The Passionate Friends
bright stir of the Parisian streets to find a dinner at the Café de la
Paix. Some day you will know that peculiar sharp definite excitement of
Paris. All cities are exciting, and each I think in a different way. And
as I walked down along some boulevard towards the centre of things I saw
a woman coming along a side street towards me, a woman with something in
her body and something in her carriage that reminded me acutely of Mary.
Her face was downcast, and then as we converged she looked up at me, not
with the meretricious smile of her class but with a steadfast, friendly
look. Her face seemed to me sane and strong. I passed and hesitated. An
extraordinary impulse took me. I turned back. I followed this woman
across the road and a little way along the opposite pavement. I remember
I did that, but I do not remember clearly what was in my mind at the
time; I think it was a vague rush towards the flash of companionship in
her eyes. There I had seemed to see the glimmer of a refuge from my
desolation. Then came amazement and reaction. I turned about and went on
my way, and saw her no more.
But afterwards, later, I went out into the streets of Paris bent upon
finding that woman. She had become a hope, a desire.
I looked for her for what seemed a long time, half an hour perhaps or
two hours. I went along, peering at the women's faces, through the
blazing various lights, the pools of shadowy darkness, the flickering
reflections and transient glitter, one of a vast stream of slow-moving
adventurous human beings. I crossed streams of traffic, paused at
luminous kiosks, became aware of dim rows of faces looking down upon me
from above the shining enamel of the omnibuses.... My first intentness
upon one person, so that I disregarded any distracting intervention,
gave place by insensible degrees to a more general apprehension of the
things about me. That original woman became as it were diffused. I began
to look at the men and women sitting at the little tables behind the
panes of the cafés, and even on the terraces--for the weather was still
dry and open. I scrutinized the faces I passed, faces for the most part
animated by a sort of shallow eagerness. Many were ugly, many vile with
an intense vulgarity, but some in that throng were pretty, some almost
gracious. There was something pathetic and appealing for me in this
great sweeping together of people into a little light, into a weak
community of desire for joy and eventfulness. There came to me a sense
of tolerance, of fellowship, of participation. From an outer darkness
of unhappiness or at least of joylessness, they had all come hither--as
I had come.
I was like a creature that slips back again towards some deep waters out
of which long since it came, into the light and air. It was as if old
forgotten things, prenatal experiences, some magic of ancestral
memories, urged me to mingle again with this unsatisfied passion for
life about me....
Then suddenly a wave of feeling between self-disgust and fear poured
over me. This vortex was drawing me into deep and unknown things.... I
hailed a passing _fiacre_, went straight to my little hotel, settled my
account with the proprietor, and caught a night train for Switzerland.
All night long my head ached, and I lay awake swaying and jolting and
listening to the rhythms of the wheels, Paris clean forgotten so soon as
it was left, and my thoughts circling continually about Justin and
Philip and Mary and the things I might have said and done.
§ 4
One day late in February I found myself in Vevey. I had come down with
the break-up of the weather from Montana, where I had met some Oxford
men I knew and had learned to ski. I had made a few of those vague
acquaintances one makes in a winter-sport hotel, but now all these
people were going back to England and I was thrown back upon myself once
more. I was dull and angry and unhappy still, full of self-reproaches
and dreary indignations, and then very much as the sky will sometimes
break surprisingly through storm clouds there began in me a new series
of moods. They came to me by surprise. One clear bright afternoon I sat
upon the wall that runs along under the limes by the lake shore, envying
all these people who were going back to England and work and usefulness.
I thought of myself, of my career spoilt, my honor tarnished, my
character tested and found wanting. So far as English politics went my
prospects had closed for ever. Even after three years it was improbable
that I should be considered by the party managers again. And besides, it
seemed to me I was a man crippled. My other self, the mate and
confirmation of my mind, had gone from me. I was no more than a
mutilated man. My life was a thing condemned; I had joined the ranks of
loafing, morally-limping, English exiles.
I looked up. The sun was setting, a warm glow fell upon the dissolving
mountains of Savoy and upon the shining mirror of the lake. The
luminous, tranquil breadth of it caught me and held me. "I am done for."
The light upon the lake and upon the mountains, the downward swoop of a
bird over the water and something in my heart, gave me the lie.
"What nonsense!" I said, and felt as if some dark cloud that had
overshadowed me had been thrust back.
I stared across at Savoy as though that land had spoken. Why should I
let all my life be ruled by the blunders and adventures of one short
year of adventure? Why should I become the votary of a train of
consequences? What had I been dreaming of all this time? Over there were
gigantic uplands I had never seen and trodden; and beyond were great
plains and cities, and beyond that the sea, and so on, great spaces and
multitudinous things all round about the world. What did the things I
had done, the things I had failed to do, the hopes crushed out of me,
the tears and the anger, matter to _that_? And in some amazing way this
thought so took possession of me that the question seemed also to carry
with it the still more startling collateral, what then did they matter
to me? "Come out of yourself," said the mountains and all the beauty of
the world. "Whatever you have done or suffered is nothing to the
inexhaustible offer life makes you. We are you, just as much as the past
is you."
