everything has been said, and on mine everything has been understood. By
what I have done to-day I have put myself into her hands, I have given
her the right to arrange my life as she pleases; I have shown her my
weakness, I have let her see her own strength. Does it matter how one
gives way, or how a woman overcomes? To-day I honestly wanted to do the
right thing, to be kind to a woman I had once cared for, and I am
powerless to do it. These agitations, these restrictions, this
sentimental ceremony, are too much for me. How is it that I did not
sooner realise the way things were tending, and set a barrier, not only
against this passionate foe without, but against this weakness, this
kindness, that turn traitors within, and run so readily to the closed
gates to open them?
* * * * *
November 8.--The letter I wrote was cold; it was as if one were giving
charity. Clare replies gratefully, as if to a benevolent stranger. I
have spoilt the idea which she still had of me. I am sorry for it; the
more so as I have no desire to see her; but I should like to have
behaved at least instinctively. It is for another woman, always, that
one is unjust to a woman. And why is it? Is it because I pity this woman
so much, that I have been unjust to the other? I did not know till
yesterday how much she cared for me. What is going to happen? I ask
myself, not liking, or not daring, to wait for an answer. How one evades
coming to a conclusion, precisely when too much depends on that
conclusion! I have never understood myself, and just now the brain in me
seems to sit aside and reserve judgment, while all manner of feelings,
instincts, sensations, chatter among themselves. No, I will confess
nothing to these pages, and chiefly because it would take a casuist to
prepare my confession.
* * * * *
November 9.--She loves me cruelly, with a dull passion that does not
come till after youth and the years one calls the years of love are long
past. I have had a terrible scene with her; terrible because, for the
first time, a woman's love seems to me a wholly serious thing, and one's
own feeling to matter less. My own feeling: what is it here? Shall I
understand one woman, at last, when the desire to do so is over?
Passions, then, are real things in women, and, if no one is responsible,
at least one cannot always hold aloof from them, or go by on the other
side. She loves me, and she can conceal it no longer; and she is ashamed
that I should see her as she is, and she exults in her shame, and is
reckless and timorous, and is at my mercy, and does not know that it is
just this that holds me, and that I cannot, if I would, turn away from
one now helpless, and a beggar. Something in her helplessness takes hold
of me like a great force, breaks down my indifference; because, I think,
it convinces me, to the roots of my mind, as no woman ever before
convinced me, that what one calls love may be life itself, carrying away
all the props of the world in its overflow. I am afraid of this horrible
reality; but I cannot escape it.
* * * * *
November 10.--I try to persuade myself that I have become her lover
wholly out of pity; but the more intimate self which listens is not to
be persuaded. Certainly I do not love her, but is it only because she
loves me, and because she is the most unfortunate of women, that ... No,
there is something else, some animal attraction, which comes to me in
spite of my repugnance; a gross, unmistakable desire, which I would not
admit even to myself if the consciousness of it were not forced upon me.
What I should not have believed in another, I experience, beyond denial,
in myself.
Shall a man never know what it is in him that responds, without love, to
a woman's gesture? Is it a kind of animal vanity? Is it that love
creates, not love, but a flattered readiness to be loved? Did I not
think how terrible it would be if she fell in love again, and did I not
mean, for the main part, because she could expect no return? And I was
wrong. Something has taken hold of me, an appeal, a partly honest and
partly perverse attraction; and I say to myself that it is pity, but
though pity is part of it, it is not all pity; and I find myself, as I
have always found myself, doing the exact opposite of what seems most
natural and desirable. Why?
* * * * *
November 20.--I have made a mistake, but it was inevitable. I have put
back my shoulders under the yoke, and all the peace is over. I have had
just time enough to rest, and to get ready for the old labour, and now I
am troubled with all a woman's ingenuity of trouble: her nerves, her
cares, her affections, her solicitudes, her whole minute and
never-ceasing possession. How am I to explain myself? There was no
choice; it is useless to regret what could but have been accepted. She
has a calm will to love, she is like some force of nature against which
it is useless to struggle.
