The Story of a Lover by Hutchins Hapgood - HTML preview

Chapter XII

HE had gone the limit of her impulse leading her away, as far as the sweetness and beauty of her nature permitted her to go. She had gone down almost to death, and when she emerged, it was like the phœnix from the ashes. A new spirit, one of willful lovingness, breathed in all her being. There was a subtle change in her attitude toward the children. She had always loved them, but now her love was unimpeded. She accepted them at last! The grace of her demeanor toward them, those deep, lingering, questioning looks at them, these were instinct with a beauty which really qualified of heaven!

And I had become one of her children! The unsentimental, inexpressive depth of her sympathy had been touched. I knew she loved me, and I regretted nothing of the past; the wonderful, glorious, painful past which had led us both to greater feeling for things outside, for life itself; gave us both a greater impersonal love, a love that lacked more and more of the exasperation of temperament, possessed more and more of the pure classic line of unegotistic passion!

Yes, I knew she loved me, and it gave me deep, but not untroubled peace. I could not forget that I had not had to the full the other kind of love—that she had never been “in love” with me! That need in me had never been and never could be satisfied! I feel sure in my reflective moments that had she had that temperamental dependent love for me, she would not have constantly appeared to me so beautiful, so wonderful! It was in part her inalienable independence of me that filled me with so passionate a respect, even when I strove to break it down! The inevitable quality of her resistance, her unconscious integrity, is the most beautiful thing that I have ever known! What so often has filled me with violent despair and fierce unspoken reproach was perhaps the most necessary condition of my underlying feeling.

And now she had fully accepted me, but in the way in which she had accepted the children, the household, and her lot in life. But she remained herself! She could give us love, but could not give herself away! Always mysteriously remote from us, no matter how tender! Not needing, though infinitely loving. How often when I have seen her slow, quiet, humorous smile have I thought of the Mona Lisa of Leonardo; of that unnervous strength, of the “depth and not the tumult of the soul.”

A few months after her recovery the new strange life of another child began to stir in her—a child about whose being she fitted herself with peculiar perfectness. This fourth infant, another little girl, was conceived, nourished and born with no resisting element in the mother’s nature. It was as if time and struggle had now fully prepared her to bring forth. Her Pilgrim’s Progress was beautifully shown in the new life, which at birth filled her with an exuberance never hers before; an exhilaration more strongly shown and a delighted appreciation without a flaw. And this little girl, now four years old, has had a life of unrelieved, gay joy, taking happiness and health as her native element and spreading joy to others and especially to her mother as the little rippling waves give gay music to the long receding shore.

And so perfect was her adjustment that even another blow from the hand of Nature, coming a few months before the birth, did not affect the unborn child. The little boy, always so sensitive, who had been born following the sudden death of her father, was again taken ill, and for months and years we feared not death but permanent invalidism. It was an intense, sad experience for both of us, relieved by its happy result, but taking from me a certain element of my native spring. I was very close to the boy all through his illness, lasting several years, and one effect it had was to give me a greater need of impersonal activity than I had ever had before.

Her going down into the Valley of the Shadow and the terrible illness of the child affected me more deeply than anything else in my life. I had, in a way, been nurse to both of them; nearer far to each than any one else had been to them, and to see these two beloved beings struggling for life, to feel in each the last supreme effort of their spiritual structure to exist, this was more than I could bear without relief.

And so when he had pulled through his long travail in which, child as he was, he had struggled like a hero for existence, and she had, for the time at least, become adjusted to her lot, and happy with her latest born, I turned to work and outside life with a greater impersonal activity than I had ever shown before.

Then followed three years when to a greater extent than ever, I lived among my fellow men and devoted myself more to the so-called larger social activities of men and women, to the work of the world; and was therefore automatically withdrawn more from the life of the family. These activities meant more to me for what I had gone through in personal relations; I think I saw their meaning better, and was better able to act and think maturely. More clearly I saw, more deeply I felt the necessary needs of men and women and their relation to the invisible reality we call human society. For the purpose and ultimate destiny of society is an organized condition in which the relations between particular men and women and their children shall be fully and beneficently developed, where the architecture of human relations may tower to its fullest and most lovely height.

