N our little apartment, in one of the noisiest of New York streets, she waited quietly for the coming of the child. The place had no elevator and one of my clearest memories is the significant difficulty with which she ascended the stairs! She moved with the dignified slowness of unconscious Nature. We used to walk or rather vibrate round the block together for her ominous exercise every evening, so that the child might be well settled down into her womb. Then, after the important task of climbing the stairs, and the less difficult, but still laborious preparation for bed, she would lie back, seeking in vain, complete comfort; full of quiet, full of a wonderful sufficiency, but withal always uncomfortable, with a discomfort as quiet as her pleasures! It was a strange, a beautiful, a laborious time!
Then, in the early evening, with her book and her cigarette, and her quietly insistent burden, what place was there for me? To be with her always at such times would have seemed shameful, even to me. I remember how often I appeared to myself trivial and ridiculous, unkind and superficial, because I wanted to be actively with her, because I wanted her to be actively with me!—to follow my restless talk, to see the pickpocket or the Yiddish poet as I saw them, to sympathize with my quick sympathy for the drunk in the saloon, or the careless girl of my acquaintance!
Even to me in my eagerness I felt the shameful impossibility of it. Big with child, she seemed beautiful in a new way,—and what a way! The inexpressive significance, the wonder of it! So when I went away from her many evenings, leaving her as quiet as her burden would permit, it was with a kind of humiliation. Often have I sallied forth into what was then to me romantic to a degree,—the streets at night, with all their fanciful possibilities of strange meetings, of mental and sensuous suggestions, to meet some man in a café, to follow out the fascinating track to what I hoped would be literature; to what filled me with sketches, sketches of life, mainly unrecorded, but always stimulating and exciting.
I wanted these experiences, but as I left her for them, I felt, as I have said, a kind of shame and humiliation. I seemed to myself to be engaged in trivialities. I could not help comparing myself, restlessly looking into the back-alleys and by-streets of the town and of the world of human nature, with her, lying, voluminous, portentous, waiting, and quietly brooding. I was forced into the street, partly through my nervous curiosity and fever for possible glimpses, partly through my consciousness that she needed more to withdraw herself from me, much of the time, than to be with me. And both these causes did not feed my vanity nor increase my dignity in my own eyes. If I had not been impelled to want these restless contacts, and had been able to be an essential, integral part of her quiet building in a great process, I should have been what my deeper imagination desired. I should have been a part of Beauty itself! But I habitually fell away from my ideal, was continuously thrown off into the amusing futilities of manifold adventures. If I could only have been with child myself! If we could have been with child together! That would have satisfied my deepest instincts, would have made us one. But, limited by inexorable Nature, I was forced to try to impregnate myself in a figurative sense, to wander about the world, led on by the instinctive need of being suggested, of being stimulated into mental and temperamental fruitfulness, into giving birth to ideas!—pale consolations!
If I write sometimes in this narrative about the art of love, do not imagine that I think I know anything about it; nor that in any way I regard myself as successful in this great shaping process. But I have had, and have, a passionate, never-failing desire to do this almost impossible thing. I see my errors and am not sure of the final result. Often I have stood on the brink of failure, and I do so at this moment, filled with a kind of helpless dread, not knowing how to shape the clay of life, to draw the line that is instinctively right, that gives the vital equilibrium of art. I feel at times that this terrific longing of mine is a criminal instinct. Is it not a crime for a man to want to be pregnant? To want to be mutually pregnant? Does it not show a passionate invasiveness, an almost incredible desire for violation of another’s personality? Is it not terrible and ugly, rather than beautiful? Perhaps it is both.
And is it not a terrible thing to be dependent on another human being? When we find ourselves going in that direction, should we not strenuously call ourselves to account, and tear the bondage from our breasts? But the greater the need to do so, the more difficult it is; it is really taken from our will and we are the prey of circumstance.
I am now writing many years after the present stage in the story, to which I shall return. I am writing on the brink of the abyss, for I am at a moment when, my love as strong as ever, I perceive with peculiar intensity, the loneliness of our lives, the lack of contact, the complete isolation in which her spirit dwells, and the kind of shrinking that my approach causes in her. Oh, why do I need the Impossible? Why, oh why? She so often tells me, and means it, for she is as clear of guile and as candid as the sunlight, that we could live a happy, pleasant, affectionate life together, if it were not for my obscure, metaphysical needs, my unexplainable passions and the growing restlessness which deprives her of the opportunity for spiritual seclusion. She needs to be emotionally alone, most of the time. Why cannot I endure it?
I can endure now even less than before; for my hope of disturbing her into the need for me that I have for her is growing less, is almost gone. And I am perhaps undergoing what may be called the change of life in a man. There is no physical difference, as far as I can see, but there is a poignant sadness and my vision of the world is changing. It is all as beautiful as before, but now it is the beauty of terror. The universe seemed so friendly, but now it seems to me that all Nature is at war with man, and that we need to gather together and cheer and protect and comfort one another against the external enemy to whom ere long we must succumb. We are fighting a losing fight, and we need sympathy and love and friendship.
It is perhaps that which makes my need of her almost fierce. When the universe fails, the need of a personal relation becomes so intense that all peace is lost. It is said that a woman who is passing through the change of life often undergoes an exaggeration, a stimulation of sexual desire. And perhaps with a man his need for an intense exclusive relation grows painfully greater, as the fire flares up into a brighter flame just before it is extinguished forever and passes into the coldness of old age.
