The Passionate Friends
the woodwork of a house that is being built....
"I read what I have written, Stephen, and I perceive I have the makings
of a fine scold in me. Perhaps under happier conditions----... I should
certainly have scolded you, constantly, continually.... Never did a man
so need scolding.... And like any self-respecting woman I see that I use
half my words in the wrong meanings in order to emphasize my point. Of
course when I write woman in all that has gone before I don't mean
woman. It is a woman's privilege to talk or write incomprehensibly and
insist upon being understood. So that I expect you already to understand
that what I mean isn't that men are creative and unselfish and brotherly
and so forth and that women are spoiling and going to spoil the
game--although and notwithstanding that is exactly what I have
written--but that humans are creative and unselfish et cetera and so
forth, and that it is their sexual, egotistical, passionate side (which
is ever so much bigger relatively in a woman than in a man, and that is
why I wrote as I did) which is going to upset your noble and beautiful
apple-cart. But it is not only that by nature we are more largely and
gravely and importantly sexual than men but that men have shifted the
responsibility for attraction and passion upon us and made us pay in
servitude and restriction and blame for the common defect of the
species. So that you see really I was right all along in writing of this
as though it was women when it wasn't, and I hope now it is unnecessary
for me to make my meaning clearer than it is now and always has been in
this matter. And so, resuming our discourse, Stephen, which only my
sense of your invincible literalness would ever have interrupted, what
are you going to do with us?
"I gather from a hint rather than accept as a statement that you propose
to give us votes.
"Stephen!--do you really think that we are going to bring anything to
bear upon public affairs worth having? I know something of the
contemporary feminine intelligence. Justin makes no serious objection to
a large and various circle of women friends, and over my little
sitting-room fire in the winter and in my corners of our various gardens
in the summer and in walks over the heather at Martens and in Scotland
there are great talks and confessions of love, of mental freedom, of
ambitions, and belief and unbelief--more particularly of unbelief. I
have sometimes thought of compiling a dictionary of unbelief, a great
list of the things that a number of sweet, submissive,
value-above-rubies wives have told me they did not believe in. It would
amaze their husbands beyond measure. The state of mind of women about
these things, Stephen, is dreadful--I mean about all these
questions--you know what I mean. The bold striving spirits do air their
views a little, and always in a way that makes one realize how badly
they need airing--but most of the nicer women are very chary of talk,
they have to be drawn out, a hint of opposition makes them start back or
prevaricate, and I see them afterwards with their husbands, pretty
silken furry feathery jewelled _silences_. All their suppression doesn't
keep them orthodox, it only makes them furtive and crumpled and creased
in their minds--in just the way that things get crumpled and creased if
they are always being shoved back into a drawer. You have only to rout
about in their minds for a bit. They pretend at first to be quite
correct, and then out comes the nasty little courage of the darkness.
Sometimes there is even an apologetic titter. They are quite
emancipated, they say; I have misunderstood them. Their emancipation is
like those horrid white lizards that grow in the Kentucky caves out of
the sunlight. They tell you they don't see why they shouldn't do this or
that--mean things, underhand things, cheap, vicious, sensual things....
Are there, I wonder, the same dreadful little caverns in men? I doubt
it. And then comes a situation that really tries their quality.... Think
of the quandary I got into with you, Stephen. And for my sex I'm rather
a daring person. The way in which I went so far--and then ran away. I
had a kind of excuse--in my illness. That illness! Such a queer untimely
feminine illness....
"We're all to pieces, Stephen. That's what brought down Rome. The women
went to pieces then, and the women are going to pieces to-day. What's
the good of having your legions in the Grampians and marching up to
Philae, while the wives are talking treason in your houses? It's no good
telling us to go back to the Ancient Virtues. The Ancient Virtues
haven't _kept_. The Ancient Virtues in an advanced state of decay is
what was the matter with Rome and what is the matter with us. You can't
tell a woman to go back to the spinning-wheel and the kitchen and the
cradle, when you have power-looms, French cooks, hotels, restaurants and
modern nurseries. We've overflowed. We've got to go on to a lot of New
Virtues. And in all the prospect before me--I can't descry one clear
simple thing to do....
"But I'm running on. I want to know, Stephen, why you've got nothing to
say about all this. It must have been staring you in the face ever since
I spent my very considerable superfluous energies in wrecking your
career. Because you know I wrecked it, Stephen. I _knew_ I was wrecking
it and I wrecked it. I knew exactly what I was doing all the time. I had
meant to be so fine a thing for you, a mothering friend, to have that
dear consecutive kindly mind of yours steadying mine, to have seen you
grow to power over men, me helping, me admiring. It was to have been so
fine. So fine! Didn't I urge you to marry Rachel, make you talk of her.