Not only did I turn to these impersonal activities for relief, but as a natural and inevitable development. I am not, however, here concerned in picturing my life except in so far as it concerns my central love relation. This is the story of a lover. These activities of mine were modified by the experience of my relation with her, and my relation with her was affected by the nature of my activities, and therefore from time to time in this narrative I have touched, merely touched upon them.

In these goings out to the world, one set of experiences are peculiarly connected with my relation to her; affected it and were affected by it; my relations with other women. And here I come to a most delicate situation to explain, where to be truthful is probably beyond my ability, try as I may. Only those who have shared my experience, at least in some measure, will understand, but as many men and women, as all men and women who have the imagination and ambition for love, have in some measure shared my experience, though perhaps only in vague movements and tendencies, there will be some understanding of my words.

I grew constantly nearer to other women. I was filled with a passionate sympathy for them. I felt their struggle and their social situation as never before, and I understood far better what is called their weaknesses; and I saw with greater intensity their unconventional beauty. I saw that beauty in a woman’s nature has nothing to do with what is called chastity. I saw how little sexual resistance women have, and yet how much they are supposed to have! How their real virtues are ignored and false ones substituted!

In these years I met several women with whom I desired the uttermost intimacy. I had for them the utmost respect and my instinct told me that they were ready for me, ready to give me what I had never had. How I longed to be able to give myself over completely! I did give myself as far as my conscious will permitted, but always, no matter how deep my friendship, no matter how intimate I was with my appreciated and appreciative friend, the unconscious instinct, that deep uncontrollable imagination kept me bound to Her as a slave is bound to its master. It was often to me humiliating and disgusting that I could not be free of her, that I could not go as far with others as my social judgment and my civilized will demanded.

I met women who were disappointed as I was disappointed; who needed just what I needed—who needed to feel a deep reciprocity in passion, a mutual giving-up to the Beyond in each other’s arms. And I could not, try as I might, meet those longing spirits! I wanted to, both for them and for myself. I succeeded in feeling deeply friendly with them and they with me, but underlying our friendship was an irritated disappointment....

I had an intense longing to satisfy longing. My deepest pleasure was to give pleasure. This filled me with strange excitement. It was not the desire to do good to anybody; it was far more real than that; it responded to an egotistic need of my own temperament. And the pain that almost drove me mad at times was that She had no need for me to satisfy!

Other women had and how at times I strove to satisfy them! How I almost wept when I could not! How I hated and despised myself and yet wondered at the strength of something in me that was not myself, a something that held me bound to Her, in a way I did not want to be bound! How I longed to give myself to those who needed me, but how I could not take myself from Her who had no temperamental need of me! In this there was a deep, impersonal cruelty, the irony of life, the laughing mystery of the universe.

I imagine that experience increases one’s need to give oneself,—to work, to others’ needs, to the impersonal demand of Life. At any rate in me this has been an ever-growing passion, and as I felt more strongly about the world, about art and literature and Labor and society, I felt more strongly about women, and loved them always more, and this love was in part a measure of their need of me! I deeply wanted them to take of me all they could—more than they were able! If they could have taken more I would have been more deeply satisfied! It is a strange truth that as I grew older and more impersonal in my passion, women drew nearer to me and wanted of me more, but were able to take of me in minor measure only.

And She who had helped me to be capable of the intenser passion stood between me and its satisfaction! With her I could not satisfy my ultimate longing for she had no ultimate longing to meet mine! But because of her I could not fully meet the need of others and thereby satisfy my own!

I cannot dwell upon these few years of work and of social and emotional attempts at foreign intimacy with my women friends. My affairs were a part of my larger going out to the world and also due to what I at last had clearly seen—that although She loved me, she did not need me in the lovers’ relation, and so I could not fully exhaust myself in an attempt to satisfy her, and I needed so much to exhaust myself!—to give myself away without reserve! Important and detailed as these, my human relations were, I can here only touch upon them to the degree that they help to show my relation to her—the central relation of my life—for this is the story of a lover, and it is true that I have loved her only—this strange, cool, incomprehensible, wonderful woman, so beautifully aloof from me, yet so loving, and so little in love!

