The Passionate Friends
the morning.... Let us take each other, Mary, now. _Now!_ Let us take
each other, and"--I still remember my impotent phrase--"afterwards count
the cost!"
"If I were a queen," said Mary. "But you see I am not a queen." ...
So we talked in fragments and snatches of argument, and all she said
made me see more clearly the large hopelessness of my desire. "At
least," I urged, "do not marry Justin now. Give me a chance. Give me
three years, Mary, three short years, to work, to do something!"
She knew so clearly now the quality of her own intentions.
"Dear Stephen," she explained, "if I were to come away with you and
marry you, in just a little time I should cease to be your lover, I
should be your squaw. I should have to share your worries and make your
coffee--and disappoint you, disappoint you and fail you in a hundred
ways. Think! Should I be any good as a squaw? How can one love when one
knows the coffee isn't what it should be, and one is giving one's lover
indigestion? And I don't _want_ to be your squaw. I don't want that at
all. It isn't how I feel for you. I don't _want_ to be your servant and
your possession."
"But you will be Justin's--squaw, you are going to marry him!"
"That is all different, Stevenage. Between him and me there will be
space, air, dignity, endless servants----"
"But," I choked. "You! He! He will make love to you, Mary."
"You don't understand, Stephen."
"He will make love to you, Mary. Mary! don't you understand? These
things---- We've never talked of them.... You will bear him children!"
"No," she said.
"But----"
"No. He promises. Stephen,--I am to own myself."
"But--He marries you!"
"Yes. Because he--he admires me. He cannot live without me. He loves my
company. He loves to be seen with me. He wants me with him to enjoy all
the things he has. Can't you understand, Stephen?"
"But do you mean----?"
Our eyes met.
"Stephen," she said, "I swear."
"But---- He hopes."
"I don't care. He has promised. I have his promise. I shall be free. Oh!
I shall be free--free! He is a different man from you, Stephen. He isn't
so fierce; he isn't so greedy."
"But it parts us!"
"Only from impossible things."
"It parts us."
"It does not even part us, Stevenage. We shall see one another! we shall
talk to one another."
"I shall lose you."
"I shall keep you."
"But I--do you expect me to be content with _this_?"
"I will make you content. Oh! Stephen dear, can't there be love--love
without this clutching, this gripping, this carrying off?"
"You will be carried altogether out of my world."
"If I thought that, Stephen, indeed I would not marry him."
But I insisted we should be parted, and parted in the end for ever, and
there I was the wiser of the two. I knew the insatiable urgency within
myself. I knew that if I continued to meet Mary I should continue to
desire her until I possessed her altogether.
§ 6
I cannot reproduce with any greater exactness than this the quality and
gist of our day-long conversation. Between us was a deep affection, and
instinctive attraction, and our mental temperaments and our fundamental
ideas were profoundly incompatible. We were both still very young in
quality, we had scarcely begun to think ourselves out, we were greatly
swayed by the suggestion of our circumstances, complex, incoherent and
formless emotions confused our minds. But I see now that in us there
struggled vast creative forces, forces that through a long future, in
forms as yet undreamt of, must needs mould the destiny of our race. Far
more than Mary I was accepting the conventions of our time. It seemed to
me not merely reasonable but necessary that because she loved me she
should place her life in my youthful and inexpert keeping, share my
struggles and the real hardships they would have meant for her, devote
herself to my happiness, bear me children, be my inspiration in
imaginative moments, my squaw, helper and possession through the whole
twenty-four hours of every day, and incidentally somehow rear whatever
family we happened to produce, and I was still amazed in the depths of
my being that she did not reciprocate this simple and comprehensive
intention. I was ready enough I thought for equivalent sacrifices. I was
prepared to give my whole life, subordinate all my ambitions, to the
effort to maintain our home. If only I could have her, have her for my
own, I was ready to pledge every hour I had still to live to that
service. It seemed mere perversity to me then that she should turn even
such vows as that against me.
"But I don't want it, Stevenage," she said. "I don't want it. I want you
to go on to the service of the empire, I want to see you do great
things, do all the things we've talked about and written about. Don't
you see how much better that is for you and for me--and for the world
and our lives? I don't want you to become a horrible little specialist
in feeding and keeping me."
"Then--then _wait_ for me!" I cried.
"But--I want to live myself! I don't want to wait. I want a great house,
I want a great position, I want space and freedom. I want to have
clothes--and be as splendid as your career is going to be. I want to be
a great and shining lady in your life. I can't always live as I do now,
dependent on my mother, whirled about by her movements, living in her
light. Why should I be just a hard-up Vestal Virgin, Stephen, in your
honor? You will not be able to marry me for years and years and
years--unless you neglect your work, unless you throw away everything
that is worth having between us in order just to get me."
"But I want _you_, Mary," I cried, drumming at the little green table
with my fist. "I want you. I want nothing else in all the world unless
it has to do with you."
