The Passionate Friends
and how I kept pestering you and asking you what is all this _for_? And
you looked at the question as an obstinate mule looks at a narrow bridge
he could cross but doesn't want to. Well, Stephen, you've had
nearly--how many years is it now?--to get an answer ready. What _is_ it
all for? What do you make of it? Never mind my particular case, or the
case of Women with a capital _W_, tell me _your_ solution. You are
active, you keep doing things, you find life worth living. Is publishing
a way of peace for the heart? I am prepared to believe even that. But
justify yourself. Tell me what you have got there to keep your soul
alive."
§ 3
I read this letter to the end and looked up, and there was my home about
me, a room ruddy-brown and familiar, with the row of old pewter things
upon the dresser, the steel engravings of former Strattons that came to
me from my father, a convex mirror exaggerating my upturned face. And
Rachel just risen again sat at the other end of the table, a young
mother, fragile and tender-eyed. The clash of these two systems of
reality was amazing. It was as though I had not been parted from Mary
for a day, as though all that separation and all that cloud of bitter
jealousy had been a mere silence between two people in the same room.
Indeed it was extraordinarily like that, as if I had been sitting at a
desk, imagining myself alone, reading my present life as one reads in a
book at a shaded lamp, and then suddenly that silent other had spoken.
And then I looked at the page of my life before me and became again a
character in the story.
I met the enquiry in Rachel's eyes. "It's a letter from Mary Justin," I
said.
She did not answer for a few moments. She became interested in the flame
of the little spirit lamp that kept her coffee hot. She finished what
she had to do with that and then remarked, "I thought you two were not
to correspond."
"Yes," I said, putting the letter down; "that was the understanding."
There was a little interval of silence, and then I got up and went to
the fireplace where the bacon and sausages stood upon a trivet.
"I suppose," said Rachel, "she wants to hear from you again."
"She thinks that now we have children, and that she has two, we can
consider what was past, past and closed and done with, and she wants to
hear--about me.... Apart from everything else--we were very great
friends."
"Of course," said Rachel with lips a little awry, "of course. You must
have been great friends. And it's natural for her to write."
"I suppose," she added, "her husband knows."
"She's told him, she says...."
Her eye fell on the letter in my hand for the smallest fraction of a
second, and it was as if hastily she snatched away a thought from my
observation. I had a moment of illuminating embarrassment. So far we had
contrived to do as most young people do when they marry, we had sought
to make our lives unreservedly open to one another, we had affected an
entire absence of concealments about our movements, our thoughts. If
perhaps I had been largely silent to her about Mary it was not so much
that I sought to hide things from her as that I myself sought to forget.
It is one of the things that we learn too late, the impossibility of any
such rapid and wilful coalescences of souls. But we had maintained a
convention of infinite communism since our marriage; we had shown each
other our letters as a matter of course, shared the secrets of our
friends, gone everywhere together as far as we possibly could.
I wanted now to give her the letter in my hand to read--and to do so was
manifestly impossible. Something had arisen between us that made out of
our unity two abruptly separated figures masked and veiled. Here were
things I knew and understood completely and that I could not even
describe to Rachel. What would she make of Mary's "Write to me. Write to
me"? A mere wish to resume.... I would not risk the exposure of Mary's
mind and heart and unhappiness, to her possible misinterpretation....
That letter fell indeed like a pitiless searchlight into all that
region of differences ignored, over which we had built the vaulted
convention of our complete mutual understanding. In my memory it seems
to me now as though we hung silent for quite a long time over the
evasions that were there so abruptly revealed.
Then I put the letter into my pocket with a clumsy assumption of
carelessness, and knelt down to the fender and sausages.
"It will be curious," I said, "to write to her again.... To tell her
about things...."
And then with immense interest, "Are these Chichester sausages you've
got here, Rachel, or some new kind?"
Rachel roused herself to respond with an equal affectation, and we made
an eager conversation about bacon and sausages--for after that startling
gleam of divergence we were both anxious to get back to the
superficialities of life again.
§ 4
I did not answer Mary's letter for seven or eight days.
During that period my mind was full of her to the exclusion of every
other interest. I re-read all that she had to say many times, and with
each reading the effect of her personality deepened. It was all so
intensely familiar, the flashes of insight, the blazing frankness, the
quick turns of thought, and her absurd confidence in a sort of sane
stupidity that she had always insisted upon my possessing. And her
unembarrassed affectionateness. Her quick irregular writing seemed to
bring back with it the changing light in her eyes, the intonations of
her voice, something of her gesture....
