"We tore her to pieces," he repeated. "It's so damned silly. One gets
angry--like an animal."
I became grotesquely anxious to assure him that, indeed, she and I had
been, as they say, innocent throughout our last day together. "You were
wrong in all that," I said. "She kept her faith with you. We never
planned to meet and when we met----. If we had been brother and
sister----. Indeed there was nothing."
"I suppose," he said, "I ought to be glad of that. But now it doesn't
seem to matter very much. We killed her.... What does that matter to me
now?"
§ 3
And it is upon this effect of sweet and beautiful possibilities, caught
in the net of animal jealousies and thoughtless motives and ancient
rigid institutions, that I would end this writing. In Mary, it seems to
me, I found both womanhood and fellowship, I found what many have dreamt
of, love and friendship freely given, and I could do nothing but clutch
at her to make her my possession. I would not permit her to live except
as a part of my life. I see her now and understand her better than when
she was alive, I recall things that she said and wrote and it is clear
to me, clearer perhaps than it ever was to her, that she, with her
resentment at being in any sense property, her self-reliant thought, her
independence of standard, was the very prototype of that sister-lover
who must replace the seductive and abject womanhood, owned, mastered and
deceiving, who waste the world to-day. And she was owned, she was
mastered, she was forced into concealment. What alternative was there
for her? What alternative is there for any woman? She might perhaps have
kept her freedom by some ill-paid work and at the price of every other
impulse in her swift and eager nature. She might have become one of
those poor neuters, an independent woman.... Life was made impossible
for her and she was forced to die, according to the fate of all untimely
things. She was destroyed, not merely by the unconsidered, undisciplined
passions of her husband and her lover, but by the vast tradition that
sustains and enforces the subjugation of her sex. What I had from her,
and what she was, is but a mere intimation of all that she and I might
have made of each other and the world.
And perhaps in this story I have said enough for you to understand why
Mary has identified herself with something world-wide, has added to
herself a symbolical value, and why it is I find in the whole crowded
spectacle of mankind, a quality that is also hers, a sense of fine
things entangled and stifled and unable to free themselves from the
ancient limiting jealousies which law and custom embody. For I know that
a growing multitude of men and women outwear the ancient ways. The
blood-stained organized jealousies of religious intolerance, the
delusions of nationality and cult and race, that black hatred which
simple people and young people and common people cherish against all
that is not in the likeness of themselves, cease to be the undisputed
ruling forces of our collective life. We want to emancipate our lives
from this slavery and these stupidities, from dull hatreds and
suspicion. The ripening mind of our race tires of these boorish and
brutish and childish things. A spirit that is like hers, arises and
increases in human affairs, a spirit that demands freedom and gracious
living as our inheritance too long deferred, and I who loved her so
blindly and narrowly now love her spirit with a dawning understanding.
I will not be content with that compromise of jealousies which is the
established life of humanity to-day. I give myself, and if I can I will
give you, to the destruction of jealousy and of the forms and shelters
and instruments of jealousy, both in my own self and in the thought and
laws and usage of the world.