HEN there came three years abroad. Economic necessity was removed to a point where we felt we could devote ourselves for a time to contemplative work—I to those psychological studies of temperament which were so fascinating to me, she to the forming of her experience into stories of human life. Dwelling as we both did in our writing on intimate nervous relations undoubtedly helped to make us more fully conscious of our own relation: and what added still farther to this awareness of our bond was my almost constant presence in the family. This had and has always been so with me, with some brief interruptions. Men who go regularly to their office and are only with their wives and children in the evenings and on holidays do not fully taste the domestic reality nor is made the full test of the personal relation. My being with her and the children was irregular but frequent and extended. All day and all night for weeks and weeks and months and months, then in the house all day and away most of the night; writing, she and I at the same time, I taking my share in care of the children, in teaching them, and in the thousand details of the domestic situation. It was a close partnership, full of variation from the usual, interesting, irritating, and replete with meaning and color.
It was soon after the crisis that we sailed; we were both very tired emotionally, but I think she felt as I did the charm of going off into the unknown together. We had left nothing behind us, not even furniture, and we were taking with us all we possessed, contained in three trunks, with no idea of the future except the decision not to live in hotels and pensions, but to keep house wherever we went. This we always did, no matter how short our stay in a place; we insisted on tasting the life as lived around us, and my domestic partnership with her helped us to get settled as well as unsettled very quickly. That we could bear nothing except keeping house had an inevitable meaning, no matter how exasperating those cares were at times to both of us. We were forced to live together in the external conditions of existence, as in the spiritual bond: it was strong, very strong, whatever it was.
On the steamer we were, I remember, unusually quiet. But I felt in her a new freer interest in other things. She, apparently, thought very little of the lover she had left, but because of him she saw the casual stranger in a warmer, more human light. Her feeling of companionship with me seemed stronger because of the recent experience; the element of additional strangeness added to the color of our common life, although I often relapsed into unreasoning pathos and pain. We were on the whole, however, calmly waiting for the future. We were on a broader base than ever, and, resting on our temperamental oars, there was something that whispered to us of exciting, adventurous things to come, for which we were instinctively saving our strength. I saw but not always with pain the fuller appreciation in her glance at other men as they swung freely and picturesquely along the deck. And on my part was unconsciously forming itself the resolution to attain emotional freedom from her by deeper intimacy with other women. Whenever I felt the full pain of my dependency on her, as I did whenever I fully realized her indestructible aloofness from me, I had an access of hope of attaining aloofness for myself through relations with other women—a hope, however, that has never been realized.
Never, however, even for a moment, have I ever felt any diminution of love for her. Indeed, as time went on and our relations grew more complex, more serious, and at times more painful, that love has seemed more profound, more all-embracing, and to be in a way a symbol of my love for beauty, for Nature, for Life itself.
And now, again in Italy, came another period of wonderful pleasure in her. In the beautiful intensity of an Italian spring and summer we realized ourselves to the joyous full, and for a time with no element of interwoven pain. The pleasures of the senses and of the mind, with civilized companions gracefully and indolently living out their unstrenuous lives, dining with them out-of-doors in the long wonderful evenings, and combining the serious languor of passionate Italy with the nervous charm of an epigrammatic Gallic civilization—these pleasures were of a broader, and more intellectualized but not less sensuous honeymoon, rendered all the more poignant by the recent crisis, hinting always of the possibility of volcanic happenings.
Now again began to stir within her the strange unconscious life, and she was pregnant for the third time. At the period of conception we were reveling in a beautiful, full translation into French of the Arabian Nights. Devoted to the sensuous unmoral charm of these gorgeous, colorful tales we lived a life quite out of harmony with Puritanical ideas. The sentimental and the narrowly ethical were far away and this child was started and was born in an atmosphere of mature sensuousness, in a complete acceptance of what is called the Pagan point of view. The tremulous, early lyricism of young love had given place to a rich decided determination to take in full measure the goods the Gods provide!
She was born—this sensitive little girl—on the Arno, on the banks of the stream that runs through Fiorenze, the Flowering City of Tuscany! And her mother this time felt the exhilaration of child-birth, the athletic triumph in the midst of pain, the accomplishment of the impossible with its resultant triumph. And soon afterwards came that full physical beauty, that springing of the blood and of the body, that intense enhancement of color and swelling of contour which gave her the look of a gorgeous Magdalene; more delicate in quality than Rubens or Titian, but suggesting both, richer and more voluptuous than the early Florentine painters, yet having the recessional purity of the Giottesque or Siennese madonna! No virgin could equal her full beauty. No lover could so richly love a maiden were it not for the unconscious purpose of this ultimate fruition!