* * * * *
November 22.--I do not know why it is, but all my old nervous uneasiness
is coming back on me again, against all sense or reason. I have that
curious feeling that something is going to happen; I find myself
listening to noises, unable to sit quiet, watching my own brain. All
the restlessness has come back, and some of the fear. I am afraid of
this woman's love. I could not leave her, but I am afraid of what will
happen to me.
* * * * *
December 3.--No, I shall never get accustomed to it; the same physical
horror will always be there; it has been there when the attraction was
strongest; it has never been out of my mind, or away from the eyes of my
senses. She is aware of it, and suffers; and I am helpless before her
suffering. And it is this, nothing but this, which turns my thoughts
morbid, whenever I think over a situation which might otherwise have had
nothing unusual in it. The husband studies me with a kind of curious and
mocking interest, which he allows to remain on his face when he sees us
together. Does he suspect, know, approve, or disapprove? Do I seem to
him ... But in any case all that is beside the question: I once thought
that it would be a generous revenge to make him suffer; now I am
conscious how idle the thought was. Is it not all idle, is not
everything more or less beside the question?
I am tired of writing in my journal, always the same things. I will shut
the book, and perhaps not open it again.
* * * * *
January 5.--I have not written anything in my journal for years (how
many years is it?), and I do not know what impulse or what accident has
led me to open it again, and to turn over some of the pages on which the
dust has settled, and to begin to write there as I am doing, half
mechanically. What is it that seems strange as I read what I have
written here? I suppose that I should have considered, discussed,
questioned the very things which are now as if they had always been. I
do not dream of changing them, any more than I dream of changing the
course of life itself, on its inevitable way. But a rage in me never
quite dies out: against this woman who has taken me from myself, and
against life that is wasting me daily. I have no happiness if I look
either forward or backward. I have always succumbed to what I have most
dreaded, and every reluctance has turned in me to an irresistible force
of attraction. And now I am softly, stealthily entangled, held by loving
hands, imprisoned in comfort; I do some good at last, for certainly I
help to make a wronged and pitiable woman happy; I have no will to break
any bond, and yet I am more desolately alone than I have ever been, more
fretted by the old self, by apprehensions and memories, by the passing
of time and the lack of hope or desire. I would welcome any change,
though it brought worse things, if I could but end this monotony in
which there is no rest; end it somehow, and rest a little, and be alone.
* * * * *
October 12.--I have been ill, I am better, I am in Venice. Surely one
gets well of every trouble in Venice, where, if anywhere in the world,
there should be peace, the oblivion of water, of silence, the unreal
life of sails? I have come to an old house on the Giudecca, where one is
islanded even from the island life of Venice: I look across and see
land, the square white Dogana, the Salute, like a mosque, the whole
Riva, with the Doges' Palace. There lies all that is most beautiful in
the world, and I have only to look out of my windows to see it. Palladio
built the house, and the rooms are vast; the beams overhead are so high
that I feel shrunk as I look at them, as if lost in all this space;
which, however, delights my humour.
* * * * *
October 14.--The art in life is to sit still, and to let things come
towards you, not to go after them, or even to think that they are in
flight. How often I have chased some divine shadow, through a whole day
till evening, when, going home tired, I have found the visitor just
turning away from my closed door.
To sit still, in Venice, is to be at home to every delight. I love St.
Mark's, the Piazza, the marble benches under the colonnade of the Doges'
Palace, the end of land beyond the Dogana, the steps of the Redentore;
above all, my own windows. Sitting at any one of these stations one
gathers as many floating strays of life as a post in the sea gathers
weeds. And it is all a sort of immense rest, literally a dream, for
there is sleep all over Venice. I have been sitting for a long time in
St. Mark's, thinking of nothing. The voices of the priests chanting
hummed and buzzed like echoes in an iron bell. They troubled me a
little, but without breaking the enchantment, as importunate insects
trouble a summer afternoon. Very old men in purple sat sunk into the
stalls of the choir, loth to move, almost overcome with sleep; waiting,
with an accustomed patience, till the task was over.
