Part 3
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.
_Chapter V_
I have written something of the art of love and of its difficulty. One aspect of love, what is called the sensual side, is much neglected by almost all men, especially men of our race and civilization. To exploit the possibilities of a physical relation is supposed to be indelicate or indecent. Reticence and unwillingness is confounded with chastity and purity. Our early sex relations are as a rule hasty and unloving, with no subtlety or sensuousness, merely violent, nervous and egotistic. Sexual life seems therefore to most inexperienced women, even when they live with a man they love, incomprehensible and unpleasant. They often pass years without the specific reaction, the complete relaxation and sensuous-spiritual satisfaction without which the sexual embrace has little æsthetic meaning.
So that women often live with a man for many years and have several children and yet know little or nothing of the physical side of love. And if the physical could be separated from the material and the spiritual this would be of little importance. But words represent merely abstractions from experience, which is a complex flux of all things, held in solution. To the sensitively developed human being a merely sensual relation is impossible; it is inextricably connected with emotion, thought and imagination, with what we call the spiritual. And neither relation is possible to the full unless the other is at the full, too.
A beautiful love relation therefore is impossible without a delicate sexual adjustment. It is the basis, the superstructure upon which fine architectural forms are reared. And it is not an easy thing for a civilized man and woman to have an adequate sensual relation. Each human being is a peculiar, irreproducible instrument, different from all other instruments, capable of giving out music of an original quality but needing the right touch, the right player, who understands the particular instrument upon which he is playing. If he plays artistically, beautiful spiritual harmony results, beautiful relations, beautiful children, and a beautiful attitude to Nature and Society.
Art is long, and we do not at once make the best connection with our lovers. When I first met her, I was not at all conscious of any sensual desire. My relations with women had been casual, fragmentary and nervous, and I had not learned to associate physical intercourse with spiritual emotion. So that, at first, our relations were lyrical and light on the sensual side, playful and athletic, smiling, and to her a little foolish and unmeaning. They were not brutal, but to her they did not seem to have any particular appeal. She did not feel the sad, colorful need of full self-and-sex expression and in her eyes was not the longing left by long nights of mutual giving-up. It was in large measure because I had not learned to be patient and quiet, to study her needs and to care more for her pleasure and emotion than for my own, not realizing that the two were inextricably dependent, one upon the other.
It is probable that women instinctively know more than men of the art of love on the physical side. They know that without the quietness of the soul it is nothing. The deep quiet woman with whom I lived unconsciously shaped my sex relation with her. She taught me the subtlety of the approach, the constancy and the continuation of it, and she herself continually grew in sensuous knowledge. After the birth of the first child, when she had recovered her health, how her sensuous beauty and her sensuous knowledge seemed almost more than I could bear! How brilliant and sensual her skin, how wonderful her instinctive art, and yet it was not then the full efflorescence, not yet what she was destined to realize, when our relations grew more complex and more distressful, and when she had become aroused by other men; then the whole rich consciousness developed and I was the gainer as well as the sufferer.
The first child deepened her nature, and each successive child added to the content of her consciousness. Although it is getting ahead of my story I cannot refrain from picturing the singular enhancement, sensual and imaginative, that came after the birth of the third child, a little girl born in wonderful Italy. The light and color of her skin seemed to come from some central sun within and to give her the rich, destructive look of a glorious fallen Magdalene, which corresponded to the deeper knowledge within her, of life, of sensuousness and of human character. Her beauty was then to me no pleasure in the charming, lyrical sense. There was no light, buoyant love in it, but a biting, harassing insistency, a serious, necessary yearning which was as inexorable as the sea and deprived me utterly of all hope of peace and of all desire for peace. I fiercely demanded sensual misery and unutterable impossible longing, and contentment seemed triviality, meant only for superficial souls. And when I saw the look of uncontrollable desire in the faces of other men, and her quick and welcoming consciousness of it, I cannot describe the kind of torturing pleasure it gave me, as if I were permitted glimpses into the terrible truth, which perhaps was destined to shatter me.
How different all this was from those April days of the honeymoon! It seemed as if thousands of years had intervened, and that just because we had been in part successful in the art of love, had mutually given and taken and partly destroyed one another and accepted from and given to others, and loved children and art and literature, and taken as fully as we could what came to us from life, just because of all that richness, our relation had become one that meant the constant possibility and at times the actuality of almost unbearable pain!
It seems to me at times that all I really care for is sensuality and ideas, and to me these are never unmixed--there never come to me ideas without sensuality, nor sensuality without ideas. My mind seems to have the warmth of my senses and to my senses are lent a hue of meaning given by the constructing intelligence. It was this mixed field on which she and I really met. Emotionally we were often far apart, but always was this keen interest together in the coloring of thought and the meaning of the sensual. So that we have been close together without sentimentality and without what is called romance.
