_The Nature of a Crime_
_The Nature of a Crime_
I
You are, I suppose, by now in Rome. It is very curious how present
to me are both Rome and yourself. There is a certain hill--you, and
that is the curious part of it, will never go there--yet, yesterday,
late in the evening, I stood upon its summit and you came walking
from a place below. It is always midday there: the seven pillars of
the Forum stand on high, their capitals linked together, and form one
angle of a square. At their bases there lie some detritus, a broken
marble lion, and I think but I am not certain, the bronze she-wolf
suckling the two bronze children. Your dress brushed the herbs: it was
grey and tenuous: I suppose you do not know how you look when you are
unconscious of being looked at? But I looked at you for a long time--at
my You.
I saw your husband yesterday at the club and he said that you would
not be returning till the end of April. When I got back to my chambers
I found a certain letter. I will tell you about it afterwards--but I
forbid you to look at the end of what I am writing now. There is a
piece of news coming: I would break it to you if I could--but there
is no way of breaking the utterly unexpected. Only, if you read this
through you will gather from the tenor, from the tone of my thoughts,
a little inkling, a small preparation for my disclosure. Yes: it is a
“disclosure.”
... Briefly, then, it was this letter--a business letter--that set me
thinking: that made that hill rise before me. Yes, I stood upon it
and there before me lay Rome--beneath a haze, in the immense sea of
plains. I have often thought of going to Rome--of going with you, in a
leisurely autumn of your life and mine. Now--since I have received that
letter--I know that I shall never see any other Rome than that from an
imagined hilltop. And when, in the wonderful light and shadelessness
of that noon, last evening, you came from a grove of silver poplars,
I looked at you--_my_ you--for a very long while. You had, I think,
a parasol behind your head, you moved slowly, you looked up at the
capitals of those seven pillars.... And I thought that I should
never--since you will not return before the end of April--never see you
again. I shall never see again the you that every other man sees....
You understand everything so well that already you must understand the
nature of my disclosure. It is, of course, no disclosure to tell you
that I love you. A very great reverence is due to youth--and a very
great latitude is due to the dead. For I am dead: I have only lived
through you for how many years now! And I shall never speak with you
again. Some sort of burial will have been given to me before the end
of April. I am a spirit. I have ended my relations with the world.
I have balanced all my books, my will is made. Only I have nothing
to leave--save to you, to whom I leave all that is now mine in the
world--my memory.
It is very curious--the world now. I walked slowly down here from
Gordon Square. I walked slowly--for all my work is done. On the way I
met Graydon Bankes, the K. C. It would have astonished him if he could
have known how unreal he looked to me. He is six feet high, and upon
his left cheek there is a brown mole. I found it difficult to imagine
why he existed. And all sorts of mists hurried past him. It was just
outside the Natural History Museum. He said that his Seaford Railway
Bill would come before Committee in June. And I wondered: what is
June?... I laughed and thought: why June will never come!
June will never come. Imagine that for a moment. We have discussed the
ethics of suicide. You see why June will never come!
You remember that ring I always wear? The one with a bulging, greenish
stone. Once or twice you have asked me what stone it was. You thought,
I know, that it was in bad taste and I told you I wore it for the sake
of associations. I know you thought--but no: there has never been any
woman but you.
You must have felt a long time ago that there was not, that there could
not have been another woman. The associations of the ring are not
with the past of a finished affection, or hate, or passion, with all
these forms of unrest that have a term in life: they looked forward to
where there is no end--whether there is rest in it God alone knows.
If it were not bad taste to use big words in extremities I would say
there was Eternity in the ring--Eternity which is the negation of all
that life may contain of losses and disappointments. Perhaps you have
noticed that there was one note in our confidence that never responded
to your touch. It was that note of universal negation contained within
the glass film of the ring. It is not you who brought the ring into my
life: I had it made years ago. It was in my nature always to anticipate
a touch on my shoulder, to which the only answer could be an act of
defiance. And the ring is my weapon. I shall raise it to my teeth, bite
through the glass: inside there is poison.
I haven’t concealed anything from you. Have I? And, with the great
wisdom for which I love you, you have tolerated these other things. You
would have tolerated this too, you who have met so many sinners and
have never sinned....