Here (infinite relief!) I can think of nothing. She writes to me, and I
put aside the letters, and I forget quite easily that some day she will
come for me, and the old life must begin over again. I do not dread it,
because I do not remember it. I am still weak, and I must not excite
myself; I must sink into this delicious Venice, where forgetfulness is
easier than anywhere in the world. The autumn is like a gentler summer;
no such autumn has been known, even in Venice, for many years; and I am
to be happy here, I think.
* * * * *
October 25.--I have been roaming about the strange house, upstairs, in
these vast garrets paved with stone, with old carved chimneys, into
which they have put modern stoves, and beams, the actual roof-trees
overhead; nearly all unoccupied space, out of which a room is walled up
or boarded off here and there. Some of the windows look right over the
court, the two stone angels on the gateway, and the broad green and
brown orto, the fruit garden which stretches to the lagoon, its vine
trellises invisible among the close leaves of the trees. Beyond the
brown and green, there is a little strip of pale water, and then mud
flats, where the tide has ebbed, the palest brown, and then more pale
water, and the walls and windows of the madhouse, San Servolo, coming up
squarely out of the lagoon.
* * * * *
October 26.--Does the too exciting exquisiteness of Venice drive people
mad? Two madhouses in the water! It is like a menace.
I went out in the gondola yesterday on the lagoon on the other side of
the island. It was an afternoon of faint, exquisite sunshine, and the
water lay like a mirror, bright and motionless, reflecting nothing but a
small stake, or the hull, hoisted nets, and stooping back of a fisher
and his boat. I looked along the level, polished surface to where sails
rose up against the sky, between the black, compact bulk of the forts.
The water lapped around the oar as it dipped and lifted, and trickled
with a purring sound from the prow. I lay and felt perfectly happy, not
thinking of anything, hardly conscious of myself. I had closed my eyes,
and when I opened them again we were drifting close to a small island,
on which there was a many-windowed building, most of the windows grated
over, and a church with closed doors; the building almost filled the
island; it had a walled garden with trees. A kind of moaning sound came
from inside the walls, rising and falling, confused and broken. 'It is
San Clemente,' said the gondolier over my shoulder; 'they keep mad
people there, mad women.'
* * * * *
November 1.--She writes affectionate letters to me, without a respite;
she will not let me alone to get well. For I am sure I could get well
here if I were quite left to myself. And now even Venice is turning
evil. Is it in the place, in myself, is it my disease returning to take
hold of me? Is it the power of the woman coming back across land and
water to take hold of me? I am getting afraid to go about this strange
house at night; the wind comes in from the sea, and tears at the old
walls and the roof; I scarcely know if it is the wind I hear when I wake
up in the night.
* * * * *
November 3.--There is something unnatural in standing between water and
water and hearing the shriek of a steam-engine. I am hardly too far, I
suppose, from the railway-station, to have actually heard it. But the
idea seems a foolish joke, unworthy of the place.
* * * * *
November 6.--Every day I find myself growing more uneasy. If I look out
of the windows at dawn, when land and water seem to awaken like a
flower, some poison comes to me out of this perhaps too perfect beauty.
I dread the day, which seems to follow me and drag me back, after I have
escaped another night; I never felt anything like this insidious coiling
of water about one.
I came to Venice for peace, and I find a subtle terror growing up out of
its waters, with a more ghostly insistence than anything solid on the
earth has ever given me. Daylight seems to mask some gulf, which, with
the early dark and the first lamps, begins to grow visible. As I look
across at Venice from this island, I see darkness, and lights growing
like trees and flowers out of the creeping water, and, white and
immense, with its black windows and one lighted lamp, the Doges' Palace.
Nothing else is real, and the beauty of this one white thing, the one
thing whose form the eye can fasten upon, is the beauty of witchcraft. I
expect to see it gone in the morning.
