of recovery--there seems a strange
prompting in her to say something which pain and failing strength
forbid her to utter; and there is a look of hideous meaning in her
eyes, which she turns continually towards her mistress. In this disease
the mind often remains singularly clear to the last."
"I am not surprised at an indication of malevolent feeling in her,"
I said. "She is a woman who has always inspired me with distrust and
dislike, but she managed to insinuate herself into her mistress's
favour." He was silent after this, looking at the fire with an air of
absorption, till he went upstairs again. He stayed away longer than
usual, and on returning, said to me quietly, "Come now."
I followed him to the chamber where death was hovering. The dark
hangings of the large bed made a background that gave a strong relief
to Bertha's pale face as I entered. She started forward as she saw me
enter, and then looked at Meunier with an expression of angry inquiry;
but he lifted up his hand as if to impose silence, while he fixed his
glance on the dying woman and felt her pulse. The face was pinched
and ghastly, a cold perspiration was on the forehead, and the eyelids
were lowered so as to conceal the large dark eyes. After a minute or
two, Meunier walked round to the other side of the bed where Bertha
stood, and with his usual air of gentle politeness towards her begged
her to leave the patient under our care--everything should be done for
her--she was no longer in a state to be conscious of an affectionate
presence. Bertha was hesitating, apparently almost willing to believe
his assurance and to comply. She looked round at the ghastly dying
face, as if to read the confirmation of that assurance, when for a
moment the lowered eyelids were raised again, and it seemed as if the
eyes were looking towards Bertha, but blankly. A shudder passed through
Bertha's frame, and she returned to her station near the pillow,
tacitly implying that she would not leave the room.
The eyelids were lifted no more. Once I looked at Bertha as she watched
the face of the dying one. She wore a rich _peignoir_, and her blond
hair was half covered by a lace cap: in her attire she was, as always,
an elegant woman, fit to figure in a picture of modern aristocratic
life: but I asked myself how that face of hers could ever have seemed
to me the face of a woman born of woman, with memories of childhood,
capable of pain, needing to be fondled? The features at that moment
seemed so preternaturally sharp, the eyes were so hard and eager--she
looked like a cruel immortal, finding her spiritual feast in the
agonies of a dying race. For across those hard features there came
something like a flash when the last hour had been breathed out, and
we all felt that the dark veil had completely fallen. What secret was
there between Bertha and this woman? I turned my eyes from her with a
horrible dread lest my insight should return, and I should be obliged
to see what had been breeding about two unloving women's hearts. I felt
that Bertha had been watching for the moment of death as the sealing of
her secret: I thanked Heaven it could remain sealed for me.
Meunier said quietly, "She is gone." He then gave his arm to Bertha,
and she submitted to be led out of the room.
I suppose it was at her order that two female attendants came into
the room, and dismissed the younger one who had been present before.
When they entered, Meunier had already opened the artery in the long
thin neck that lay rigid on the pillow, and I dismissed them, ordering
them to remain at a distance till we rang: the doctor, I said, had an
operation to perform--he was not sure about the death. For the next
twenty minutes I forgot everything but Meunier and the experiment in
which he was so absorbed, that I think his senses would have been
closed against all sounds or sights which had no relation to it. It
was my task at first to keep up the artificial respiration in the body
after the transfusion had been effected, but presently Meunier relieved
me, and I could see the wondrous slow return of life; the breast began
to heave, the inspirations became stronger, the eyelids quivered,
and the soul seemed to have returned beneath them. The artificial
respiration was withdrawn: still the breathing continued, and there was
a movement of the lips.
Just then I heard the handle of the door moving: I suppose Bertha had
heard from the women that they had been dismissed: probably a vague
fear had arisen in her mind, for she entered with a look of alarm. She
came to the foot of the bed and gave a stifled cry.
The dead woman's eyes were wide open, and met hers in full
recognition-- the recognition of hate. With a sudden strong effort, the
hand that Bertha had thought for ever still was pointed towards her,
and the haggard face moved. The gasping eager voice said--
"You mean to poison your husband . . . the poison is in the black
cabinet . . . I got it for you . . . you laughed at me, and told lies
about me behind my back, to make me disgusting . . . because you were
jealous . . . are you sorry . . . now?"
The lips continued to murmur, but the sounds were no longer distinct.
Soon there was no sound--only a slight movement: the flame had leaped
out, and was being extinguished the faster. The wretched woman's
heart-strings had been set to hatred and vengeance; the spirit of
life had swept the chords for an instant, and was gone again for ever.
Great God! Is this what it is to live again . . . to wake up with our
unstilled thirst upon us, with our unuttered curses rising to our lips,
with our muscles ready to act out their half-committed sins?
Bertha stood pale at the foot of the bed, quivering and helpless,
despairing of devices, like a cunning animal whose hiding-places are
surrounded by swift-advancing flame. Even Meunier looked paralysed;
life for that moment ceased to be a scientific problem to him. As for
me, this scene seemed of one texture with the rest of my existence:
horror was my familiar, and this new revelation was only like an old
pain recurring with new circumstances.
* * * * *