Ah, my dear one--that is why I have so loved you. From our two poles we
have met upon one common ground of scepticism--so that I am not certain
whether it was you or I who first said: “Believe nothing: be harsh to
no one.” But at least we have suffered. One does not drag around with
one such a cannon-ball as I have done all these years without thinking
some wise thoughts. And well I know that in your dreary and terrible
life you have gained your great wisdom. You have been envied; you too
have thought: Is any prospect fair to those among its trees? And I
have been envied for my gifts, for my talents, for my wealth, for my
official position, for the letters after my name, for my great and
empty house, for my taste in pictures--for my ... for my opportunities.
Great criminals and the very patient learn one common lesson: Believe
in nothing, be harsh to no one!
But you cannot understand how immensely leisurely I feel. It is one
o’clock at night. I cannot possibly be arrested before eleven to-morrow
morning. I have ten hours in which, without the shadow of a doubt, I
can write to you: I can put down my thoughts desultorily and lazily. I
have half a score of hours in which to speak to you.
The stress of every secret emotion makes for sincerity in the end.
Silence is like a dam. When the flood is at its highest the dam
gives way. I am not conceited enough to think that I can sweep you
along, terrified, in the rush of my confidences. I have not the
elemental force. Perhaps it is just that form of “greatness” that I
have lacked all my life--that profound quality which the Italians
call _terribilita_. There is nothing overpowering or terrible in the
confession of a love too great to be kept within the bounds of the
banality which is the safeguard of our daily life. Men have been nerved
to crime for the sake of a love that was theirs. The call of every
great passion is to unlawfulness. But your love was not mine, and my
love for you was vitiated by that conventional reverence which, as to
nine parts in ten, is genuine, but as to the last tenth a solemn sham
behind which hide all the timidities of a humanity no longer in its
youth. I have been of my time--altogether of my time--lacking courage
for a swoop, as a bird respects a ragged and nerveless scarecrow.
Altogether a man of my time. Observe, I do not say “our time.” You are
of all time--you are the loved Woman of the first cry that broke the
silence and of the last song that shall mark the end of this ingenious
world to which love and suffering have been given, but which has in the
course of ages invented for itself all the virtues and all the crimes.
And being of this world and of my time I have set myself to deal
ingeniously with my suffering and my love.
Now everything is over--even regrets. Nothing remains of finite things
but a few days of life and my confession to make to you--to you alone
of all the world.
It is difficult. How am I to begin? Would you believe it--every time I
left your presence it was with the desire, with the necessity to forget
you. Would you believe it?
This is the great secret--the heart of my confession. The distance did
not count. No walls could make me safe. No solitude could defend me;
and having no faith in the consolations of eternity I suffered too
cruelly from your absence.
If there had been kingdoms to conquer, a crusade to preach--but no.
I should not have had the courage to go beyond the sound of your
voice. You might have called to me any time! You never did. Never.
And now it is too late. Moreover, I am a man of my time, the time is
not of great deeds but of colossal speculations. The moments when I
was not with you had to be got through somehow. I dared not face them
empty-handed lest from sheer distress I should go mad and begin to
execrate you. Action? What form of action could remove me far enough
from you whose every thought was referred to your existence? And as you
were to me a soul of truth and serenity I tried to forget you in lies
and excitement. My only refuge from the tyranny of my desire was in
abasement. Perhaps I was mad. I gambled. I gambled first with my own
money and then with money that was not mine. You know my connection
with the great Burden fortune. I was trustee under my friend’s,
Alexander Burden’s will. I gambled with a determined recklessness,
with closed eyes. You understand now the origin of my houses, of my
collections, of my reputation, of my taste for magnificence--which
you deigned sometimes to mock indulgently with an exquisite flattery
as at something not quite worthy of me. It was like a break-neck ride
on a wild horse, and now the fall has come. It was sudden. I am alive
but my back is broken. Edward Burden is going to be married. I must
pay back what I have borrowed from the Trust. I cannot. Therefore I am
dead. (A mouse has just come out from beneath one of the deed-boxes.
It looks up at me. It may have been eating some of the papers in the
large cupboard. To-morrow morning I shall tell Saunders to get a cat.