And the noises here are mysterious. I hear a creak outside my window,
and it comes nearer, and a great orange sail passes across the window
like a curtain drawn over it. Bells break out, and ring wildly, as if
out of the water. Steamers hoot, with that unearthly sound to which one
can never get accustomed. The barking of a dog comes from somewhere
across the water, a voice cries out suddenly, and then the shriek of
steam from a vessel, and again, from some new quarter, a volley of
bells.
* * * * *
November 9.--The wind woke me from sleep, rattling the wooden shutter
against the panes of the windows, and I could hear it lifting the water
up the steps of the landing-place, where there is always a chafing and
gurgling whenever the wind is not quite still. I looked out, and,
pressing my face close against the glass, I could just distinguish the
black bundle of stakes in the dim water, which I could see throbbing
under a very faint light, where the gas-lamp, hung from the next house,
shone upon it. Beyond, there was nothing but darkness, and the level row
of lights on the Riva, and the white walls, cut into stone lacework, of
the Doges' Palace. The wind seemed to pass down the canal, as if on its
way from the sea to the sea. I felt it go by, like a living thing, not
turning to threaten me.
* * * * *
November 13.--I am beginning almost to wish that she were here. She
writes that she is coming, and I scarcely know whether to be glad or
sorry. I fear her more than anything in the world, but there is
something here which is hardly of the world, a vague, persistent image
of death, impalpable, unintelligible, not to be shaken off; and I know
not what I am dreading, not the mere fear of water, though I have always
had that, but some terrible expectancy, which keeps me now from getting
any rest by day or by night.
* * * * *
November 22.--At last something has happened, nothing indeed to my hurt,
but it has broken the strain a little. The last days have been windless,
warm, and, till yesterday afternoon, cloudless. Suddenly, as I sat in
the Piazza, the daylight seemed to be put out by a great blackness
which came up rapidly out of the north, and hung over half the sky. A
wind swept suddenly in from the lagoon, and blew sharply across the open
space and along the arcades. In hardly more than a moment the Piazza was
empty. I went down to the Riva, and called to my gondolier, who swung to
and fro in his moored boat. The water was blackening, and had begun to
race past. He called to me that we must wait, and I saw one or two
gondolas hurrying up the Grand Canal, carried along by the tide, the men
rowing hard. As the rain began I went into the Grand Hotel, and sat
looking out on the water, which blackened and whitened and flung itself
forward in actual waves, and splashed right up the steps and over the
balcony. The rain came down steadily, and the lightning flickered across
the sky behind the Salute, and lit up the domes, the windows, the steps,
and a few people huddled there. Every now and then the water turned
white; I saw every outline as it shouldered forward like a sea and broke
on the marble steps; and the water was empty, not a gondola, not even a
steamer; and then a steamer which had turned home drifted past without
a passenger. I went out, and felt the rain on my face, and the water
splashing on the steps; not far off I could see the gondolas tossing on
their moorings. I seemed to be on the shore of some horrible island, and
I had to cross the sea, which there was no crossing. I was afraid the
gondola would come for me; but nothing, I thought, should tempt me upon
that tossing water: I saw the black hull whirled sideways, and the man
reeling over on his oar. No gondola came, and I slept that night in the
Grand Hotel, which seemed to me, as I heard the water splashing under my
windows, impregnably safe.
* * * * *
November 27.--She is here, she has become kind to me now, only kind and
gentle; I am no longer afraid of her love. I have been ill again, and
she has taken care of me, she has taken me away from this horrible
Giudecca. I look out on a great garden, in which I can forget there is
any water in Venice; I am near the land and I see nothing but trees. The
house is full of pictures, beautiful old Venetian things; it is like
living in another century, yet in the midst of a comfort which rests me.
I am no longer afraid of her love; I seem to have become a child, and
her love is maternal. When I look at her I can see her face as it was,
as it is, without a scar; I see that she is beautiful. If I get well
again I will never leave her.
