GAIN I am aware of the selected character of all writing. No literary attempt, no matter how successful, can do other than trace a thread which runs in and out of a vast complex of experience remaining unrecorded. My sincerity can do no more than catch a small though important aspect of the relations between a man and a woman, and in order to make vivid that aspect all else must fade into a gray obscurity or into a nothingness which is far from corresponding to the reality. That is why the most sincere writing automatically takes on the quality of fiction.
With every deepening addition to our relation there has come to me an ever intenser appreciation of her spiritual and physical beauty. This is true even at the moment of great pain, of disappointment and of anger, showing, perhaps, that my bond to her is æsthetic first and last, a bond of pleasure complete though often unendurable to the point of anguish; yet there was always in it a life-giving something. She certainly came to me that existence might be more abundant. In an indescribable, warm way she has always been for me the Woman, with all the complex marvelousness that that means to the Man.
And in the year that followed, beginning with the shock to her from the projectile of my amorous play, her increasingly alienating depth, her steady recession from me, came to me not as something wrong or ugly. There was a something wonderful in it on which I cannot lay my analyzing touch.
And he, the man, who came at what is called the psychological moment, he, too, now appears to me as even then he seemed, a being of exceptional beauty. He was an old friend of mine from college days, always bitter with nervous unbalance and impatient of the world’s futilities, not strong enough to help to set them right, but keen to all hypocrisy and false sentiment, full of ambition to achieve which left him no peace and which prevented any quiet accomplishment. I had loved him for his sensibility and his one-time nervous need of me, and now after long years of separation he came to us, abroad, nervously needing rest, broken down from inner strain and outer fruitless work.
And he loved Her, my Her, of course! And I loved him all the more! Perhaps he liked her—that may be a fitter word to call it; but his liking was that intense recognition of her quality which at the highest point is greater than love; he liked her much as I liked her. She pleased our taste so utterly! And I loved to have him so perfectly appreciate her. She is deeper than either of us, he would say, and I knew full well what he meant: I knew he saw how through her quiet breathing personality all of the elements passed, held by her in solution! I saw he felt her quiet unconscious power and I felt nearer to him and no further from her on that account.
But then there came the old deep pain when I felt again the excluding movement of their souls. I felt near to them, but their growing affair steadily alienated them from me! He withdrew from me and I was hurt, and she in equal measure went farther and farther into that unknown land in which I had no home, and I was hurt more deeply still. As they came together, each departed from me, and this caused again in me that mysterious unthinking pang which by the shallow-minded is called jealousy; but not to feel that pang when the best that one knows is threatened is to lack life’s impulse. Oh, how may we be broad-minded, tolerant and civilized, and yet keep our feet firmly on the basic reality of our natures?
They came together as if they were spiritually brother and sister; there is much loose talk about “affinities”; it is a vague word which has become a banality, but between these two there was a spontaneous bond which has never been between her and me. They were drawn together by a nameless similarity; she and I were together, I think, mainly because of my insistent love, perhaps because of a mutual strangeness. I can never understand her and she can never understand me. They understood one another at once; and of course I was therefore on the outside, an interested spectator of a relation I did not understand, but longed for.
When we dwell intensely on any human relation we touch upon a fundamental mystery; but there is nothing more real than the mystery of being in love. And although in after years she did not admit it, and I think does not now admit it to herself even, yet I believe that for the only time in her life she felt the strange, temperamental identity of her soul with another. It is no mere accident that that man, long years before I knew her, and all through our friendship, attracted me with peculiar force, just as she attracted me; how ironical and yet how natural that the man for whom I felt the most spontaneous liking should be the one for whom she felt the nameless something she never felt for me!
Well, we all met, as I have written, abroad, and her depression gave way at once to a kind of strong excitement—the excitement of finding an affinity! And I in the first stages of their affair played the part of an encourager, of an abettor and promoter of their friendship. Then, as always, I longed for her the fullest life, rejoiced in all that heightened her feeling and caused a warmer glow in her physical and moral nature; in anything that took her from her cooler depths. And my ideas of freedom strengthened this attitude of mine, and both together made it easy, at first, for them to come as close together as their souls desired. I still hoped that she might have the bond with me that was the ideal of my life as it touched the personal relation, and at the same time follow all the inclinations of her temperament which were not easily aroused nor too many. Is it an impossible hope, the sign of a deep-seated idealistic folly? I confess, that as time passed and deep emotional fatigue has come to me in ever fuller measure, that my hope has waned, not indeed for its realization for others in the remoter future, but for me, here, upon this stretch of time, in this our present social state which so stubbornly declines to accept the light of the higher reason.