I didn't go on discussing with myself whether we two ought to
correspond; that problem disappeared from my thoughts. Her challenge to
me to justify myself took possession of my mind. That thrust towards
self-examination was the very essence of her ancient influence. How did
I justify myself? I was under a peculiar compulsion to answer that to
her satisfaction. She had picked me up out of my work and accumulating
routines with that demand, made me look at myself and my world again as
a whole.... I had a case. I have a case. It is a case of passionate
faith triumphing over every doubt and impossibility, a case real enough
to understand for those who understand, but very difficult to state. I
tried to convey it to her.
I do not remember at all clearly what I wrote to her. It has disappeared
from existence. But it was certainly a long letter. Throughout this book
I have been trying to tell you the growth of my views of life and its
purpose, from my childish dreams and Harbury attitudes to those ideas of
human development that have made me undertake the work I do. It is not
glorious work I know, as the work of great artists and poets and leaders
is glorious, but it is what I find best suits my gifts and my want of
gifts. Greater men will come at last to build within my scaffoldings. In
some summary phrasing I must have set out the gist of this. I must have
explained my sense of the supreme importance of mental clarification in
human life. All this is manifest in her reply. And I think too I did my
best to tell her plainly the faith that was in me, and why life seemed
worth while to me....
Her second letter came after an interval of only a few days from the
despatch of mine. She began abruptly.
"I won't praise your letter or your beliefs. They are fine and
large--and generous--like you. Just a little artificial (but you will
admit that), as though you had felt them _give_ here and there and had
made up your mind they shouldn't. At times it's oddly like looking at
the Alps, the real Alps, and finding that every now and then the
mountains have been eked out with a plank and canvas Earl's Court
background.... Yes, I like what you say about Faith. I believe you are
right. I wish I could--perhaps some day I shall--light up and _feel_ you
are right. But--but---- That large, _respectable_ project, the increase
of wisdom and freedom and self-knowledge in the world, the calming of
wars, the ending of economic injustice and so on and so on----
"When I read it first it was like looking at a man in profile and
finding him solid and satisfactory, and then afterwards when I thought
it all over and looked for the particular things that really matter to
me and tried to translate it into myself--nothing is of the slightest
importance in the world that one cannot translate into oneself--then I
began to realize just how amazingly deficient you are. It was like
walking round that person in profile and finding his left side wasn't
there--with everything perfect on the right, down to the buttons. A kind
of intellectual Lorelei--sideways. You've planned out your
understandings and tolerances and enquiries and clearings-up as if the
world were all just men--or citizens--and nothing doing but racial and
national and class prejudices and the exacting and shirking of labor,
and you seem to ignore altogether that man is a sexual animal
first--first, Stephen, first--that he has that in common with all the
animals, that it made him indeed because he has it more than they
have--and after that, a long way after that, he is the
labor-economizing, war-and feud-making creature you make him out to be.
A long way after that....
"Man is the most sexual of all the beasts, Stephen. Half of him,
womankind, rather more than half, isn't simply human at all, it's
specialized, specialized for the young, not only naturally and
physically as animals are, but mentally and artificially. Womankind
isn't human, it's reduced human. It's 'the sex' as the Victorians used
to say, and from the point of view of the Lex Julia and the point of
view of Mr. Malthus, and the point of view of biologists and saints and
artists and everyone who deals in feeling and emotion--and from the
point of view of all us poor specialists, smothered up in our clothes
and restrictions--the future of the sex is the centre of the whole
problem of the human future, about which you are concerned. All this
great world-state of your man's imagination is going to be wrecked by us
if you ignore us, we women are going to be the Goths and Huns of another
Decline and Fall. We are going to sit in the conspicuous places of the
world and _loot_ all your patient accumulations. We are going to abolish
your offspring and turn the princes among you into undignified slaves.
Because, you see, specialized as we are, we are not quite specialized,
we are specialized under duress, and at the first glimpse of a chance we
abandon our cradles and drop our pots and pans and go for the vast and
elegant side possibilities--of our specialization. Out we come, looking
for the fun the men are having. Dress us, feed us, play with us! We'll
pay you in excitement,--tremendous excitement. The State indeed! All
your little triumphs of science and economy, all your little
accumulations of wealth that you think will presently make the struggle
for life an old story and the millennium possible--_we spend_. And all
your dreams of brotherhood!--we will set you by the ears. We hold
ourselves up as my little Christian nephews--Philip's boys--do some
coveted object, and say _Quis?_ and the whole brotherhood shouts
'_Ego!_' to the challenge.... Back you go into Individualism at the word
and all your Brotherhood crumbles to dust again.
"How are you going to remedy it, how are you going to protect that Great
State of your dreams from this anti-citizenship of sex? You give no
hint.
"You are planning nothing, Stephen, nothing to meet this. You are
fighting with an army all looting and undisciplined, frantic with the
private jealousies that centre about _us_, feuds, cuts, expulsions,
revenges, and you are giving out orders for an army of saints. You treat
us as a negligible quantity, and we are about as negligible as a fire in