My feeling for her at that time did not have, perhaps, as much of what is called sentiment as it had before, and was destined to have again; and I imagine it was the same with her. I liked her with an intense and destructive liking because she was life itself, and she had an impersonal relish in existence which included me, the children, the hills, the works of art, the Italian cooking and the witticisms of our æsthetic and self-indulgent friends! Never before had she enjoyed life, never had she trusted and believed in it, so much, never had she been so willing to embrace it!
Yes, she was willing to embrace it! Or, rather, have life embrace her. I saw that in her every attitude. Her feeling about literature and art, about Nature; the love of beauty, always strong and pure in her, was greatly intensified. And there was a subtle sensuousness in her friendly relations with the contemplative men on the hills; a cool freedom from any recognized bond. In her imagination she was as free as air: I could see this in everything; in a glance, in a sensuous movement towards a sunset, the kind of love she showed for a child, as well as her quiet appreciation of the personalities about her. That innate distrust of life which had always been hers, was in large measure displaced by the fully accepted sensuousness of her experience; art, children, the willingness to have lovers, the sense of freedom. The sense of freedom! How vitalizing, how refreshing, how indispensable to the living of every full life!
And this was in part the result of the sex crises we had had together and these were in part due to my interest in the philosophy of the proletariat! What a strange swing it is from the impersonal to the personal and the other way round! How I had fiercely desired this and how I feared it!
And that I feared it with reason was shown by the development of her feeling for me. Her love for me seemed to increase in impersonal warmth; she loved me more as she loved other things more, as she loved life more, and other people more; but at the same time there was even less dependency on me, a greater impersonality in her feeling for me! Partly through other men and partly through my ideas she had achieved an even more complete independence of me! This was beautiful: this is beautiful to me now, and the very beauty of it stimulated my emulation. I wanted to be as she was: I want to be as she is!
Let me not be hypocritical enough to say that that was the only reason which now began to lead to more intimate relations between me and other women than ever before. But it was one of the reasons. I was ever struggling to be free of her in order more fully to enjoy her without that intolerable pain. And certainly my deep and luxurious intimacy with her had enabled me to understand other women better and to approach them with greater sympathy—just as her experience with me had rendered her a more attractive object to other men, more subtly sensitive and understanding, more sensuous, with more of that amorous pity which a finely balanced woman feels so thoroughly that she hardly recognizes its specific character and is not inclined to think herself in love.
And a developed sensuousness in all things leading to a general Paganism gives to friendship between a man and a woman an almost inevitable occasional sexuality. It is the condition of a fuller taste of personality. So at any rate I have always felt it to be, and so as I enjoyed her more and more fully, more and more did my friendship with other women tend towards the possibility, but not the realization, of the more intimate embrace! Never have I been able, as I have written, to achieve emotional independence of her, but my social intimacy with other women grew more and more intense and my relations with them were limited not by my conscious will, but by that mysterious bond which held my spirit and made it impossible for me to give my real self to another. It affected even my physical make-up which in amorous play will not respond to the conscious will but only to the unconscious instinct. And she held that unconscious part of me on which even the instinctive movements of my flesh were dependent—that part of me she held in bond! How mysterious is that inevitable monogamy, and how it shows that the real thing in us all is something spiritual! And how it points to the impertinence of law and conventional morality which insists on a condition already inevitable if of the spirit—and if it is not of the spirit it is nothing.
On the top of one of the most beautiful hills of Italy we lived and played, mentally and temperamentally. A few hours of writing in the morning when we tried with sincerity to express our innermost feelings about existence, I in psychological documents and she in fiction, and then the long, late, cool summer afternoons when the sun changed from the white scorching blaze of noon to the luminous ball throwing long, cool shadows made of color and form over the earth, followed by the fresh, warm night broken pleasantly in the early dawn by the noisy nightingale or the shrill, clear clarion of the cock; removed from the urgent call of economic need, with much unnecessary energy, and in such an environment, why not play? How prevent, or why, the inevitable movements of the human temperament, leading to the song and dance of sex? It was this song and dance that sounded and vibrated rhythmically all about, among these sensuous, disillusioned, self-indulgent ones, and among the spontaneous peasantry on the olive-laden slopes.
