During that period my mind was full of her to the exclusion of every
other interest. I re-read all that she had to say many times, and with
each reading the effect of her personality deepened. It was all so
intensely familiar, the flashes of insight, the blazing frankness, the
quick turns of thought, and her absurd confidence in a sort of sane
stupidity that she had always insisted upon my possessing. And her
unembarrassed affectionateness. Her quick irregular writing seemed to
bring back with it the changing light in her eyes, the intonations of
her voice, something of her gesture....
I didn't go on discussing with myself whether we two ought to
correspond; that problem disappeared from my thoughts. Her challenge to
me to justify myself took possession of my mind. That thrust towards
self-examination was the very essence of her ancient influence. How did
I justify myself? I was under a peculiar compulsion to answer that to
her satisfaction. She had picked me up out of my work and accumulating
routines with that demand, made me look at myself and my world again as
a whole.... I had a case. I have a case. It is a case of passionate
faith triumphing over every doubt and impossibility, a case real enough
to understand for those who understand, but very difficult to state. I
tried to convey it to her.
I do not remember at all clearly what I wrote to her. It has disappeared
from existence. But it was certainly a long letter. Throughout this book
I have been trying to tell you the growth of my views of life and its
purpose, from my childish dreams and Harbury attitudes to those ideas of
human development that have made me undertake the work I do. It is not
glorious work I know, as the work of great artists and poets and leaders
is glorious, but it is what I find best suits my gifts and my want of
gifts. Greater men will come at last to build within my scaffoldings. In
some summary phrasing I must have set out the gist of this. I must have
explained my sense of the supreme importance of mental clarification in
human life. All this is manifest in her reply. And I think too I did my
best to tell her plainly the faith that was in me, and why life seemed
worth while to me....
Her second letter came after an interval of only a few days from the
despatch of mine. She began abruptly.
"I won't praise your letter or your beliefs. They are fine and
large--and generous--like you. Just a little artificial (but you will
admit that), as though you had felt them _give_ here and there and had
made up your mind they shouldn't. At times it's oddly like looking at
the Alps, the real Alps, and finding that every now and then the
mountains have been eked out with a plank and canvas Earl's Court
background.... Yes, I like what you say about Faith. I believe you are
right. I wish I could--perhaps some day I shall--light up and _feel_ you
are right. But--but---- That large, _respectable_ project, the increase
of wisdom and freedom and self-knowledge in the world, the calming of
wars, the ending of economic injustice and so on and so on----
"When I read it first it was like looking at a man in profile and
finding him solid and satisfactory, and then afterwards when I thought
it all over and looked for the particular things that really matter to
me and tried to translate it into myself--nothing is of the slightest
importance in the world that one cannot translate into oneself--then I
began to realize just how amazingly deficient you are. It was like
walking round that person in profile and finding his left side wasn't
there--with everything perfect on the right, down to the buttons. A kind
of intellectual Lorelei--sideways. You've planned out your
understandings and tolerances and enquiries and clearings-up as if the
world were all just men--or citizens--and nothing doing but racial and
national and class prejudices and the exacting and shirking of labor,
and you seem to ignore altogether that man is a sexual animal
first--first, Stephen, first--that he has that in common with all the
animals, that it made him indeed because he has it more than they
have--and after that, a long way after that, he is the
labor-economizing, war-and feud-making creature you make him out to be.
A long way after that....
"Man is the most sexual of all the beasts, Stephen. Half of him,
womankind, rather more than half, isn't simply human at all, it's
specialized, specialized for the young, not only naturally and
physically as animals are, but mentally and artificially. Womankind
isn't human, it's reduced human. It's 'the sex' as the Victorians used
to say, and from the point of view of the Lex Julia and the point of
view of Mr. Malthus, and the point of view of biologists and saints and
artists and everyone who deals in feeling and emotion--and from the
point of view of all us poor specialists, smothered up in our clothes
and restrictions--the future of the sex is the centre of the whole
problem of the human future, about which you are concerned. All this
great world-state of your man's imagination is going to be wrecked by us
if you ignore us, we women are going to be the Goths and Huns of another
Decline and Fall. We are going to sit in the conspicuous places of the
world and _loot_ all your patient accumulations. We are going to abolish
your offspring and turn the princes among you into undignified slaves.