It was as though I had forgotten and now remembered how infinitely
multitudinous life can be. It was as if Tarvrille's neglected words to
me had sprouted in the obscurity of my mind and borne fruit....
I cannot explain how that mood came, I am doing my best to describe it,
and it is not easy even to describe. And I fear that to you who will
have had I hope no experience of such shadows as I had passed through,
it is impossible to convey its immense elation.... I remember once I
came in a boat out of the caves of Han after two hours in the darkness,
and there was the common daylight that is nothing wonderful at all, and
its brightness ahead there seemed like trumpets and cheering, like
waving flags and like the sunrise. And so it was with this mood of my
release.
There is a phrase of Peter E. Noyes', that queer echo of Emerson whom
people are always rediscovering and forgetting again, a phrase that
sticks in my mind,--"Every living soul is heir to an empire and has
fallen into a pit." It's an image wonderfully apt to describe my change
of mental attitude, and render the contrast between those intensely
passionate personal entanglements that had held me tight and that wide
estate of life that spreads about us all, open to all of us in just the
measure that we can scramble out of our individual selves--to a more
general self. I seemed to be hanging there at the brim of my stale and
painful den, staring at the unthought-of greatness of the world, with an
unhoped-for wind out of heaven blowing upon my face.
I suppose the intention of the phrase "finding salvation," as religious
people use it, is very much this experience. If it is not the same thing
it is something very closely akin. It is as if someone were scrambling
out of a pit into a largeness--a largeness that is attainable by every
man just in the measure that he realizes it is there.
I leave these fine discriminations to the theologian. I know that I went
back to my hotel in Vevey with my mind healed, with my will restored to
me, and my ideas running together into plans. And I know that I had come
out that day a broken and apathetic man.
§ 5
The next day my mood declined again; it was as if that light, that sense
of release that had shone so clear and strong in my mind, had escaped
me. I sought earnestly to recover it. But I could not do so, and I found
my old narrow preoccupations calling urgently to me again.
I thought that perhaps I might get back those intimations of outlook and
relief if I clambered alone into some high solitude and thought. I had
a crude attractive vision of myself far above the heat and noise,
communing with the sky. It was the worst season for climbing, and on the
spur of the moment I could do nothing but get up the Rochers de Naye on
the wrong side, and try and find some eyrie that was neither slippery
nor wet. I did not succeed. In one place I slipped down a wet bank for
some yards and held at last by a root; if I had slipped much further I
should not be writing here now; and I came back a very weary and bruised
climber, without any meditation....
Three nights after when I was in bed I became very lucidly awake--it
must have been about two or three in the morning--and the vision of life
returned to me, with that same effect of enlargement and illumination.
It was as if the great stillness that is behind and above and around the
world of sense did in some way communicate with me. It bade me rouse my
spirit and go on with the thoughts and purposes that had been stirring
and proliferating in my mind when I had returned to England from the
Cape. "Dismiss your passion." But I urged that that I could not do;
there was the thought of Mary subjugated and weeping, the smarting
memory of injury and defeat, the stains of subterfuge and discovery, the
aching separation. No matter, the stillness answered, in the end all
that is just to temper you for your greater uses.... I cannot forget, I
insisted. Do not forget, but for the present this leads you no whither;
this chapter has ended; dismiss it and turn to those other things. You
are not only Stephen Stratton who fell into adultery; in these silences
he is a little thing and far away; here and with me you are
Man--Everyman--in this round world in which your lot has fallen. But
Mary, I urged, to forget Mary is a treason, an ingratitude, seeing that
she loved me. But the stillness did not command me to forget her, but
only to turn my face now to the great work that lies before mankind. And
that work? That work, so far as your share goes, is first to understand,
to solve, and then to achieve, to work out in the measure of yourself
that torment of pity and that desire for order and justice which
together saturate your soul. Go about the world, embrue yourself with
life, make use of that confusedly striving brain that I have lifted so
painfully out of the deadness of matter....
"But who are you?" I cried out suddenly to the night. "Who are you?"
I sat up on the side of my bed. The dawn was just beginning to break up
the featureless blackness of the small hours. "This is just some odd
corner of my brain," I said....
Yet---- How did I come to have this odd corner in my brain? What _is_
this lucid stillness?...
§ 6
Let me tell you rather of my thoughts than of my moods, for there at
least one comes to something with a form that may be drawn and a
substance that is measurable; one ceases to struggle with things
indefinable and the effort to convey by metaphors and imaginary voices