And our relation has thus had at least one of the results that is highly desirable. It has helped us to express ourselves impersonally, has helped our writing, our understanding, our culture and our human connections, our appreciation of children and of Nature. It has done more. It has helped us to an understanding of the struggle of mankind, and has given us social sympathy. Indeed it is frequently true of thoughtful human beings capable of the rounded experience that is called culture, that as the youthful passions--which are the slighter passions--subside, as our cruder interest in women, in boon-companionship, in verses and in art-for-art’s sake, falls away or dies, we turn to the deeper personal relation, to social morality, to God. Men of forty who when younger sought women and gold and distinction now try to dig deeper into one relation, fight with insistency for an abstract idea, for a social panacea, or for a religion.
It was not a mere coincidence that after the coming of the first child, my relations to other things than her, to my friends, and to my work began to undergo if not a change, at least a deepening. I saw much more in my chance café companions, in the peddler or the poet of the Ghetto, in the pickpocket and in the submerged generally than ever before. My interest in my work, which was formerly light and suggestive, a kind of playfulness, became more serious. The psychology of the thief and of the revolutionary immigrant formerly amused me as something exotic and unfamiliar. The boon companions and the girls excited my senses and satisfied my love of pleasure. But now all these things came to mean more to me, to connect themselves with my real life. My intimacy with her, the fact that I was having an ever-deepening relationship with her, made it impossible for me to approach anything else with free lightness, with superficial playfulness. Once for all, the deeper harmonies were touched and they permeated more and more all my interests and undertakings. As serious intimacy ever developed between her and me, it developed between me and everything else. I saw something in work more significant than art. Writing became for me a human occupation, not a matter of art, nor of business. A thief was a human being, not a thief; a drunkard became a fine soul in distress, not a drunkard. An abandoned woman became a figure about whom to construct a better society, not a prostitute.
My love for my wife, deepened, satisfied and exasperated with experience, enabled me to approach crime in a passionate and a profoundly æsthetic way. It led me step by step into what is called radicalism, into an infidelity to the conventions of my class. To have one purely passionate relation extends the impulse to be pure, that is passionate, in all things. The one love leads one to the love of all, and the love of all re-acts on the love of one, heightening and intensifying it. I saw everything in terms of the intimate seriousness my relation with her had developed in my soul.
Our first trip to Italy when the boy was a year and a half old was a strange and lovely blending of what had been with what was to be. The honeymoon quality was still there, but it was more sensuous and more significant, and for the time being it was not troubled. It was in the charming hill country where the climate is semi-tropical and everything invites to relaxation. The many hills are capped with beautiful old towns deserted largely of their inhabitants and as pure in form and color as shells on the beach. It represents a lovely death, and over these hills and through these valleys we loved to walk. More often I went alone, but alone only after being with her, in her arms always except on the walks. The embrace was as constant as before our marriage and far deeper and more voluptuous. It seemed to me in that lovely, languishing, liquid place there were only two realities, her embrace and the hills with their swoon-inducing atmospheric mantle.
My feeling for those hills and that relaxing, impregnated air, was indistinguishable from my feeling for her. It seems to me that it was the result of it, that it could not have been without it. Without the satisfaction and relaxation after the embrace, I could not have had that glorious passiveness, that sensuous receptivity in which Nature came to me as nothing foreign, but as part of my blood and bone, as a feeling from within. Already my intimacy with her was giving to external nature a new quality never felt by me before. How I returned to her from these walks and how I went to these walks from her! How she sent me forth and how they brought me back! O, the deep, relaxing sensuousness of it! The long, languid afternoons, the quiet warm nights! And in and out of it all was the little boy breaking in on our luxuries with his clear charm, interrupting and diverting his parents who were caught in a continuous moment of almost impersonal amorousness, so connected did it seem with the old town, the sky and the semi-tropical atmosphere!
As I write these memories of a lover I realize that the woman is hardly more than a shadow to the reader. Or rather, perhaps, she is what each reader makes her; each lover--and this book means nothing except to the lover--will see in her the particular woman about whom he has built his spiritual life--the woman who has realized for him the great adventure. I know if I can tell the inner truth to me it will be the inner truth to every lover. To him the doubt, the pleasure; to him the hope, the disillusion, the pain and joy, as to me--the certainty of her love for him, the certainty of her indifference. To him, as to me, the beloved seems one thing at one moment, another at the next, but always wonderful, always incomprehensible, and beyond all else perhaps, strange--foreign, giving glimpses always of magic casements opening on “faery seas,” sometimes forlorn or terrible, sometimes warming and infinitely consoling.
The inevitable is the deepest mystery; and the naturalness of her second pregnancy beginning in these languorous Italian hills did not take from its wonder; rather the contrary. This time to her the new life was from the first a welcome thing. Perhaps by now her nature had become adjusted to this intrusion, so that it was no longer intrusion but completion. Then, too, the first born had become a thing beloved and the little fellow had been rather lonely and bored in this to him unexciting quiet, and she foresaw for him a play-fellow. So this second pregnancy fitted in harmoniously with what she felt in the warm surroundings and what she hoped for in the colorful future.