We played for a time abroad; but it was not a light and cheerful play. Somber and intense chords were throbbing beneath our frivolous talk together in the cafés of Paris, and in and out of our wine suppers there was simmering a more destructive flame than that of the spirit of the grape. We tried to pass it off in external gayety and sensuous pleasure, but sad intensity lived in all of us. In me the deeper jealousy was threatening to overcome my assumed and superficial civilization. And in him I felt the strong and nervous impulse to make a radical break, to insist on a new deal which would nullify the past and open up for him and her—my Her!—a remote and faery life apart from all the world! And in her there began a self-destructive schism, an unexpressed struggle which meant for her something far more strenuous than any other situation of her life.
He demanded silently, and more and more in words; it was a fiercely expressed demand, and as his demand grew, mine became definitely aroused, and she was drawn and quartered between the two. This is roughly put, but the expression is not as roughly cruel as the reality. Her nature was made for breathing harmony, for abiding, breathing peace, and here in a deep soul, full of unconventional, sincere feeling, was a conflict which threatened, and later almost took, her life.
We and he separated for a period; he stayed in Europe, and, our time abroad being up, we returned to America, and to a Middle Western town in the midst of those monotonous, passionate plains which so intensely affect the sensitive temperament. Here there was nothing of the civilized charm of the old countries, a charm which relieves the devouring central passions, and renders them relatively harmless.
From the beginning, she hated her environment. She bitterly missed the picturesque detail of Europe, and the long, melancholy lines of the Middle Western landscape fanned her smoldering resentment against me and tortured her with the intense new need which he had aroused, and which his eager, passionate letters sustained and stimulated. It was a baleful music in her soul, and the few people she consented to know in this, her new home, were caught up in the fierce simplicity of the plains and harmonized with and strengthened her mood.
It was a mood of concentrated pain. I felt the inner struggle that was testing her harmonizing resources to the uttermost, and yet I could not relieve her. I could not fail to let her feel my deepening need exasperated by the seriousness of her feeling for him. Scene after scene made vivid to her the reality of my egotistic passion and his letters were one intense, white flame. When he came again to be with us she could not fail to feel increasingly the sharpness of these two conflicting needs. He then had come to know that she to him was all, and with a beautiful recklessness which charmed and terrified my soul he desired with no retreating doubt to take her completely into his life. It had ceased to be an affair with him and had become the serious business of his existence.
Now indeed was she disturbed, this quiet and brooding woman! The stronger elements of feeling which I had ever hoped for her and to attain which I had thrown so many cones were now indeed a menace to her very being. She was at last disturbed so deeply that the wreck of all was imminent. When I saw in her lingering look at him the same wondering doubt of what her destiny was to be, sharp memory brought to me that look of hers when I returned long years before and felt her wondering whether after all she was destined to live with me!—that look which was the beautiful, symbolic forerunner of the honeymoon now and forever a sensuous, lyrical joy to me! And here again her nature was accepting, she was unconsciously prepared to see with sympathy this other man, prepared to give herself again, this time with the greater, fuller intensity of the intervening years of experience!
But this time to give herself meant a destructive inner conflict. As he well said, hers was a nature of sincere depth, incapable of frivolity. She could not leave me spiritually nor could she leave the children; she could not break the interwoven threads of those twelve years of pain and joy together. She could not refuse my demand, nor could she refuse his demand; she was not capable of the easy relation with him that was not inharmonious with my feeling. For that she cared too much for him. Had she taken him lightly, involving the sexual relation, I could by that time have been reconciled, seen it as not meaning the destruction of the bond I wanted. But this she could not do. She knew as I did that her feeling for him was inconsistent with that she had for me. She was aware of excluding me when with him! It was this awareness that shook her to the depths. She did not want it so! It went against her unconscious will. That she could not fill the deeper need of both of us—and neither of us would accept the lesser thing, even if she could give it—this filled her with a disappointment so keen that it racked her to the uttermost. He wanted all and so did I, and this she knew could never be; and yet she longed for both! She wanted the accepted and redolent past, the old bond, but her temperament eagerly desired the new, the beckoning lover!