I have never seen a mouse here before. I have never been here so
late before. At times of pressure, as you know, I have always taken
my papers home. So that these late hours have been, as it were, the
prerogative of the mouse. No. I shall not get a cat. To that extent
I am still a part of the world: I am master of the fate of mice!) I
have, then, ten hours, less the time it has taken me to chronicle the
mouse, in which to talk to you. It is strange, when I look back on it,
that in all the years we have known each other--seven years, three
months and two days--I have never had so long as ten hours in which I
might talk to you. The longest time was when we came back from Paris
together, when your husband was in such a state that he could neither
see nor hear. (I’ve seen him, by-the-bye, every day since you have been
gone. He’s really keeping away from it wonderfully well; in fact, I
should say that he has not once actually succumbed. I fancy, really,
that your absence is good for him in a way: it creates a new set of
circumstances, and a change is said to be an excellent aid in the
breaking of a habit. He has, I mean, to occupy himself with some of the
things, innumerable as they are, that you do for him. I find that he
has even had his pass-book from the bank and has compared it with his
counterfoils. I haven’t, on account of this improvement, yet been round
to his chemist’s. But I shall certainly tell them that they _must_
surreptitiously decrease the strength of it.) That was the longest
time we have ever really talked together. And, when I think that in
all these years I haven’t once so much as held your hand for a moment
longer than the strictest of etiquette demanded! And I loved you within
the first month.
I wonder why that is. Fancy, perhaps. Habit perhaps--a kind of
idealism, a kind of delicacy, a fastidiousness. As you know very well
it is not on account of any moral scruples....
I break off to look through what I have already written to you. There
is, first, the question of why I never told you my secret: then,
the question of what my secret really is; I have started so many
questions and have not followed one of them out to the very end. But
all questions resolve themselves into the one question of our dear and
inestimable relationship.
I think it has been one of the great charms of our relationship that
all our talks have been just talks. We have discussed everything under
the sun, but we have never discussed anything _au fond_. We have
strayed into all sorts of byways and have never got anywhere. I try to
remember how many evenings in the last five years we have not spent
together. I think they must be less than a hundred in number. You know
how, occasionally, your husband would wake out of his stupors--or
walk _in_ his stupor and deliver one of his astonishingly brilliant
disquisitions. But remember how, always, whether he talked of free
love or the improvement in the breed of carriage-horses, he always
thrashed his subject out to the bitter end. It was not living with a
man: it was assisting at a performance. And, when he was sunk into
his drugs or when he was merely literary, or when he was away, how
lazily we talked. I think no two minds were ever so fitted one into
another as yours and mine. It is not of course that we agree on all
subjects--or perhaps upon any. In the whole matter of conduct we are so
absolutely different--you are always for circumspection, for a careful
preparation of the ground, for patience; and I am always ready to act,
and afterwards draw the moral from my own actions. But somehow, in the
end, it has all worked out in our being in perfect agreement. Later I
will tell you why that is.
* * * * *
Let me return to my mouse. For you will observe that the whole question
revolves, really, around that little allegorical mite. It is an omen:
it is a symbol. It is a little herald of the Providence that I do not
believe in--of the Providence you so implicitly seek to obey. For
instinctively you believe in Providence--in God, if you will. I as
instinctively disbelieve. Intellectually of course you disbelieve in a
God. You say that it is impossible for Reason to accept an Overlord; I
that Reason forces one to accept an Overlord; that Reason forces one
to believe in an Omnipotent Ruler--only I am unable to believe. We, my
dear, are in ourselves evidence of a design in creation. For we are the
last word of creation. It has taken all the efforts, all the birthpangs
of all the ages to evolve--you and me. And, being evolved, we are
intellectually so perfectly and so divinely fashioned to dovetail
together. And, physically too, are we not divinely meant the one for
the other? Do we not react to the same causes: should not we survive
the same hardships or succumb to the same stresses? Since you have
been away I have gone looking for people--men, women, children, even
animals--that could hold my attention for a minute. There has not been
one. And what purer evidence of design could you ask for than that?
I have made this pact with the Providence that I argue for, with the
Providence in whose existence I cannot believe--that if, from under
the castle of black metal boxes, the mouse reappear and challenge
death--then there is no future state. And, since I can find no
expression save in you, if we are not reunited I shall no longer exist.
So my mouse is the sign, the arbitrament, a symbol of an eternal life
or the herald of nothingness.
I will make to you the confession that since this fancy, this profound
truth, has entered my mind, I have not raised my eyes from the paper. I
dread--I suppose it is dread--to look across the ring of light that my
lamp casts. But now I will do so. I will let my eyes travel across the
bundles of dusty papers on my desk. Do you know I have left them just
as they were on the day when you came to ask me to take your railway
tickets? I will let my eyes travel across that rampart of blue and
white dockets.... The mouse is not there.
But that is not an end of it. I am not a man to be ungenerous in my
dealings with the Omnipotent: I snatch no verdict.