Because, you see, specialized as we are, we are not quite specialized,
we are specialized under duress, and at the first glimpse of a chance we
abandon our cradles and drop our pots and pans and go for the vast and
elegant side possibilities--of our specialization. Out we come, looking
for the fun the men are having. Dress us, feed us, play with us! We'll
pay you in excitement,--tremendous excitement. The State indeed! All
your little triumphs of science and economy, all your little
accumulations of wealth that you think will presently make the struggle
for life an old story and the millennium possible--_we spend_. And all
your dreams of brotherhood!--we will set you by the ears. We hold
ourselves up as my little Christian nephews--Philip's boys--do some
coveted object, and say _Quis?_ and the whole brotherhood shouts
'_Ego!_' to the challenge.... Back you go into Individualism at the word
and all your Brotherhood crumbles to dust again.
"How are you going to remedy it, how are you going to protect that Great
State of your dreams from this anti-citizenship of sex? You give no
hint.
"You are planning nothing, Stephen, nothing to meet this. You are
fighting with an army all looting and undisciplined, frantic with the
private jealousies that centre about _us_, feuds, cuts, expulsions,
revenges, and you are giving out orders for an army of saints. You treat
us as a negligible quantity, and we are about as negligible as a fire in
the woodwork of a house that is being built....
"I read what I have written, Stephen, and I perceive I have the makings
of a fine scold in me. Perhaps under happier conditions----... I should
certainly have scolded you, constantly, continually.... Never did a man
so need scolding.... And like any self-respecting woman I see that I use
half my words in the wrong meanings in order to emphasize my point. Of
course when I write woman in all that has gone before I don't mean
woman. It is a woman's privilege to talk or write incomprehensibly and
insist upon being understood. So that I expect you already to understand
that what I mean isn't that men are creative and unselfish and brotherly
and so forth and that women are spoiling and going to spoil the
game--although and notwithstanding that is exactly what I have
written--but that humans are creative and unselfish et cetera and so
forth, and that it is their sexual, egotistical, passionate side (which
is ever so much bigger relatively in a woman than in a man, and that is
why I wrote as I did) which is going to upset your noble and beautiful
apple-cart. But it is not only that by nature we are more largely and
gravely and importantly sexual than men but that men have shifted the
responsibility for attraction and passion upon us and made us pay in
servitude and restriction and blame for the common defect of the
species. So that you see really I was right all along in writing of this
as though it was women when it wasn't, and I hope now it is unnecessary
for me to make my meaning clearer than it is now and always has been in
this matter. And so, resuming our discourse, Stephen, which only my
sense of your invincible literalness would ever have interrupted, what
are you going to do with us?
"I gather from a hint rather than accept as a statement that you propose
to give us votes.
"Stephen!--do you really think that we are going to bring anything to
bear upon public affairs worth having? I know something of the
contemporary feminine intelligence. Justin makes no serious objection to
a large and various circle of women friends, and over my little
sitting-room fire in the winter and in my corners of our various gardens
in the summer and in walks over the heather at Martens and in Scotland
there are great talks and confessions of love, of mental freedom, of
ambitions, and belief and unbelief--more particularly of unbelief. I
have sometimes thought of compiling a dictionary of unbelief, a great
list of the things that a number of sweet, submissive,
value-above-rubies wives have told me they did not believe in. It would
amaze their husbands beyond measure. The state of mind of women about
these things, Stephen, is dreadful--I mean about all these
questions--you know what I mean. The bold striving spirits do air their
views a little, and always in a way that makes one realize how badly
they need airing--but most of the nicer women are very chary of talk,
they have to be drawn out, a hint of opposition makes them start back or
prevaricate, and I see them afterwards with their husbands, pretty
silken furry feathery jewelled _silences_. All their suppression doesn't
keep them orthodox, it only makes them furtive and crumpled and creased
in their minds--in just the way that things get crumpled and creased if
they are always being shoved back into a drawer. You have only to rout
about in their minds for a bit. They pretend at first to be quite
correct, and then out comes the nasty little courage of the darkness.
