Part 7
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!
_Chapter XI_
It 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!
_Chapter XII_
She 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.