As I write these lines I know the truth does not fully appear. I have an unquenchable desire to tell the truth but it is something that quite surpasses my power of expression. The impression of blackness that these last pages give is not wholly faithful. Blackness is only one color in the compound. I see the whole thing as very beautiful, even separation and death, but I also see the poignant sadness and the quality of terror and tragedy.
As the time of her deliverance from the first born approached, a minor note of quiet gayety modified the harsher noises of life. It was as if the child, which long since had begun to move and stir in the womb, had begun to prevail, and to insist upon a smiling interpretation and a cheerful attitude. The atmosphere of children, in which our relation has existed for an eternity, began to form before the first of our four children was born. As we both together sometimes felt the pulsations of the new life, and she the springing within and the urge and the movement it was the faint suggestion as of a bouncing little cherub playing with his blocks about the room or trying to dive through the window pane! And we would smile together, she one of those long, slow, tender smiles which went through her whole body and soul, and completely satisfied her, and I would smile more quickly, a smile tending to translate itself into a more strenuous expression and a forbidden embrace!
And slowly and richly, like a well-filled argosy, she would sometimes move with me to the café for dinner, and throughout our talk, or more exactly my talk, the unborn would have its effect. It was not like the old days of my pre-nuptial wooing when my words flowed in torrential masses and the atmosphere was filled with the excitement of half ideas and amorous hopes. Into these was introduced a subtle modification. The shadow of the child was cast on the high lights like gray on a water color, bringing in a transfused softening. And my male companions who came alone or with their wives to our little apartment, underwent the same influence, and there was not so much wine and whiskey consumed, and not so much boisterous talk about it and about. The unseen deeper meaning made its demand and insisted upon harmony in the surroundings.
Pregnancy came to seem to me such a normal, inevitable state that when I saw slim girls in the street or young married women who had not yet begun their process of completion, it was with a sort of pity. They seemed so wanting, so forlorn and hoping. Where was the male with his impregnating fierceness? Why should such wanting creatures go thinly about the world?
So natural and beautiful did her condition seem to me that when her pains began, they took me by surprise, though we had been expecting them for many days. It was as if some strange eruption, some volcanic accident had occurred, something quite contrary to the placid course of Nature. It was as exciting and direful as a Revolution! Yet, as I held her hands when the recurrent, ever-increasing pains returned, she in a strange and marvelous way, maintained that calm, that breathing, inexpressible quiet, at which I wonder and shall wonder until my dying day, even though, at times, it has almost driven me mad!
And when, sternly driven by the doctor into the adjoining room, I heard her low, unconscious moans, as the child came ripping from her womb,—deep, suffering sounds which did not seem to come from her but from the world in travail, from the body of Nature itself, sounds not so much human as cosmic, even then there was no turmoil nor violence nor nervousness. It seemed deeply impersonal,—the pain, the sound—to come from the depths of life and death, from a great, a terrible distance, and without petulance, too deep, too all-embracing to be noisy.
I afterwards knew that she had been at the point of death, that the hemorrhage which so often accompanies the first child-birth had nearly carried her into the unknown. She realized it at the time, felt herself going, going, but there was no alarm or uneasiness. It was like fading away into her elements, passing into something almost as much herself as what she knew, into something familiar, friendly; going out, but not going out into the cold; perhaps into the cool, the moist, the colorful, pleasing half-light, half-life, which lacks nervousness and pain—the elementary, the elemental, the Cosmic, lacking the meaningless stridency of civilization, possessing the long, quiet line of primitiveness! She was so civilized that she could easily dispense with civilization, so sophisticated that she could quietly welcome the approach of the uttermost simple, the dissolving into the elements of existence!
How I loved her, how I admired her! Beyond everything else how I liked her! She pleased my taste so utterly. She thrilled me with excited pleasure even at the moment when I feared for her life! As I heard the sharp cry of the new-born, like a clear figure in the foreground against the deep meaning of the mother’s impersonal silence, and rushing into the room, saw the strange struggling baby brandished aloft by the doctor, and the pale face of the woman in the bed, the danger of it all, the beauty of it all, almost overpowered me.
And then for days and days I rushed about, doing meaningless but necessary things; prodding the strangely stupid nurse, fiercely demanding of her punctuality and carefulness; alert, restless, awake, watchful, untiring, but always with a deep impatience, always feeling myself inessential, trivial, doing these necessary errands, but withheld from her, not able to commune with her, not able to be a part of her; having no longer any relation with her, a mere spectator of her importance, not an integral part of it!
I wonder if I have not been a mere spectator all my life!—a super-heated observer? Have I ever been a part of her real life? Is not my recurrent feeling of almost intolerable loneliness an index, a sign of her remoteness? In her arms only have I been able to feel united with something not myself, bigger than myself, a part of something not myself, my larger self. Under the illusion of the senses and the amorous fancy I have felt a real bond. Was it, after all, merely an illusion? Who knows? Perhaps it was a real union, a real oneness, but with difficulty maintained, impossible to maintain; continuously, inevitably falling apart, slipping back again into tragic, hopeless separateness.