I think it was her æsthetic sense, that inevitable response in her to form, that determined for her the character of her social pleasures. There were two men with whom she played in exquisite, amusing ways that had its own subtle intensity, too. There was a passionate, blue flame of a man who loved beauty as Shelley’s night loved the morrow, the devotion to something afar from the sphere of our sorrow. She caught and gracefully responded to the aerial nature of his feeling, humorously conscious of his fear of the full emotional or physical caress. And the other was a relaxed sensualist of delicate and civilized character whose French epigrams were the only enticing things about him. Neither of these gentlemen was in deep need of anything except the flitting pleasures of evanescent thought and poetical expression, and she played with them with a smiling and rather slighting sympathy. But the charm was at times great enough to hold her in amusing converse below while the nursing baby above howled in impotent rage because of food delayed. Her need for the amusement of the mind was strong and constant, but I sometimes had sympathy for the child.
And I went off through the wonderful nights to the cafés in Florence to talk to the artists and the women, to taste the Chianti and the Mazarin, and to indulge in that satisfying mixture of work and play—where work is play and play is work, that would be the solution of the labor problem, and is the highest form of an enjoyment that has no sad reaction. But this passion which has followed me always throughout life, to work on my pleasures and to be pleased in my work, periodically ends in an unpremeditated, intenser situation which destroys both work and play.
And in this lovely place I met a lady with whom I played and who played with me. A certain note of frivolity, of the sad Watteau type, however, insists on conveying itself to these pages dealing with this period abroad. The profounder thing in passion is the product of a keen and simple provincialism; where the spiritual lines are long and intense and monotonous. In an old, civilized place, however, full of detailed beauty, passion is broken up into picturesque and amusing half emotions and incipient, laughing ideas which relieve the emotional strain. So I find in writing of our European experience among the completer products of human personality and art that there is an inevitable note of frivolity, even though it has a touch of the sad and the pathetic; it lacks passion and intensity.
We played together, this lady and I, but we were not on an equality, for I was living with my wife—how strange and inadequate it seems to refer to her as my wife!—and to this absorbing relation were added my work and the children, and she, the lady with whom I played, was living alone. In every way, except in the deeper need of the soul, I was satisfied, and she was not in any way, and that formed an unfair situation which always leads to pain and regret. Following the conventional episode of sex which of course ensued, there came an inevitable, emotional demand from her which I could not satisfy, try as I might; for that called on instinctive depths which I could not control and I had the humiliation of disappointing her, of leaving her unsatisfied and resentful, and with reason. To arouse and not satisfy a need is the deepest sin of all, and that any one who has experienced knows and bitterly regrets. What I condemn even more strongly in myself is that more than once, with others, I sinned in like manner, not having learned my lesson, or, having learned it, not having enough self-control and genuine kindness to take advantage of it.
I have no intention of going through the list of my experiences with other women, of those warm friendships and impossible hopes of emotional freedom and of periodic belief that never in her could I find the reciprocal passion which my soul needed; with therefore serious movements towards others. I touch and shall touch only upon such aspects of these experiences as help to explain my love life, such experiences as seem to me typical of the love life of all of us. And I bring up especially the memory of the lady with whom I played at that time, and with whom pain was the result, because of the surprising effect that this affair had on Her, on the woman with whom I had been playing for nine years, the complex, perturbed and difficult game of life.
I had never felt it necessary to hide anything from her; I wanted my relations to her to be of that inner truth which was independent of all external manifestations and of all conventions, and her apparent coolness towards me and the quality of impersonality in her feeling gave me a greater fancied freedom both of act and of openness with her. But when she found that I had had this affair, she staggered slightly, as from a physical blow. I imagine that a part of my instinct in telling her was that desire to disturb her, to make her feel, which is a constant part of my relation to her. I have told how I threw cones at her; but this one was of unexpected seriousness. I felt that something had happened that had never happened before, something that was destined to have portentous consequences; and it created in me a keen sense of my brutality and at the same time a kind of fear, something akin to panic, unfamiliar and disturbing. Never again, I felt, could I be so open with her; for the first time I saw that at some points she, like me, must be spared. Not that my perception had any great influence at that time on my actions, but it did have upon my attitude.
And her gayety was gone. The sensuous lightness and aloof freedom of her life abroad had flown. We were perhaps as close as ever, but it was a sad closeness, with little of the lighter play in it. It was a time of depression with her, and also a time of unconscious preparation for the most serious episode in her life and in mine—an episode that seemed to threaten at one time to put a final term to our relation. She was not aware, I think, of her deep readiness to give to another what I periodically felt she had never given to me; but it was deep indeed in her, this unconscious, perhaps partly conscious readiness to lose her aloofness, to give herself completely away, and the inevitable followed, for that towards which one’s whole nature strains, is, in some measure, bound to come.