Don't you remember that? And one day when I saw you thinking of Rachel,
saw a kind of pride in your eyes!--suddenly I couldn't stand it. I went
to my room after you had gone and thought of you and her until I wanted
to scream. I couldn't bear it. It was intolerable. I was violent to my
toilet things. I broke a hand-glass. Your dignified, selfish,
self-controlled Mary _smashed_ a silver hand-mirror. I never told you
that. You know what followed. I pounced on you and took you. Wasn't I--a
soft and scented hawk? Was either of us better than some creature of
instinct that does what it does because it must? It was like a gust of
madness--and I cared, I found, no more for your career than I cared for
any other little thing, for honor, for Rachel, for Justin, that stood
between us....
"My dear, wasn't all that time, all that heat and hunger of desire, all
that secret futility of passion, the very essence of the situation
between men and women now? We are all trying most desperately to be
human beings, to walk erect, to work together--what was your
phrase?--'in a multitudinous unity,' to share what you call a common
collective thought that shall rule mankind, and this tremendous force
which seizes us and says to us: 'Make that other being yours, bodily
yours, mentally yours, wholly yours--at any price, no matter the price,'
bars all our unifications. It splits the whole world into couples
watching each other. Until all our laws, all our customs seem the
servants of that. It is the passion of the body swamping the brain; it's
an ape that has seized a gun, a beautiful modern gun. Here am I,
Justin's captive, and he mine, he mine because at the first escapade of
his I get my liberty. Here are we two, I and you, barred for ever from
the sight of one another, and I and you writing--I at any rate--in spite
of the ill-concealed resentment of my partner. We're just two, peeping
through our bars, of a universal multitude. Everywhere this prison of
sex. Have you ever thought just all that it means when every woman in
the world goes dressed in a costume to indicate her sex, her cardinal
fact, so that she dare not even mount a bicycle in knickerbockers, she
has her hair grown long to its longest because yours is short, and
everything conceivable is done to emphasize and remind us (and you) of
the fundamental trouble between us? As if there was need of reminding!
Stephen, is there no way out of this? Is there no way at all? Because if
there is not, then I had rather go back to the hareem than live as I do
now imprisoned in glass--with all of life in sight of me and none in
reach. I had rather Justin beat me into submission and mental
tranquillity and that I bore him an annual--probably deciduous--child. I
can understand so well now that feminine attitude that implies, 'Well,
if I must have a master, then the more master the better.' Perhaps that
is the way; that Nature will not let us poor humans get away from sex,
and I am merely--what is it?--an abnormality--with whiskers of enquiry
sprouting from my mind. Yet I don't feel like that....
"I'm pouring into these letters, Stephen, the concentrated venom of
years of brooding. My heart is black with rebellion against my lot and
against the lot of woman. I have been given life and a fine position in
the world, I made one fatal blunder in marrying to make these things
secure, and now I can do nothing with it all and I have nothing to do
with it. It astounds me to think of the size of our establishments,
Stephen, of the extravagant way in which whole counties and great
countries pay tribute to pile up the gigantic heap of wealth upon which
we two lead our lives of futile entanglement. In this place alone there
are fourteen gardeners and garden helps, and this is not one of our
garden places. Three weeks ago I spent a thousand pounds on clothes in
one great week of shopping, and our yearly expenditure upon personal
effect, upon our magnificence and our margins cannot be greatly less
than forty-five thousand pounds. I walk about our house and gardens, I
take one of the carriages or one of the automobiles and go to some large
pointless gathering of hundreds and thousands and thousands of pounds,
and we walk about and say empty little things, and the servants don't
laugh at us, the butlers don't laugh at us, the people in the street
tolerate us.... It has an effect of collective insanity.... You know the
story of one of those dear Barons of the Cinque Ports--a decent
plumber-body from Rye or Winchelsea--one of the six--or eight--who
claimed the privilege of carrying the canopy over the King"--she is
speaking of King Edward's coronation of course--"how that he was
discovered suddenly to be speaking quite audibly to the sacred presence
so near to him: 'It is very remarkable--we should be here, your
majesty--very remarkable.' And then he subsided--happily unheard--into
hopeless embarrassment. That is exactly how I feel, Stephen. I feel I
can't stand it much longer, that presently I shall splutter and spoil
the procession....
"Perhaps I don't properly estimate our position in the fabric, but I
can't get away from the feeling that everything in social life leads up
to this--to us,--the ridiculous canopy. If so, then the universe
means--_nothing_; it's blowing great forms and shapes as a swamp blows
bubbles; a little while ago it was megatheriums and plesiosauriums--if
that's the name for them--and now it is country-houses and motor-cars
and coronation festivals. And in the end--it is all nonsense, Stephen.
It is utter nonsense.
"If it isn't nonsense, tell me what it is. For me at any rate it's
nonsense, and for every intelligent woman about me--for I talk to some
of them, we indulge in seditious whisperings and wit--and there isn't
one who seems to have been able to get to anything solider than I have
done. Each of us has had her little fling at maternity--about as much as
a washerwoman does in her odd time every two or three years--and that is
our uttermost reality. All the rest,--trimmings! We go about the world,
Stephen, dressing and meeting each other with immense ceremony, we have