"You've got me--as much as anyone will ever have me. You'll always have
me. Always I will write to you, talk to you, watch you. Why are you so
greedy, Stephen? Why are you so ignoble? If I were to come now and marry
you, it wouldn't help you. It would turn you into--a wife-keeper, into
the sort of uninteresting preoccupied man one sees running after and
gloating over the woman he's bought--at the price of his money and his
dignity--and everything.... It's not proper for a man to live so for a
woman and her children. It's dwarfish. It's enslaving. It's--it's
indecent. Stephen! I'd hate you so." ...
§ 7
We parted at last at a cab-rank near a bridge over the Canal at the
western end of Park Village. I remember that I made a last appeal to her
as we walked towards it, and that we loitered on the bridge, careless of
who might see us there, in a final conflict of our wills. "Before it is
too late, Mary, dear," I said.
She shook her head, her white lips pressed together.
"But after the things that have happened. That night--the moonlight!"
"It's not fair," she said, "for you to talk of that. It isn't fair."
"But Mary. This is parting. This indeed is parting."
She answered never a word.
"Then at least talk to me again for one time more."
"Afterwards," she said. "Afterwards I will talk to you. Don't make
things too hard for me, Stephen."
"If I could I would make this impossible. It's--it's hateful."
She turned to the kerb, and for a second or so we stood there without
speaking. Then I beckoned to a hansom.
She told me Beatrice Normandy's address.
I helped her into the cab. "Good-bye," I said with a weak affectation
of an everyday separation, and I turned to the cabman with her
instructions.
Then again we looked at one another. The cabman waited. "All right,
sir?" he asked.
"Go ahead!" I said, and lifted my hat to the little white face within.
I watched the cab until it vanished round the curve of the road. Then I
turned about to a world that had become very large and empty and
meaningless.
§ 8
I struggled feebly to arrest the course of events. I wrote Mary some
violent and bitter letters. I treated her as though she alone were
responsible for my life and hers; I said she had diverted my energies,
betrayed me, ruined my life. I hinted she was cold-blooded, mercenary,
shameless. Someday you, with that quick temper of yours and your power
of expression, will understand that impulse to write, to pour out a
passionately unjust interpretation of some nearly intolerable situation,
and it is not the least of all the things I owe to Mary that she
understood my passion and forgave those letters and forgot them. I tried
twice to go and see her. But I do not think I need tell you, little son,
of these self-inflicted humiliations and degradations. An angry man is
none the less a pitiful man because he is injurious. The hope that had
held together all the project of my life was gone, and all my thoughts
and emotions lay scattered in confusion....
You see, my little son, there are two sorts of love; we use one name
for very different things. The love that a father bears his children,
that a mother feels, that comes sometimes, a strange brightness and
tenderness that is half pain, at the revelation of some touching aspect
of one long known to one, at the sight of a wife bent with fatigue and
unsuspicious of one's presence, at the wretchedness and perplexity of
some wrong-doing brother, or at an old servant's unanticipated tears,
that is love--like the love God must bear us. That is the love we must
spread from those of our marrow until it reaches out to all mankind,
that will some day reach out to all mankind. But the love of a young man
for a woman takes this quality only in rare moments of illumination and
complete assurance. My love for Mary was a demand, it was a wanton claim
I scored the more deeply against her for every moment of happiness she
gave me. I see now that as I emerged from the first abjection of my
admiration and began to feel assured of her affection, I meant nothing
by her but to possess her, I did not want her to be happy as I want you
to be happy even at the price of my life; I wanted her. I wanted her as
barbarians want a hunted enemy, alive or dead. It was a flaming jealousy
to have her mine. That granted, then I was prepared for all
devotions....
This is how men love women. Almost as exclusively and fiercely I think
do women love men. And the deepest question before humanity is just how
far this jealous greed may be subdued to a more generous passion. The
fierce jealousy of men for women and women for men is the very heart of
all our social jealousies, the underlying tension of this crowded modern
life that has grown out of the ampler, simpler, ancient life of men.
That is why we compete against one another so bitterly, refuse
association and generous co-operations, keep the struggle for existence
hard and bitter, hamper and subordinate the women as they in their turn
would if they could hamper and subordinate the men--because each must
thoroughly have his own.
And I knew my own heart too well to have any faith in Justin and his
word. He was taking what he could, and his mind would never rest until
some day he had all. I had seen him only once, but the heavy and
resolute profile above his bent back and slender shoulders stuck in my
memory.
If he was cruel to Mary, I told her, or broke his least promise to her,
I should kill him.
§ 9
My distress grew rather than diminished in the days immediately before
her marriage, and that day itself stands out by itself in my memory, a
day of wandering and passionate unrest. My imagination tormented me with
thoughts of Justin as a perpetual privileged wooer.
Well, well,--I will not tell you, I will not write the ugly mockeries my
imagination conjured up. I was constantly on the verge of talking and
cursing aloud to myself, or striking aimlessly at nothing with clenched