§ 1
I sit here in this graciously proportioned little room which I shall
leave for ever next week, for already your mother begins to pack for
England again. I look out upon the neat French garden that I have
watched the summer round, and before me is the pile of manuscript that
has grown here, the story of my friendship and love for Mary and of its
tragic end, and of all the changes of my beliefs and purposes that have
arisen out of that. I had meant it to be the story of my life, but how
little of my life is in it! It gives, at most, certain acute points,
certain salient aspects. I begin to realize for the first time how thin
and suggestive and sketchy a thing any novel or biography must be. How
we must simplify! How little can we convey the fullness of life, the
glittering interests, the interweaving secondary aspects, the dawns and
dreams and double refractions of experience! Even Mary, of whom I have
labored to tell you, seems not so much expressed as hidden beneath these
corrected sheets. She who was so abundantly living, who could love like
a burst of sunshine and give herself as God gives the world, is she here
at all in this pile of industrious inexpert writing?
Life is so much fuller than any book can be. All this story can be
read, I suppose, in a couple of hours or so, but I have been living and
reflecting upon and reconsidering the substance of it for over forty
years. I do not see how this book can give you any impression but that
of a career all strained upon the frame of one tragic relationship, yet
no life unless it is a very short young life can have that simplicity.
Of all the many things I have found beautiful and wonderful, Mary was
the most wonderful to me, she is in my existence like a sunlit lake seen
among mountains, of all the edges by which life has wrought me she was
the keenest. Nevertheless she was not all my life, nor the form of all
my life. For a time after her death I could endure nothing of my home, I
could not bear the presence of your mother or you, I hated the
possibility of consolation, I went away into Italy, and it was only by
an enormous effort that I could resume my interest in that scheme of
work to which my life is given. But it is manifest I still live, I live
and work and feel and share beauty....
It seems to me more and more as I live longer, that most poetry and most
literature and particularly the literature of the past is discordant
with the vastness and variety, the reserves and resources and
recuperations of life as we live it to-day. It is the expression of life
under cruder and more rigid conditions than ours, lived by people who
loved and hated more naïvely, aged sooner and died younger than we do.
Solitary persons and single events dominated them as they do not
dominate us. We range wider, last longer, and escape more and more from
intensity towards understanding. And already this astounding blow begins
to take its place among other events, as a thing strange and terrible
indeed, but related to all the strangeness and mystery of life, part of
the universal mysteries of despair and futility and death that have
troubled my consciousness since childhood. For a time the death of Mary
obscured her life for me, but now her living presence is more in my mind
again. I begin to see that it is the reality of her existence and not
the accidents of her end that matter most. It signifies less that she
should have flung out of life when it seemed that her living could only
have meant disaster to herself and to all she loved, than that all her
life should have been hampered and restricted. Through all her life this
brave and fine and beautiful being was for the most part of her
possibilities, wasted in a splendid setting, magnificently wasted if you
will, but wasted.
§ 2
It was that idea of waste that dominated my mind in a strange interview
I had with Justin. For it became necessary for me to see Justin in order
that we should stamp out the whispers against her that followed her
death. He had made it seem an accidental death due to an overdose of the
narcotic she employed, but he had not been able to obliterate altogether
the beginnings of his divorce proceedings. There had been talk on the
part of clerks and possible witnesses. But of all that I need not tell
you here; what matters is that Justin and I could meet without hatred or
violence. I met a Justin grey-haired and it seemed to me physically
shrunken, more than ever slow-speaking, with his habit of attentive
silences more marked and that dark scar spread beyond his brows.
We had come to our parting, we had done our business with an
affectation of emotional aloofness, and then suddenly he gripped me by
the arm. "Stratton," he said, "we two---- We killed her. We tore her to
pieces between us...."