Sometimes there is even an apologetic titter. They are quite
emancipated, they say; I have misunderstood them. Their emancipation is
like those horrid white lizards that grow in the Kentucky caves out of
the sunlight. They tell you they don't see why they shouldn't do this or
that--mean things, underhand things, cheap, vicious, sensual things....
Are there, I wonder, the same dreadful little caverns in men? I doubt
it. And then comes a situation that really tries their quality.... Think
of the quandary I got into with you, Stephen. And for my sex I'm rather
a daring person. The way in which I went so far--and then ran away. I
had a kind of excuse--in my illness. That illness! Such a queer untimely
feminine illness....
"We're all to pieces, Stephen. That's what brought down Rome. The women
went to pieces then, and the women are going to pieces to-day. What's
the good of having your legions in the Grampians and marching up to
Philae, while the wives are talking treason in your houses? It's no good
telling us to go back to the Ancient Virtues. The Ancient Virtues
haven't _kept_. The Ancient Virtues in an advanced state of decay is
what was the matter with Rome and what is the matter with us. You can't
tell a woman to go back to the spinning-wheel and the kitchen and the
cradle, when you have power-looms, French cooks, hotels, restaurants and
modern nurseries. We've overflowed. We've got to go on to a lot of New
Virtues. And in all the prospect before me--I can't descry one clear
simple thing to do....
"But I'm running on. I want to know, Stephen, why you've got nothing to
say about all this. It must have been staring you in the face ever since
I spent my very considerable superfluous energies in wrecking your
career. Because you know I wrecked it, Stephen. I _knew_ I was wrecking
it and I wrecked it. I knew exactly what I was doing all the time. I had
meant to be so fine a thing for you, a mothering friend, to have that
dear consecutive kindly mind of yours steadying mine, to have seen you
grow to power over men, me helping, me admiring. It was to have been so
fine. So fine! Didn't I urge you to marry Rachel, make you talk of her.
Don't you remember that? And one day when I saw you thinking of Rachel,
saw a kind of pride in your eyes!--suddenly I couldn't stand it. I went
to my room after you had gone and thought of you and her until I wanted
to scream. I couldn't bear it. It was intolerable. I was violent to my
toilet things. I broke a hand-glass. Your dignified, selfish,
self-controlled Mary _smashed_ a silver hand-mirror. I never told you
that. You know what followed. I pounced on you and took you. Wasn't I--a
soft and scented hawk? Was either of us better than some creature of
instinct that does what it does because it must? It was like a gust of
madness--and I cared, I found, no more for your career than I cared for
any other little thing, for honor, for Rachel, for Justin, that stood
between us....
"My dear, wasn't all that time, all that heat and hunger of desire, all
that secret futility of passion, the very essence of the situation
between men and women now? We are all trying most desperately to be
human beings, to walk erect, to work together--what was your
phrase?--'in a multitudinous unity,' to share what you call a common
collective thought that shall rule mankind, and this tremendous force
which seizes us and says to us: 'Make that other being yours, bodily
yours, mentally yours, wholly yours--at any price, no matter the price,'
bars all our unifications. It splits the whole world into couples
watching each other. Until all our laws, all our customs seem the
servants of that. It is the passion of the body swamping the brain; it's
an ape that has seized a gun, a beautiful modern gun. Here am I,
Justin's captive, and he mine, he mine because at the first escapade of
his I get my liberty. Here are we two, I and you, barred for ever from
the sight of one another, and I and you writing--I at any rate--in spite
of the ill-concealed resentment of my partner. We're just two, peeping
through our bars, of a universal multitude. Everywhere this prison of
sex. Have you ever thought just all that it means when every woman in
the world goes dressed in a costume to indicate her sex, her cardinal
fact, so that she dare not even mount a bicycle in knickerbockers, she
has her hair grown long to its longest because yours is short, and
everything conceivable is done to emphasize and remind us (and you) of
the fundamental trouble between us? As if there was need of reminding!
