The Passionate Friends
his voice. "You had her letters?" he said.
"Two."
"Yes. Didn't they speak?"
"I want to see her. Damn it, Tarvrille!" I cried with sudden tears in
my smarting eyes. "Let _her_ send me away. This isn't---- Not treating
us like human beings."
"Women," said Tarvrille and looked at his boot toes, "are different from
men. You see, Stratton----"
He paused. "You always strike me, Stratton, as not realizing that women
are weak things. We've got to take _care_ of them. You don't seem to
feel that as I do. Their moods--fluctuate--more than ours do. If you
hold 'em to what they say in the same way you hold a man--it isn't
fair...."
He halted as though he awaited my assent to that proposition.
"If you were to meet Mary now, you see, and if you were to say to her,
come--come and we'll jump down Etna together, and you said it in the
proper voice and with the proper force, she'd do it, Stratton. You know
that. Any man knows a thing like that. And she wouldn't _want_ to do
it...."
"You mean that's why I can't see her."
"That's why you can't see her."
"Because we'd become--dramatic."
"Because you'd become--romantic and uncivilized."
"Well," I said sullenly, realizing the bargain we were making, "I
won't."
"You won't make any appeal?"
"No."
He made no answer, and I looked up to discover him glancing over his
shoulder through the great glass window into the other room. I stood up
very quickly, and there in the further apartment were Guy and Mary,
standing side by side. Our eyes met, and she came forward towards the
window impulsively, and paused, with that unpitying pane between us....
Then Guy was opening the door for her and she stood in the doorway. She
was in dark furs wrapped about her, but in the instant I could see how
ill she was and how broken. She came a step or so towards me and then
stopped short, and so we stood, shyly and awkwardly under Guy and
Tarvrille's eyes, two yards apart. "You see," she said, and stopped
lamely.
"You and I," I said, "have to part, Mary. We---- We are beaten. Is that
so?"
"Stephen, there is nothing for us to do. We've offended. We broke the
rules. We have to pay."
"By parting?"
"What else is there to do?"
"No," I said. "There's nothing else." ...
"I tried," she said, "that you shouldn't be sent from England."
"That's a detail," I answered.
"But your politics--your work?"
"That does not matter. The great thing is that you are ill and
unhappy--that I can't help you. I can't do anything.... I'd go anywhere
... to save you.... All I can do, I suppose, is to part like this and
go."
"I shan't be--altogether unhappy. And I shall think of you----"
She paused, and we stood facing one another, tongue-tied. There was only
one word more to say, and neither of us would say it for a moment.
"Good-bye," she whispered at last, and then, "Don't think I deserted
you, Stephen my dear. Don't think ill of me. I couldn't come--I couldn't
come to you," and suddenly her face changed slowly and she began to
weep, my fearless playmate whom I had never seen weeping before; she
began to weep as an unhappy child might weep.
"Oh my Mary!" I cried, weeping also, and held out my arms, and we clung
together and kissed with tear-wet faces.
"No," cried Guy belatedly, "we promised Justin!"
But Tarvrille restrained his forbidding arm, and then after a second's
interval put a hand on my shoulder. "Come," he said....
And so it was Mary and I parted from one another.
CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
BEGINNING AGAIN
§ 1
In operas and romances one goes from such a parting in a splendid
dignity of gloom. But I am no hero, and I went down the big staircase of
Tarvrille's house the empty shuck of an abandoned desire. I was acutely
ashamed of my recent tears. In the centre of the hall was a marble
figure swathed about with yellow muslin. "On account of the flies," I
said, breaking our silence.
My words were far too unexpected for Tarvrille to understand. "The
flies," I repeated with an air of explanation.
"You're sure she'll be all right?" I said abruptly.
"You've done the best thing you can for her."
"I suppose I have. I have to go." And then I saw ahead of me a world
full of the tiresome need of decisions and arrangements and empty of all
interest. "Where the _devil_ am I to go, Tarvrille? I can't even get out
of things altogether...."
And then with a fresh realization of painful difficulties ahead: "I have
to tell this to my father. I've got to explain---- And he thought--he
expected----"
Tarvrille opened the half of the heavy front door for me, hesitated,
and came down the broad steps into the chilly grey street and a few
yards along the pavement with me. He wanted to say something that he
found difficult to say. When at last he did find words they were quite
ridiculous in substance, and yet at the time I took them as gravely as
he intended them. "It's no good quoting Marcus Aurelius," said
Tarvrille, "to a chap with his finger in the crack of a door."
"I suppose it isn't," I said.
"One doesn't want to be a flatulent ass of course," said Tarvrille,
"still----"
He resumed with an air of plunging. "It will sound just rot to you now,
Stratton, but after all it comes to this. Behind us is
a--situation--with half-a-dozen particular persons. Out here--I mean
here round the world--before you've done with them--there's a thousand
million people--men and women."
"Oh! what does that matter to me?" said I.
"Everything," said Tarvrille. "At least--it ought to."
