UR second child, the child of her greatest pain, the child bound up with the sensuous Italian hills, was seriously ill at this period. Almost every moment since that time he has been struggling between the dissolution of his being and its regeneration. The full beauty of Her would never have been fully revealed had it not been for the full pain of this sensitive child! He with his precarious and tremulous marvelousness was a product of her unconscious richness. I have now fully known the hopeless superficiality of the lover who looks to joy as the distinctive fruit of his relation; and of him who thinks himself nearer his childless mistress than to the mother of his children. Every new link of the beloved with the wider life gives her greater beauty and meaning, and the perception of her interrelation with all of Nature lends to her original appeal a deep structural power that becomes identified with the total love of life.
Things grew constantly more complex for us. Practical difficulties and trying illness, my growing relations with the rebels whose philosophy became a disturbing factor in our union, and its consequent effect on her, these weavings and developments seemed to carry us to a point, an infinity of moral distance from the simple sensuous honeymoon!—giving, however, to that simple sensuousness a new exasperation and intensity. Especially was this true with her. Her temperamental coolness at times quite vanished in the midst of her deep woe and her growing excitement of life. The possibility of an unknown lover and the tragedy of childhood woke her now to an occasional amorous expression in which she gave herself with the last, sad, wonderful giving!
And thus I reaped the painful joy as well as the pleasurable pain of the new stirrings of her nature toward others! And as those stirrings brought more strenuous disturbance between us, so strenuous that they might have burst asunder the relation, the new additions, the children, the practical difficulties, the growing, deepening relations and experiences brought in a counteracting intimacy which prevented the break between us.
If our relation had remained simple it might not have endured. It could not have endured had it not developed, changed, and taken into it the richness of the outside world. It grew to be so manifold, so connected with all else, that the disturbances of egotistic strife were gathered up, controlled and harmonized by the total structure of our existences—as a sound which may be a harsh discord in a simple harmony is a beautiful part of a more complex symphony.
At the most intense point of my absorption in the rebellious victims of the industrial despotism of our day and in their resulting philosophy of life, she and the two children were away for several months, leaving me excitedly living with my new friends. It was the first time we had been separated for more than a day or two, and in my feeling we were not separated then, for I poured out to her in letters the emotional meaning of my life among the social rebels. These letters were full of an exalted excitement, of a vivid hope for an extended fruitful liberty revivifying and regenerating society, and of a direct appeal and challenge to her, demanding a continuance of the Great Adventure, and exhorting her to live freely and to love me all the more!
With me this time of separation was one of mental excitement and imaginative adventure, adventure with ideas, and with men and women. There was no deep relation, physical or otherwise, with any woman, but I touched and experimented and wondered and glimpsed the human and social vistas that were opened to me. And I passed on my impulsive suggestions to her!
And then, just before I went to her and the children again, a letter came telling of how she had met a man who moved her in a strong, primitive way. He had a root-like, sensual charm for her, she wrote; there was a something in him which needed of her and made her need of him; he was lonely and unsocial and graceless, remote and bad, excitingly, refreshingly bad, and me she accused of being good and that was rather stale and dull, and touched with life’s too-refined food and not with the stimulating salt of the earth. In him was the stimulating salt of the earth!
Again, more strongly than ever, there came in me the deep reverberations of a nameless jealousy! How weak were my ideas when my fundamental feelings were aroused! Nameless it was, for we have as yet no name for a jealousy which doubts and despises itself, a jealousy mixed with elation and approval of its cause! In the grip of the pang I tried to justify myself. Oh, why need she reject me at every new out-going? Why compare me unfavorably? Again came to me the old deep wound; she had never seen me! never had liked my real self. Again the intolerable pain of seeing that she had never really given herself to me!
She met me at the railroad station. As she came quietly, calmly and cordially towards me, how wonderful, how strong and self-sufficient she seemed! A new life, which perhaps came from the sense of having a new lover, breathed through her, and lent an enhanced vitality; and to have the new without eliminating the old, this was a fructifying hope in her, a hope I should have welcomed, for it was of the bone of my theory and of my new ideal for civilization. I had the grace at any rate to see her as wonderful. A fresh intensity of liking was added to my love, and for weeks I devoted myself to her with a devouring passion that knew no bounds.
It was a passion full of disturbance and moral agony. Her cool ability to compare him with me, the new with the old, as if we stood on an equality in her feeling, this drove me almost insane!
By nature she was beautifully, cruelly frank; and I with an idealistic instinct for self-torture encouraged and fostered this tendency natural to her. It was an unconscious cruelty, due to that seclusion of her spirit which shut her from a quick, alert knowledge of the state of feeling in the other person. I demanded from her on this occasion an entire, detailed account of her relation with the other man, and she, to my indescribable pain, responded with a lucid exactness which had its fascination, too. Indeed, she never was more desirable to me than when she seemed, through some excluding instinct for another, infinitely remote. I might hate her, but she appeared then as a resplendent being.
I saw from what she coolly told me that she was prepared to give him whatever he needed or asked. Just because of her aloofness she was capable of a rich though cool sympathy which saw him as beautiful partly because he needed—a strong being who needed—who seemed to need her. I felt the beauty of her attitude. To be ready always to meet a need is beautiful. Theoretically and even emotionally I subscribed, but why, oh, why, had she through all these long years never met my completer need with an absoluteness which would have calmed and controlled and rendered for me quite harmless her relations with others?
So I felt the beauty and the limitation at once—the beauty of her feeling for him, and the terrible emotional forgetfulness of me! How the temperamental memory dropped out or had never been for the intenser values of our life together! Before my fierce, uncontrolled reproaches she scornfully called attention to my inconsistency—that made me think and desire in one direction and passionately act in the opposite. She cast up to me my physical relations with women and expressed with cool completeness her temporary contempt for me. He seemed so noble in comparison, for the lover in a much more simple relation, always has the advantage in apparent nobility, over the husband.