Stephen, is there no way out of this? Is there no way at all? Because if
there is not, then I had rather go back to the hareem than live as I do
now imprisoned in glass--with all of life in sight of me and none in
reach. I had rather Justin beat me into submission and mental
tranquillity and that I bore him an annual--probably deciduous--child. I
can understand so well now that feminine attitude that implies, 'Well,
if I must have a master, then the more master the better.' Perhaps that
is the way; that Nature will not let us poor humans get away from sex,
and I am merely--what is it?--an abnormality--with whiskers of enquiry
sprouting from my mind. Yet I don't feel like that....
"I'm pouring into these letters, Stephen, the concentrated venom of
years of brooding. My heart is black with rebellion against my lot and
against the lot of woman. I have been given life and a fine position in
the world, I made one fatal blunder in marrying to make these things
secure, and now I can do nothing with it all and I have nothing to do
with it. It astounds me to think of the size of our establishments,
Stephen, of the extravagant way in which whole counties and great
countries pay tribute to pile up the gigantic heap of wealth upon which
we two lead our lives of futile entanglement. In this place alone there
are fourteen gardeners and garden helps, and this is not one of our
garden places. Three weeks ago I spent a thousand pounds on clothes in
one great week of shopping, and our yearly expenditure upon personal
effect, upon our magnificence and our margins cannot be greatly less
than forty-five thousand pounds. I walk about our house and gardens, I
take one of the carriages or one of the automobiles and go to some large
pointless gathering of hundreds and thousands and thousands of pounds,
and we walk about and say empty little things, and the servants don't
laugh at us, the butlers don't laugh at us, the people in the street
tolerate us.... It has an effect of collective insanity.... You know the
story of one of those dear Barons of the Cinque Ports--a decent
plumber-body from Rye or Winchelsea--one of the six--or eight--who
claimed the privilege of carrying the canopy over the King"--she is
speaking of King Edward's coronation of course--"how that he was
discovered suddenly to be speaking quite audibly to the sacred presence
so near to him: 'It is very remarkable--we should be here, your
majesty--very remarkable.' And then he subsided--happily unheard--into
hopeless embarrassment. That is exactly how I feel, Stephen. I feel I
can't stand it much longer, that presently I shall splutter and spoil
the procession....
"Perhaps I don't properly estimate our position in the fabric, but I
can't get away from the feeling that everything in social life leads up
to this--to us,--the ridiculous canopy. If so, then the universe
means--_nothing_; it's blowing great forms and shapes as a swamp blows
bubbles; a little while ago it was megatheriums and plesiosauriums--if
that's the name for them--and now it is country-houses and motor-cars
and coronation festivals. And in the end--it is all nonsense, Stephen.
It is utter nonsense.
"If it isn't nonsense, tell me what it is. For me at any rate it's
nonsense, and for every intelligent woman about me--for I talk to some
of them, we indulge in seditious whisperings and wit--and there isn't
one who seems to have been able to get to anything solider than I have
done. Each of us has had her little fling at maternity--about as much as
a washerwoman does in her odd time every two or three years--and that is
our uttermost reality. All the rest,--trimmings! We go about the world,
Stephen, dressing and meeting each other with immense ceremony, we have
our seasonal movements in relation to the ritual of politics and sport,
we travel south for the Budget and north for the grouse, we play games
to amuse the men who keep us--not a woman would play a game for its own
sake--we dabble with social reform and politics, for which few of us
care a rap except as an occupation, we 'discover' artists or musicians
or lecturers (as though we cared), we try to believe in lovers or, still
harder, try to believe in old or new religions, and most of us--I
don't--do our best to give the gratifications and exercise the
fascinations that are expected of us....