* * * * *
December 12.--There is a phrase of Balzac which turns over and over in
my head. It is in the story called 'Sur Catherine de Medicis,' and he is
speaking of the Calvinist martyr, who is recovering after being
tortured. 'On ne saurait croire' says Balzac, 'a quel point un homme,
seul dans son lit et malade, devient personnel.' Since I have been lying
in bed, in this queer fever which keeps me shaking and hot (some
Venetian chill which has got into my very bones), I have had so
singularly little feeling of personality, I seem to have become so
suddenly impersonal, that I wonder if Balzac was right. The world,
ideas, sensations, all are fluid, and I flow through them, like a
gondola carried along by the current; no, like a weed adrift on it.
* * * * *
The journal ends there, and the writing of the last page is faint and
unsteady.
Here I might leave the matter, but I am impelled to mention a
circumstance which I always associate in my mind with the tragical
situation revealed in poor Luxulyan's journal. A year after it had come
into my hands, and while I was still hesitating whether or not to have
it printed, I happened to be passing through Rome, where the Eckensteins
had gone to live; and a sort of curiosity, I suppose, more than any
friendly feeling I had for them, suggested to me that I should call upon
them in the palace which they had taken in the Via Giulia. The concierge
was not in his loge, and I went up the first flight of broad low marble
stairs and rang at the door. It was opened by a servant in livery. 'Is
the Baroness von Eckenstein at home?' I asked; and as the man remained
silent, I added, 'Will you send in my card?' He still stared at me
without replying, and I repeated my question. At last he said: 'Madame
la Baronne died the day before yesterday. She was buried this morning.'
I can hardly say that I was profoundly grieved, but the suddenness of
the announcement struck me with a kind of astonishment. I inquired for
the Baron; he was in, and I was taken through one after another of the
vast marble rooms which, in Roman palaces, lead to the reception-room.
Every room was crowded with pictures, statues, rare Eastern vases,
tables and cases of bibelots, exotic plants, a profusion of showy things
brought together from the ends of the world. The Baron received me with
almost more than his usual ceremony. His face wore an expression of
correct melancholy, he spoke in a subdued and slightly mournful voice.
He told me that his beloved wife had succumbed to a protracted illness,
that she had suffered greatly, but, at the end, through the skilful aid
of the best surgeons in Europe, she had passed into a state of
somnolency, so that her death had been almost unconscious. He raised his
eyes with an air of pious resignation, and said that he thanked God for
having taken to himself so admirable, so perfect a being, whose loss,
indeed, must leave him inconsolable for the rest of his life on earth.
He spoke in measured syllables, and always in the same precise and
mournful tone. I found myself unconsciously echoing his voice and
reflecting his manner, and it seemed to me as if we were both playing in
a comedy, and repeating words which we had learnt by heart. I went
through my part mechanically, and left him. When I found myself in the
street I dismissed the cab which was waiting to take me to the Vatican.
I wanted to walk. I do not know why I felt a cold shiver run through me,
for the sky was cloudless, and it was the month of June.
=Transcriber's Notes:=
- hyphenation, spelling and grammar have been preserved as in the
original (other than as listed below)
Page 35, 'Lavengro" took my thoughts ==> 'Lavengro' took my thoughts
Page 37, trembled with ecstacy ==> trembled with ecstasy
Page 60, immensly, and especially ==> immensely, and especially
Page 93, mortages left just enough ==> mortgages left just enough
Page 116, in an ecstacy ==> in an ecstasy
Page 129, a little pale and she ==> a little pale, and she
Page 162, these confectionaries. ==> these confectionaries.'
Page 196, Arlesian women one was ==> Arlesian women: one was
Page 209, Allee des Tombeaux ==> Allee des Tombeaux
Page 214, grown up, like Peter? ==> grown up, like Peter?'
Page 229, divine will aright?' ==> divine will aright?
Page 259, But what if only ==> but what if only
Page 261, which is insensative ==> which is insensitive
Page 262, artifically attached ==> artificially attached
Page 275, in whose pyschology ==> in whose psychology
Page 288, first of her chilhood ==> first of her childhood
Page 291, agony as the vitrol ==> agony as the vitriol