T was him she gave up and then she broke. Ever since the far distant day in Europe when they met, the struggle in her soul had stirred and steadily grown until her nervous system could bear no more. She has often said that in part that terrible situation was due to her physical state, but I think it was the other way round, that her physical state was a result of the unsolvable situation.
At any rate we were all aware that she was very ill. Her calm was gone, and she was utterly disturbed to the very marrow. At last she was what I had so often desired and to attain which I had thrown so many cones—taken completely away from the reserved depths which so often had irritated me. Now indeed she talked, but her talk to me was torture. The self-restraint was gone, which had always been hers, and with an almost terrified fascination I listened to her; listened to her for many weeks while I helped to nurse her back to life and calmness.
We went on a trip together through the sad monotonous prairie country, the first time we had been alone for many years, without the children, with no one else. And she talked to me as if to her own soul. Never can I forget the terrible, the utter frankness of it. I had longed so for expression from her—longed all our life together, but when it came, under those circumstances, it was painful indeed. It was so apparent that she was shocked so deeply that she hardly was aware of her frank revelations! She let herself go with an abandonment quite unlike herself, an abandonment so unlike what had become through all those years the strongest demand in me!
I suppose that it was the first time that she talked with no reserve; and she said to me things which she has now forgotten and could never say again. But to me they live and have taught me much about myself, about her and about the relation which meant so much of life to me. In the midst of my utter disappointment I was yet at school. I knew she was very ill, that she was all unraveled and had for the time given up what held her life together. I knew it was critical. I feared the result. What she said gave me constant anguish, but yet it was not all pain. I, the incorrigible, was still at school, still a Pilgrim seeking spiritual progress, seeking knowledge! It was all so strange! That impersonal love of life which has been mine in unusual measure persisted, and insisted on making a spiritual acquisition from my deepest woe.
As we drove through the long-lined, slowly passionate country, as she lay in restless talk, ever growing more chaotic on her bed of spiritual pain, some of the things that I must always remember, I have set down. Extraordinary they are not, for I think they breathe deep in every noble woman’s soul, which is a spiritual abode of deep rebellion against man’s conventional moralities and laws.
In and out of her fragmentary and ejaculatory talk were vivid pictures of why he had appealed to her so strongly, and why I had failed. I was to her the law. Even in my criticism of existing laws I was still law-abiding. I was ever seeking a human order. Deep in me the traditional conventions of civilization lived. I was social; I was socialized. I felt the slow, painful family structure through the ages. At the thought of harm to these my soul was ever anxious; I was keen to conscious man’s historic struggle with life and Nature; keen to his protecting artificialities. Family life and children, household cares and anxious economies, fear of the future and prudence, mixed though it were with temperamental generosity, were to her as a prison house. To her I was the symbol of the larger prison, the threatening finger of harsh law, the negator of her primitive imagination and of the impulse beyond good and evil.
But he was different. In him she felt a genuine unmorality, a fresh, refreshing, salad-like unscrupulousness. He was capable of a relation to her which had no law, which was connected with no principle, with nothing beyond itself. The love I bore her she saw as impersonal in large measure: I loved her because she revealed so much to me of beauty; it was really the beauty I loved, not her, something of which she was an instrument, as all other things in life were instruments to me of the Divine Something. She felt I was religious and moral, and he was neither. He took her as she was: he loved her, that particular woman, and asked no metaphysical questions, did not live in soul-torturing and impossible spiritual strainings. His intensity was for her alone, and he was willing to break all else and give her freedom—freedom from morality, from anxiety, from responsibility, from law—from me! It was the eternal advantage of the lover over the husband.
I was too good, she said to me, in constant moving criticism. She meant I was not free to be an exciting self, a pure and life-giving form. I did not make the last appeal to her imagination, for I was bound, she thought, by all things not myself. I was too good! How I longed to be otherwise, and yet how fully I knew I could not be but what I was—not good, but deeply careful, carrying with me all the Past, holding all together, insisting on the Soul! It was this, this Soul that oppressed and hampered her. She needed to fly off into mere cool existences, into the soulless places of the spirit.
And then again I had loved her too much, or at any rate too actively; had not left to her enough to do in our relation, not enough initiative; this was a thought on which she constantly dwelt. Her deepest passion was to construct; she needed to build, to feel that of her own will she was bringing to the relation. Her personal work, her writing, had been the way in which she felt she was herself. There it was all her own doing; if she could have felt that our relation was her construction, not mine, she would have loved me more! She had a need to go out actively to others as I had gone to her! She did not so much want to be wooed as to woo! This was her mood, expressed with passion.
I make no attempt to tell how I suffered at this time. It seems to me my agony went beyond the point of personal suffering and was a quality of external things—that it was a universal pain, deep and full and hopeless. I lost my habitual nervousness and was calm. To see the woman who meant so much to me thus express her deep dissatisfaction and to feel that she was, mainly because of me, almost at death’s door,—well, I cannot say what this was to me. Each man kills the thing he loves indeed! How this woman, like a fly, had been caught, her free flight impeded, by my all-embracing, passionate egotism! I felt a pity for her that was perhaps more unendurable than all else.
Then there came the hospital, for her life and reason were threatened. For many weeks she lay in danger, feverishly, unconsciously contending with herself, and I, admitted for a short hour each day, sat quietly by her side, hoping, waiting, for returning strength and self-control. Indeed, it seems to me that it was I who nursed her back to life, for I would not have her go!
It was I and her strong will, for that she finally wanted to live, in part for me and for the children, there is no doubt. Life returned with flickering, hesitating fear, and in tremulous lines she wrote me a note in which it seemed to me a new love breathed! And then, a little stronger, she wrote a poem, a ballad of intense and simple passion, in which is told how a mermaid, loving her native salty substance and the damp sea-weed and the unmoral, beautiful sea, meets one day upon the shore a human man and loves and marries him and has fine children whom she loves. But the sea beckons, and one day upon the shore she meets a salty merman, her old deep-sea lover, and upon a gust of sensuous desire goes with him into her native region, where alone she is at home. But after unthinking satisfaction in the depths the thought of her acquired civilization, of her husband and her lovely, needing children, comes strong upon her, and she seeks the sorrowing human, who, in despairing passion, tries to drive her hence!
Oh, how wonderful, how life-giving is the power of song, of any swelling art! That she could sing, no matter how tragic-wise, showed returning strength, and a strength that bred more strength! Yes, the tide turned and began to flow, and as it swelled, a new hope was born in her—in me!