Since we had hurt one another at times so much there had grown up between us a greater reserve. We did not tend to talk so much about others. I was far less of a retriever who brought back rich human stories—when they involved me—to my mistress! But in an impulsive moment I told her of my attempt to meet other women, to satisfy in them a demand that she did not feel, to respond to a feeling in them for me that she did not feel.

And then again, more intensely than ever, she was hurt. What had happened to her abroad was as nothing compared to this. She was filled for months with a deep passionate resentment—something I had never seen in her before. She felt she had given up much when she broke with her lover; she had, she thought, laid aside, once for all, the great illusion, and had done so because of her great love for me and the children. And when she saw I could not give up that illusion, that I was still longing for the intangible reality she could not give me, again there came to her a destructive blow. She had renounced for this!

Once more there were a long series of frank talks from her—those rare and wonderful though terrible revelations of an inexpressive soul! I found that during all these years of our married life she had felt my infidelities, not exactly with pain, but that they had caused her to retire more and more within herself. The slight but lovely bud of her affection had never been able to flower. Her love for me was more and more maternal, the illusion of sex more and more absent; the moment came when it seemed to be quite gone. Of course I said it had never been, and I believe I am right, that she had had only the possibility of it, for me or for another, never realized. And I told her over and over again that now she loved me, maternally or otherwise, more than ever—that her conventional disapproval of my acts and her deeper infidelity of thought and feeling had not withdrawn her from me, but had brought her nearer.

She suffered, I really know not why, because of my relations with other women—they were not the relations she wanted for herself, and yet she suffered. And when I saw more clearly than ever before that there was something in her which by necessity was hurt by this my conduct, there came a strange change in me. I hated to lose any shade of her feeling for me, and I closed up instinctively my social sympathy, and my natural intimate outgoing to other women ceased!

But my sacrifice, like hers, like all sacrifices, was useless—nay, more, was harmful. My attitude of receptive openness, not only to women, but to men and work, to life, was in large measure gone. My friends noticed that I had lost the keen zest for experience which had been so characteristic of me. She herself began to see that I was older in spirit, that I was sinking into the reserve and timidity of old age, and that my creative initiative in work and life was less. And I felt it, too. I made no effort to be different. I simply was different, and I saw that my work and my life were more anæmic, but I could not help it. Somehow her clearly revealed pain and æsthetic disapproval had for the time at least strangely crippled me. And this, of course, was no good to her. I was less amusing, and still to her the word amusing was of all but the greatest moment. She began to regret my virtue and my old age. She saw that one was part of the other, indissolubly connected. She saw that I had done brutal things to others, under her influence, and I think her conscience hurt her, as did mine. But beyond all else she felt that she had invaded my personality and thereby weakened it, and in about a year she withdrew from her position and tacitly gave me to understand that she would be well content to have me go my ways.

During that year she had been consciously willing to have another lover; she had seen beautiful men whom she admired and who admired her, but deeper than her mind was her fundamental disillusionment. She knew that this for her was not to be. I saw that she was on the look-out, and yet I knew that there was nothing deep in her demand, that she was satisfied with life, disillusioned with what is called being in love, but loving more what she had—children, friends, work and me. Yes, me! She loved me more after all this strange and twisted travail! Even when she calmly told me, as she did, that she no longer wanted me in any temperamental way—that the little she had felt was gone—even then I felt a strange certainty of her love for me! For her love for me was of Platonic purity and strength, unmixed with sex or sentimentality, that seemed to me to be of the essence of tenderness.

She seems now to have given up her futile desire to desire others and to have accepted for herself a deep aloof affection and tenderness for me and for all who touch her. This same she wants from me and only accepts but does not desire my metaphysical needs, my sexual straining towards the universe’s oblivion. This she neither understands nor likes. This she feels should be put on other things, on work, on thought and impersonal activity, and she is right, but I, although going in that direction, am not ready—yet.