But these no doubt are superficial explanations. Who can tell or know why she breathed in, so to speak, this second pregnancy as she breathed in the caressing air of this semi-tropical place? Perhaps she had become a more unconscious part of Nature which does not question why the seed bursts and grows in the rich, moist earth. And her skin, giving light and warmth, and suggesting the rich material within from which life springs was like the sun-bathed fields telling of the damp pregnancies underneath!
But a terrible disturbance again awaited this quietly brooding soul. Into her expectant state our daily interests wove themselves with tranquil ease; our literary work, and talks, our pleasant times with friends and all the little things and momentary values which relieve and put in bold relief the vital things of life. This deep disturbance was not this time due to me. I threw no cone at her in her second period of travail; nor did I irritate her sensibility. She did not weep because of me.
There came a bolt from the void--a cable-gram from America telling of the sudden violent death of her beloved father. I remember I brought her the message, fearing for her and for the unborn child, for I knew what that romantic man meant to her. But she took it in the quiet, deep way with which she takes all serious things. She said no word, she did not weep, but it went through her whole being and as we both now think affected deeply the temperament and character and life of the child that was to be. I have always felt that it was a deeper blow to her than if she had expressed it more violently. She took it--as she takes everything--did not throw it off by successive paroxysms, but wove it into her complete existence, thereby coloring herself and the child, introducing somber elements into what her nature insisted should always be harmonious.
_Chapter VI_
We left the sensuous charm of Italy and went back to nervous New York and its detailed and relatively meaningless activities, and I again attempted, as I have attempted periodically all through my life, to become a part of the machinery of practical existence. But the big deceptive generalizations of philosophy, which I needed in my youth, as I have explained, to attain equilibrium, and my subsequent absorption in the deep pathos of love, stood always in my way when I honestly tried to be interested in what the world calls practical and necessary. But to all things I invariably tended to apply the measure of eternity, and eternity spoke to me through the impulses of philosophy and of love. So that the spur of practical need, which was keen and constant enough to have chained most men to the wheel of necessary routine, acted on me mainly as an irritant, leading me into situations, positions, jobs as they are lugubriously called, but never strong enough to hold me there. I was continually thrown off onto the bosom of the Eternal, where only I found significant excitement and troubled peace.
When our second boy was born I was exceedingly active in journalism and in other futilities, called important by the best people, and a great deal was happening to me, in the ordinary way. But these important events have left no strong impression on my memory. They are vague and shadowy and have not the quality of value. I know they happened mainly because from time to time I come across some record of them. Otherwise they would have been entirely forgotten; have taken their proper place in general oblivion.
But what I do remember as intensely as though it were happening to me at this moment is the look of the second child as he came with a flash of noise into the world. As the doctor waved him in the air to help him take his first breath in this amazing place, he seemed to me older than anything I had ever seen or imagined. When I first met Her she had seemed older and more beautiful and more terrible than the Sphinx, but he seemed to go back beyond all human expression and to go forward beyond it all, too, and to represent the suffering essence of Life itself! He was neither animal nor human, but the something from which they both come and to which they both go!
What a contrast he was then and has always been to his brother! When the first child came, he was a baby, a human baby, and at each stage, up to his early teens, where he now is, he has been the child, the boy, perfectly and typically the happy, playful child, the romantic active boy--so much the boy that as yet there has been little else--he has the boy quality taken to the nth degree!--a beautiful thing, a ridiculous thing, a baffling, incomprehensible thing, a delightful, innocent thing, with open joyful eyes, keen to the color of events, unseeing the unseen harmonies and discords.
To his brother, however, are the unseen harmonies and discords; the child of the sensuous Italian hills, the child who formed its unborn life about the spiritual woe of the mother, the child of sensuousness, the child of disturbance! I have sometimes felt that the blow that struck her in the midst of rich peace and joy must have come from some cold, inhuman artist who saw the tragic form--some smiling sculptor who brutally modeled without regard to human good and evil, thinking only of the line, of the possibilities inherent in the clay of life.
Whatever the cause--and our causes are all of the fancy; we know no other--this second child has been strangely sensitive to all things outside of him. They have filled him with disease and pain, but he has seen their form--their discord and their harmony. He does not live in the romantic world of the pure child. He does not become a Sir Lancelot or a cowboy. He lives in his perceptions of reality, and his instincts to construct. He is always building, building, indefatigably, even in the moment of physical pain and weakness. His mood is changed by the sunlight, by the dampness, and he sensitively understands the emotional situation of those near him; and it is on the basis of the way this wonderful, tragic world affects him that he builds, builds.
I am aware that most people love the joyous and the happy; the robust, the cheerful and the pleasant, the adequate and efficient ones, and these are indeed a part of the strange rhythm of life that holds us all, but to me there has always been a peculiar beauty in those who suffer--not those who merely bear, but those on whom all of life impinges, on whom rush the quality of all things, rendering them painfully conscious and sensitive of the beauty and the horror; those who are affected by the hidden meaning of every event and every form and whose structure, whose being, is therefore always in imminent danger, the meaning forced upon them being so constantly great and unrelenting.