"Something has to be done for women, Stephen. We are the heart of life,
birth and begetting, the home where the future grows, and your schemes
ignore us and slide about over the superficialities of things. We are
spoiling the whole process of progress, we are turning all the
achievements of mankind to nothingness. Men invent, create, do miracles
with the world, and we translate it all into shopping, into a glitter of
dresses and households, into an immense parade of pride and excitement.
We excite men, we stir them to get us and keep us. Men turn from their
ideas of brotherhood to elaborate our separate cages....
"I am Justin's wife; not a thing in my heavens or my earth that is not
subordinated to that.
"Something has to be done for women, Stephen, something--urgently--and
nothing is done until that is done, some release from their intolerable
subjection to sex, so that for us everything else in life, respect,
freedom, social standing, is entirely secondary to that. But what has to
be done? We women do not know. Our efforts to know are among the most
desolating of spectacles. I read the papers of those suffrage women; the
effect is more like agitated geese upon a common than anything human has
a right to be.... That's why I turn to you. Years ago I felt, and now I
know, there is about you a simplicity of mind, a foolishness of faith,
that is stronger and greater than the cleverness of any woman alive. You
are one of those strange men who take high and sweeping views--as larks
soar. It isn't that you yourself are high and sweeping.... No, but still
I turn to you. In the old days I used to turn to you and shake your mind
and make you think about things you seemed too sluggish to think about
without my clamor. Once do you remember at Martens I shook you by the
ears.... And when I made you think, you thought, as I could never do.
Think now--about women.
"Stephen, there are moments when it seems to me that this futility of
women, this futility of men's effort _through_ women, is a fated
futility in the very nature of things. We may be saddled with it as we
are with all the animal infirmities we have, with appendixes and
suchlike things inside of us, and the passions and rages of apes and a
tail--I believe we have a tail curled away somewhere, haven't we?
Perhaps mankind is so constituted that badly as they get along now they
couldn't get along at all if they let women go free and have their own
way with life. Perhaps you can't have _two_ sexes loose together. You
must shut up one. I've a horrible suspicion that all these anti-suffrage
men like Lord Cromer and Sir Ray Lankester must know a lot about life
that I do not know. And that other man Sir Something-or-other Wright,
who said plainly that men cannot work side by side with women because
they get excited.... And yet, you know, women have had glimpses of a
freedom that was not mischievous. I could have been happy as a Lady
Abbess--I must have space and dignity, Stephen--and those women had
things in their hands as no women have things in their hands to-day.
They came to the House of Lords. But they lost all that. Was there some
sort of natural selection?...
"Stephen, you were made to answer my mind, and if you cannot do it
nobody can. What is your outlook for women? Are we to go back to
seclusion or will it be possible to minimize sex? If you are going to
minimize sex how are you going to do it? Suppression? There is plenty of
suppression now. Increase or diminish the pains and penalties? My
nephew, Philip's boy, Philip Christian, was explaining to me the other
day that if you boil water in an open bowl it just boils away, and that
if you boil it in a corked bottle it bangs everything to pieces, and
you have, he says, 'to look out.' But I feel that's a bad image.
Boiling-water isn't frantically jealous, and men and women are. But
still suppose, suppose you trained people not to make such an awful fuss
about things. _Now_ you train them to make as much fuss as possible....
"Oh bother it all, Stephen! Where's your mind in these matters? Why
haven't you tackled these things? Why do you leave it to _me_ to dig
these questions into you--like opening a reluctant oyster? Aren't they
patent? You up and answer them, Stephen--or this correspondence will
become abusive...."
§ 5
It was true that I did ignore or minimize sexual questions as much as I
could. I was forced now to think why I did this. That carried me back to
those old days of passion, memories I had never stirred for many years.
And I wrote to Mary that there was indeed no reason but a reasonable
fear, that in fact I had dismissed them because they had been beyond my
patience and self-control, because I could not think very much about
them without an egotistical reversion to the bitterness of my own case.