As yet my soul is not satisfied. It is with a deep unwillingness that I feel her temperamental withdrawal—which in a less degree has always been true of her but never so clearly seen by me. That she loves me more, perhaps, in another way, can never meet that fundamental madness that every lover has. I can never be satisfied until I find the Other—and I know I can never find the Other, and never really want to. I know that what I passionately want is a deep illusion, which can never come. It is of Life’s essence, which is to us illusory, as it can never be known and does not respond to our Ideal. It is a passion that leads to death, but when real as mine is, never leads to satisfaction.

Here I am at middle life living with the one woman I want to live with, hopeful for my fine children, interested in a work I have chosen and which was not forced upon me, rich in friends, in good health, and seeing progressively the sad splendid beauty of Nature and Art, hopeful for man’s struggle to break his bonds and interested in coöperating with him, and yet, in spite of all, passionately unsatisfied!

Passionately unsatisfied, and yet to me she is more beautiful, more wonderful than ever! This inaccessible woman, approaching middle age, more loving to me and more remote than ever, consciously rejecting me as a lover and accepting me warmly as a child, her complete and impersonal loveliness, is the one perfect experience of my life, the experience that permeates and affects all others, that has subtly intertwined itself in my love for children and nature, for work and for the destiny of my fellow-men. It has been the sap of my life, which has urged the slender stalk into the full-grown tree with its many branches and its decorative voluminous lines.

The sap still urges its undeniable way; my youthful passion still maintains itself but now more than ever it meets only the rich maternal smile, full of knowledge and a kind of tender scorn. As I write these lines—she, for the moment, distant from me by the length of an ocean—I remember the days when with a certain response she played with me with a light grace. Two little incidents come back to me from the multitudinous deluge of the past—one, when, with the laughter of unconventionality, we openly and completely embraced on the bosom of a Swiss glacier encouraged by the full sun of noon! Again, when, in our fancy, she was the wife of another, and we indulged in sweet mutual infidelity after a delicious supper in a French garden on the banks of the Seine! How we talked and smiled, and how we held for the moment aloof the serious madness that was behind my passion! How we enjoyed the decorous and polite knowledge of the host who ushered us to the guilty couch! And how our French epigrams were mixed up with our light and happy caresses! And at that time, she was beginning to see Him, and I had thrown my cone—my play with the lady in Italy! And this added zest, and she threw at me with more than joyous lightness a glass of wine which stained my white immaculate shirt and brought me to her with a quick reproachful embrace!

Yes, these gestures I must remember, in this the day of the waning of our lighter relations! The waning, yes, of our lighter amorousness, indeed the beginning of the day when she pushes me away, but at the same time the beginning of a love for me that passes understanding, that has no material expression, that is full of compassion, of a kind of dignified pity! A love in which the temperament plays no part, but to which all that has been between us—pleasure, pain, difficulties, work and infidelities—give an indescribable solidity and depth. Nothing on earth can separate us. Our relation, indeed, is built on a fortress which nothing but a double death can destroy, and perhaps not even that!

What is the romance of a young couple, previous to their first nuptials, as compared with our full experience? Why do novels, as a rule, end with the first slight lyrical gesture? Why do we inculcate in the imagination of the young and in our moral code a false conception of the nature of virtue? Why do we imply that chastity in woman has anything to do with goodness, or that physical movements necessarily affect a soul relation? I do not know why we have built up historically these colossal lies which give us pain and unnecessary jealousy and despair.

But what is to me the deepest mystery of all—and this a glorious mystery which distils a spiritual fragrance to all of life—is what holds a man and woman together through an entire eternity of experience. She is to me the key of existence that opens up the realm of the Infinite which, though I can never reach, yet sheds upon all things its colorful meaning. It is only the conception of the Eternal which gives interest to every concrete detail. God inheres as a quality in all things. Religion is right when it points the fact that without Him there is nothing.

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