He stopped and held out his hand. "Good-bye, Stratton--good luck to you!
Good-bye."
"Yes," I said. "Good-bye."
I turned away from him. The image of Mary crying as a child cries
suddenly blinded me and blotted out the world.
§ 2
I want to give you as clearly as I can some impression of the mental
states that followed this passion and this collapse. It seems to me one
of the most extraordinary aspects of all that literature of speculative
attack which is called psychology, that there is no name and no
description at all of most of the mental states that make up life.
Psychology, like sociology, is still largely in the scholastic stage, it
is ignorant and intellectual, a happy refuge for the lazy industry of
pedants; instead of experience and accurate description and analysis it
begins with the rash assumption of elements and starts out upon
ridiculous syntheses. Who with a sick soul would dream of going to a
psychologist?...
Now here was I with a mind sore and inflamed. I did not clearly
understand what had happened to me. I had blundered, offended, entangled
myself; and I had no more conception than a beast in a bog what it was
had got me, or the method or even the need of escape. The desires and
passionate excitements, the anger and stress and strain and suspicion of
the last few months had worn deep grooves in my brain, channels without
end or issue, out of which it seemed impossible to keep my thoughts. I
had done dishonorable things, told lies, abused the confidence of a
friend. I kept wrestling with these intolerable facts. If some momentary
distraction released me for a time, back I would fall presently before I
knew what was happening, and find myself scheming once more to reverse
the accomplished, or eloquently restating things already intolerably
overdiscussed in my mind, justifying the unjustifiable or avenging
defeat. I would dream again and again of some tremendous appeal to Mary,
some violent return and attack upon the situation....
One very great factor in my mental and moral distress was the uncertain
values of nearly every aspect of the case. There is an invincible sense
of wild rightness about passionate love that no reasoning and no
training will ever altogether repudiate; I had a persuasion that out of
that I would presently extract a magic to excuse my deceits and
treacheries and assuage my smarting shame. And round these deep central
preoccupations were others of acute exasperation and hatred towards
secondary people. There had been interventions, judgments upon
insufficient evidence, comments, and often quite justifiable comments,
that had filled me with an extraordinary savagery of resentment.
I had a persuasion, illogical but invincible, that I was still entitled
to all the respect due to a man of unblemished honor. I clung fiercely
to the idea that to do dishonorable things isn't necessarily to be
dishonorable.... This state of mind I am describing is, I am convinced,
the state of every man who has involved himself in any affair at once
questionable and passionate. He seems free, but he is not free; he is
the slave of the relentless paradox of his position.
And we were all of us more or less in deep grooves we had made for
ourselves, Philip, Guy, Justin, the friends involved, and all in the
measure of our grooves incapable of tolerance or sympathetic
realization. Even when we slept, the clenched fist of the attitudes we
had assumed gave a direction to our dreams.
You see the same string of events that had produced all this system of
intense preoccupations had also severed me from the possible resumption
of those wider interests out of which our intrigue had taken me. I had
had to leave England and all the political beginnings I had been
planning, and to return to those projects now, those now impossible
projects, was to fall back promptly into hopeless exasperation....
And then the longing, the longing that is like a physical pain, that
hunger of the heart for some one intolerably dear! The desire for a
voice! The arrested habit of phrasing one's thoughts for a hearer who
will listen in peace no more! From that lonely distress even rage, even
the concoction of insult and conflict, was a refuge. From that pitiless
travail of emptiness I was ready to turn desperately to any offer of
excitement and distraction.
From all those things I was to escape at last unhelped, but I want you
to understand particularly these phases through which I passed; it falls
to many and it may fall to you to pass through such a period of darkness
and malign obsession. Make the groove only a little deeper, a little
more unclimbable, make the temperament a little less sanguine, and
suicide stares you in the face. And things worse than suicide, that
suicide of self-respect which turns men to drugs and inflammatory vices
and the utmost outrageous defiance of the dreaming noble self that has
been so despitefully used. Into these same inky pools I have dipped my
feet, where other men have drowned. I understand why they drown. And my
taste of misdeed and resentment has given me just an inkling of what men
must feel who go to prison. I know what it is to quarrel with a world.
§ 3
My first plan when I went abroad was to change my Harbury French, which
was poor stuff and pedantic, into a more colloquial article, and then go
into Germany to do the same thing with my German, and then perhaps to
remain in Germany studying German social conditions--and the quality of
the German army. It seemed to me that when the term of my exile was over
I might return to England and re-enter the army. But all these were very
anæmic plans conceived by a tired mind, and I set about carrying them
out in a mood of slack lassitude. I got to Paris, and in Paris I threw
them all overboard and went to Switzerland.
I remember very clearly how I reached Paris. I arrived about sunset--I
suppose at St. Lazare or the Gare du Nord--sent my luggage to the little
hotel in the Rue d'Antin where I had taken rooms, and dreading their
loneliness decided to go direct to a restaurant and dine. I remember
walking out into the streets just as shops and windows and street lamps
were beginning to light up, and strolling circuitously through the clear