And in avoiding them I was only doing what the great bulk of men in
business and men in affairs find themselves obliged to do. They train
themselves not to think of the rights and wrongs of sexual life, not to
tolerate liberties even in their private imaginations. They know it is
like carrying a torch into a powder magazine. They feel they cannot
trust their own minds beyond the experience, tested usages, and
conventions of the ages, because they know how many of those who have
ventured further have been blinded by mists and clouds of rhetoric, lost
in inexplicable puzzles and wrecked disastrously. There in those half
explored and altogether unsettled hinterlands, lurk desires that sting
like adders and hatreds cruel as hell....
And then I went on--I do not clearly remember now the exact line of
argument I adopted--to urge upon her that our insoluble puzzles were not
necessarily insoluble puzzles for the world at large, that no one
soldier fights anything but a partial battle, and that it wasn't an
absolute condemnation of me to declare that I went on living and working
for social construction with the cardinal riddles of social order, so
far as they affected her, unsolved. Wasn't I at any rate preparing
apparatus for that huge effort at solution that mankind must ultimately
make? Wasn't this dredging out and deepening of the channels of thought
about the best that we could hope to do at the present time, seeing that
to launch a keel of speculation prematurely was only to strand oneself
among hopeless reefs and confusions? Better prepare for a voyage
to-morrow than sail to destruction to-day.
Whatever I put in that forgotten part of my letter was put less
strikingly than my first admissions, and anyhow it was upon these that
Mary pounced to the disregard of any other point. "There you are," she
wrote, with something like elation, "there is a tiger in the garden and
you won't talk or think about it for fear of growing excited. That is my
grievance against so much historical and political and social
discussion; its hopeless futility because of its hopeless omissions. You
plan the world's future, taking the women and children for granted, with
Egotistical Sex, as you call it, a prowling monster upsetting
everything you do...."
But I will not give you that particular letter in its order, nor its
successors. Altogether she wrote me twenty-two letters, and I one or two
more than that number to her, and--a thing almost inevitable in a
discussion by correspondence--there is a lot of overlapping and
recapitulation. Those letters spread over a space of nearly two and a
half years. Again and again she insists upon the monstrous exaggeration
of the importance of sex in human life and of the need of some reduction
of its importance, and she makes the boldest experimental suggestions
for the achievement of that end. But she comes slowly to recognize that
there is a justification for an indirect attack, that sex and the
position of women do not constitute the primary problem in that
bristling system of riddles that lies like a hostile army across the
path of mankind. And she realized too that through art, through science
and literature and the whole enquiring and creative side of man's
nature, lies the path by which those positions are to be outflanked, and
those eternal-looking impossibles and inconceivables overcome. Here is a
fragment--saturated with the essence of her thought. Three-quarters of
her earlier letters are variations on this theme....
"What you call 'social order,' Stephen, all the arrangements seem to me
to be _built_ on subjection to sex even more than they are built (as you
say) on labor subjection. And this is an age of release, you say it is
an age of release for the workers and they know it. And so do the women.
Just as much. 'Wild hopes' indeed! The workers' hopes are nothing to the
women's! It is not only the workers who are saying let us go free,
manage things differently so that we may have our lives relieved from
this intolerable burthen of constant toil, but the women also are saying
let us go free. They are demanding release just as much from their
intolerable endless specialization as females. The tramp on the roads
who won't work, the swindler and the exploiter who contrive not to work,
the strikers who throw down their tools, no longer for twopences and
sixpences as you say but because their way of living is no longer
tolerable to them, and we women, who don't bear children or work or
help; we are all in one movement together. We are part of the General
Strike. I have been a striker all my life. We are doing nothing--by the
hundred thousand. Your old social machine is working without us and in
spite of us, it carries us along with it and we are sand in the
bearings. I'm not a wheel, Stephen, I'm grit. What you say about the
reactionaries and suppressionists who would stifle the complaints of
labor and crush out its struggles to be free, is exactly true about the
reactionaries and suppressionists who would stifle the discussion of the
woman's position and crush out her hopes of emancipation...."