And I retorted with what I think was not entire hypocrisy. Despairingly and passionately I insisted that she had as yet shown herself incapable of giving to others without taking from the relation with me that my soul demanded. Never, I repeated, had I been able to forget, even for a moment, even in the arms of another woman, my bond with her; even when I desired to forget it, this spiritual love, stronger than death, was unshaken; its strength was even more conscious to me at such times. I was then more aware of it, of its indestructibility, than ever.
But with her it was different, I insisted. Had she ever loved me in that strange, temperamental way, had she ever had that passionate liking for my real self, independent of my qualities, she would have been incapable of spiritual infidelity; no matter what her friendly actions had been, no matter how technically and conventionally unfaithful she had been, in moments of inevitable sexual movements.
Over and over again I vehemently asserted the difference between the conventions of her sex and of mine, conventions that I hated and wished undone and obliterated from society; but which nevertheless existed and which were a painful element in every human relation. I pointed out how difficult it is for a woman to give herself without the deeper infidelity, for she is told by society that unless she loves when she gives herself, she is evil and unworthy, abandoned; and that that terrible and ugly convention is a corrosive reality even to strong-minded, humorous and emancipated women. I had hoped she, the woman I loved, could rise above this crassly physical measure of virtue, but whenever it came to the test I had seen that when she began to be intimate, or to think of intimacy with another man, she tended to forget her spiritual bond with me. Was it because of this damnable social convention, or because she had never felt that bond? Between these alternatives I passionately vacillated, self-torturing, helpless, morally unattractive, undignified, the ugly incarnation of an extreme unsatisfied need!
One day she asked me, as she had asked me before, not to come home that evening until late. She wanted to spend it alone with him. She wanted a relation in which I could be no part, which could not be if I were there, something excluding me! Dumb rage took possession of me, but at the same time I longed to take the strong and independent attitude, the attitude that might win myself for myself, that might win the greater Her for me—the Her for me that I had never had!
So I went away and dined and spent the evening in a gathering of men and women who lightly talked of love and freedom and society. As I looked on these faces and heard not what they said, I wondered if they felt as I felt, if their lives were as mine, and I knew instinctively that they were; I knew that all lovers understand and that this book is a universal book, that all human beings who feel at all must feel as I feel. In my mind and senses, in my conscious self and in the clearness of my definite thoughts, I was with her and him—not with these my talking brothers and sisters whose faces only I saw, for their faces, not their words, mirrored my soul. Did her being remember me? Doubt of her and doubt of myself came with alternating violence and when I went home I was completely exhausted.
I found her proud and silent, instinct with that torturing and amazing recessional remoteness which was of her inner being, of the inner being of all things. She looked at me with quiet, searching questionings, as if she were looking deep into my nature and wondering if there were any consistency there, anything that remained and endured, anything that was necessary, after all that was conventional and accidental and vain and merely respectable had passed. She was deeply serious and it was with a certain quiet anxiety that she met me.
But her quiet passed into silent reproach as I nervously demanded talk from her. She withdrew into that infinity of distance that I knew and hated, and refused to answer my violent demand to tell me all that had happened between her and him. The strong part for me to have taken was dignified trust, an obvious confidence that the best existed between us and was inalienable. But I did not have that trust. That confidence was lacking in me and I was not strong and clever enough to assume it.
So she with clear disappointment was obstinately silent, and this in spite of my growing excitement and violence. And suddenly something happened which had never happened before and never since, although in after years even more acute crises arose; without premeditation I took her by the throat! I did not know I was doing it until I caught myself in the act. Never had the possibility of using physical violence occurred to me. In my consciousness it was incredible—but here it happened without consciousness! The underlying brute in me terrified me, even in the act itself! At that moment I understood murder, and knew that assassination might become inevitable for any one at any moment.
Terror at myself was followed by surprise at the way she took it. She made no resistance, but in a deep quiet whisper she breathed my name. Her eyes grew big and a profound wonder was in that silent sound that seemed to come from all of her. I think the perception that I was capable of absolute unreason appealed in some primitive way to her imagination. Me she had always regarded as a finally civilized creature, analytical, seeking reason and sophistication. The passion which was me she had perhaps never so clearly felt. At any rate I sensed with a kind of shameful pride that she was gazing at me as at an interesting stranger. Not the slightest touch of fear was in her look, but a wonderful quiet excitement dominated her.
Why was it that, in after years, when the waves of passion came on me perhaps even more strongly, I never again resorted to physical violence? It may be the shock to myself when I felt what I was capable of; perhaps it was the contempt that must be ours when we use the uttermost weapon without reserve. To lose all possible control is the final degradation of the soul. And she, too, never again used her final weapon—impenetrable silence to the same terrible degree. Her silence was with her as unreasonable, as much a part of primitive instinct, as was my violence. And she had on that occasion indulged her form of unreasonable violence to the limit. And my violence had been born of hers. I think at that moment a new fear of ourselves was born in each, and that although we did not then know it we were nearer together than ever before.
At that moment we felt the degree of savageness which each could show the other; and the first symbolic response was a wild, fierce embrace, mordant, painful, without limit, sad with passion, born of the new element of recognized mutual strangeness that had been excitingly revealed to us. And in the languid, unnervous reconciliation that followed, the wonderful complete peace, she quietly and fully told me what I had so fiercely needed to know; and I remember how ashamed I was of my relief when I knew that she had been unable to give herself to him, and at the same time of a certain vague disappointment; perhaps because she was still finally untested and doubt of the inalienable bond continued its periodic possession.