And here is a page of the peculiar doubt that was as characteristic of
her as the quick changes of her eyes. It gives just that pessimistic
touch that tempered her valiant adventurousness, that gave a color at
last to the tragedy of her death....
"Have you ever thought, Stephen, that perhaps these (repressionist)
people are righter than you are--that if the worker gets free he _won't_
work and that if the woman gets free she won't furl her sex and stop
disturbing things? Suppose she _is_ wicked as a sex, suppose she _will_
trade on her power of exciting imaginative men. A lot of these new
women run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, beguile some poor
innocent of a man to ruin them and then call in fathers, brother,
husbands, friends, chivalry, all the rest of it, and make the best of
both sides of a sex. Suppose we go on behaving like that. After we've
got all our emancipations. Suppose that the liberation of common people
simply means loafing, no discipline, nothing being done, an end to labor
and the beginning of nothing to replace it, and that the liberation of
women simply means the elaboration of mischief. Suppose that it is so.
Suppose you are just tumbling the contents of the grate into the middle
of the room. Then all this emancipation _is_ a decay, even as
conservative-minded people say,--it's none the less a decay because we
want it,--and the only thing to stop it is to stop it, and to have more
discipline and more suppression and say to women and the common people:
'Back to the Sterner Virtues; Back to Servitude!' I wish I hadn't these
reactionary streaks in my thoughts, but I have and there you are...."
And then towards the second year her letters began to break away from
her preoccupation with her position as a woman and to take up new
aspects of life, more general aspects of life altogether. It had an
effect not of her having exhausted the subject but as if, despairing of
a direct solution, she turned deliberately to the relief of other
considerations. She ceased to question her own life, and taking that for
granted, wrote more largely of less tangible things. She remembered that
she had said that life, if it was no more than its present appearances,
was "utter nonsense." She went back to that. "One says things like
that," she wrote "and not for a moment does one believe it. I grumble
at my life, I seem to be always weakly and fruitlessly fighting my life,
and I love it. I would not be willingly dead--for anything. I'd rather
be an old match-woman selling matches on a freezing night in the streets
than be dead. Nothing nonsensical ever held me so tightly or kept me so
interested. I suppose really I am full of that very same formless faith
on which you rely. But with me it's not only shapeless but
intangible.... I nibble at religion. I am immensely attracted. I stand
in the doorway. Only when they come out to persuade me to come in I am
like a shy child and I go away. The temples beguile me and the music,
but not the men. I feel I want to join _it_ and they say 'join _us_.'
They are--like vergers. Such small things! Such dreadful little
_arguing_ men! They don't let you come in, they want you to say they are
right. All the really religious people seem to be outside nowadays and
all the pretending, cheating, atheistical, vain and limited people
within....
"But the beautiful things religion gives! The beauty! Do you know Saint
Paul's, Stephen? Latterly I have been there time after time. It is the
most beautiful interior in all the world, so great, so sombrely
dignified, so perfectly balanced--and filled with such wonderful music,
brimming with music just as crystal water brims in a bowl of crystal.
The other day I went there, up into a little gallery high up under the
dome, to hear Bach's Passion Music, the St. Matthew Passion. One hangs
high and far above the little multitudes below, the white-robed singers,
the white-robed musicians, ranks and ranks, the great organ, the rows
and rows and rows of congregation, receding this way, that way, into the
haze of the aisle and the transepts, and out of it all streams the
sound and the singing, it pours up past you like a river, a river that
rushes upward to some great sea, some unknown sea. The whole place is
music and singing.... I hang on to the railings, Stephen, and weep--I
have to weep--and I wonder and wonder....
"One prays then as naturally as one drinks when one is thirsty and cold
water comes to hand. I don't know whom I pray to, but I pray;--of course
I pray. Latterly, Stephen, I have been reading devotional works and
trying to catch that music again. I never do--definitely. Never. But at
times I put down the book and it seems to me that surely a moment ago I
heard it, that if I sit very still in a moment I shall hear it again.
And I can feel it is there, I know it is there, like a bat's cry,
pitched too high for my ears. I know it is there, just as I should still
know there was poetry somewhere if some poor toothless idiot with no
roof to his mouth and no knowledge of any but the commonest words tried
to read Shelley to me....
"I wish I could pray with you, Stephen; I wish I could kneel down
somewhere with you of all people and pray."
§ 6
Presently our correspondence fell away. The gaps between our letters
lengthened out. We never wrote regularly because for that there must be
a free exchange upon daily happenings, and neither of us cared to dwell
too closely on our immediate lives. We had a regard for one another that
left our backgrounds vague and shadowy. She had made her appeal across
the sundering silences to me and I had answered, and we had poured out
certain things from our minds. We could not go on discussing. I was a
very busy man now, and she did not write except on my replies.
For a gap of nearly four months neither of us had anything to say in a
letter at all. I think that in time our correspondence might have
altogether died away. Then she wrote again in a more familiar strain to
tell me of certain definite changes of relationship and outlook. She
said that the estrangement between herself and Justin had increased
during the past year; that they were going to live practically apart;
she for the most part in the Surrey house where her two children lived
with their governesses and maids. But also she meant to snatch weeks and
seasons for travel. Upon that they had been disputing for some time. "I
know it is well with the children," she wrote; "why should I be in
perpetual attendance? I do nothing for them except an occasional kiss,
or half-an-hour's romping. Why should one pretend? Justin and I have
wrangled over this question of going away, for weeks, but at last
feminine persistence has won. I am going to travel in my own fashion and
see the world. With periodic appearances at his side in London and
Scotland. We have agreed at least on one thing, and that is upon a
companion; she is to be my secretary in title, my moral guarantor in
fact, and her name which is her crowning glory is Stella Summersley
Satchel. She is blonde, erect, huffy-mannered and thoroughly up to both
sides of her work. I partly envy her independence and rectitude--partly
only. It's odd and quite inconsistent of me that I don't envy her
altogether. In theory I insist that a woman should not have charm,--it
is our undoing. But when I meet one without it----!
"I shall also trail a maid, but I guess that young woman will learn what
it is to be left behind in half the cities of Europe before I have done
with her. I always lose my maids. They are so much more passive and
forgettable than luggage--abroad that is. And Justin usually in the old
days used to remember about them. And his valet used to see after
them,--a most attentive man. Justin cannot, he says, have his wife
abroad with merely a companion; people would talk; maid it must be as
well. And so in a week or less I shall start, unusually tailor-made, for
South Germany and all that jolly country, companioned and maided. I
shall tramp--on the feet God has given me--in stout boots. Miss
Summersley Satchel marches, I understand, like the British infantry but
on a vegetarian 'basis,'--fancy calling your nourishment a 'basis'!--the
maid and so forth by _Èilgut_...."
§ 7
After the letter containing that announcement she wrote to me twice
again, once from Oban and then after a long interval from Siena. The
former was a scornfully minute description of the English at their
holidays and how the conversation went among the women after dinner.
"They are like a row of Japanese lanterns, all blown out long ago and
swinging about in a wind," she wrote--an extravagant image that yet
conveys something of the large, empty, unilluminating effect of a sort
of social intercourse very vividly. In the second letter she was
concerned chiefly with the natural beauty of Italy and how latterly she
had thrice wept at beautiful things, and what this mystery of beauty
could be that had such power over her emotions.
"All up the hillside before the window as I write the herbage is thick
with anemones. They aren't scattered evenly and anyhow amongst the other
things but in little clusters and groups that die away and begin again,
like the repetitions of an air in some musical composition. I have been
sitting and looking at them for the better part of an hour, loving them
more and then more, and the sweet sunlight that is on them and in among
them.... How marvellous are these things, Stephen! All these little
exquisite things that are so abundant in the world, the gleaming lights
and blossoms, the drifting scents! At times these things bring me to
weeping.... I can't help it. It is as if God who is so stern and high,
so terrible to all our appeals, took pity for a moment and saw fit to
speak very softly and tenderly...."
That was the last letter I was ever to have from her.