The Passionate Friends
conservative-minded people say,--it's none the less a decay because we
want it,--and the only thing to stop it is to stop it, and to have more
discipline and more suppression and say to women and the common people:
'Back to the Sterner Virtues; Back to Servitude!' I wish I hadn't these
reactionary streaks in my thoughts, but I have and there you are...."
And then towards the second year her letters began to break away from
her preoccupation with her position as a woman and to take up new
aspects of life, more general aspects of life altogether. It had an
effect not of her having exhausted the subject but as if, despairing of
a direct solution, she turned deliberately to the relief of other
considerations. She ceased to question her own life, and taking that for
granted, wrote more largely of less tangible things. She remembered that
she had said that life, if it was no more than its present appearances,
was "utter nonsense." She went back to that. "One says things like
that," she wrote "and not for a moment does one believe it. I grumble
at my life, I seem to be always weakly and fruitlessly fighting my life,
and I love it. I would not be willingly dead--for anything. I'd rather
be an old match-woman selling matches on a freezing night in the streets
than be dead. Nothing nonsensical ever held me so tightly or kept me so
interested. I suppose really I am full of that very same formless faith
on which you rely. But with me it's not only shapeless but
intangible.... I nibble at religion. I am immensely attracted. I stand
in the doorway. Only when they come out to persuade me to come in I am
like a shy child and I go away. The temples beguile me and the music,
but not the men. I feel I want to join _it_ and they say 'join _us_.'
They are--like vergers. Such small things! Such dreadful little
_arguing_ men! They don't let you come in, they want you to say they are
right. All the really religious people seem to be outside nowadays and
all the pretending, cheating, atheistical, vain and limited people
within....
"But the beautiful things religion gives! The beauty! Do you know Saint
Paul's, Stephen? Latterly I have been there time after time. It is the
most beautiful interior in all the world, so great, so sombrely
dignified, so perfectly balanced--and filled with such wonderful music,
brimming with music just as crystal water brims in a bowl of crystal.
The other day I went there, up into a little gallery high up under the
dome, to hear Bach's Passion Music, the St. Matthew Passion. One hangs
high and far above the little multitudes below, the white-robed singers,
the white-robed musicians, ranks and ranks, the great organ, the rows
and rows and rows of congregation, receding this way, that way, into the
haze of the aisle and the transepts, and out of it all streams the
sound and the singing, it pours up past you like a river, a river that
rushes upward to some great sea, some unknown sea. The whole place is
music and singing.... I hang on to the railings, Stephen, and weep--I
have to weep--and I wonder and wonder....
"One prays then as naturally as one drinks when one is thirsty and cold
water comes to hand. I don't know whom I pray to, but I pray;--of course
I pray. Latterly, Stephen, I have been reading devotional works and
trying to catch that music again. I never do--definitely. Never. But at
times I put down the book and it seems to me that surely a moment ago I
heard it, that if I sit very still in a moment I shall hear it again.
And I can feel it is there, I know it is there, like a bat's cry,
pitched too high for my ears. I know it is there, just as I should still
know there was poetry somewhere if some poor toothless idiot with no
roof to his mouth and no knowledge of any but the commonest words tried
to read Shelley to me....
"I wish I could pray with you, Stephen; I wish I could kneel down
somewhere with you of all people and pray."
§ 6
Presently our correspondence fell away. The gaps between our letters
lengthened out. We never wrote regularly because for that there must be
a free exchange upon daily happenings, and neither of us cared to dwell
too closely on our immediate lives. We had a regard for one another that
left our backgrounds vague and shadowy. She had made her appeal across
the sundering silences to me and I had answered, and we had poured out
certain things from our minds. We could not go on discussing. I was a
very busy man now, and she did not write except on my replies.
For a gap of nearly four months neither of us had anything to say in a
letter at all. I think that in time our correspondence might have
altogether died away. Then she wrote again in a more familiar strain to
tell me of certain definite changes of relationship and outlook. She
said that the estrangement between herself and Justin had increased
during the past year; that they were going to live practically apart;
she for the most part in the Surrey house where her two children lived
with their governesses and maids. But also she meant to snatch weeks and
seasons for travel. Upon that they had been disputing for some time. "I
know it is well with the children," she wrote; "why should I be in
perpetual attendance? I do nothing for them except an occasional kiss,
or half-an-hour's romping. Why should one pretend? Justin and I have
wrangled over this question of going away, for weeks, but at last
feminine persistence has won. I am going to travel in my own fashion and
see the world. With periodic appearances at his side in London and
Scotland. We have agreed at least on one thing, and that is upon a
companion; she is to be my secretary in title, my moral guarantor in
fact, and her name which is her crowning glory is Stella Summersley
Satchel. She is blonde, erect, huffy-mannered and thoroughly up to both
sides of her work. I partly envy her independence and rectitude--partly
only. It's odd and quite inconsistent of me that I don't envy her
altogether. In theory I insist that a woman should not have charm,--it
is our undoing. But when I meet one without it----!
"I shall also trail a maid, but I guess that young woman will learn what
it is to be left behind in half the cities of Europe before I have done
with her. I always lose my maids. They are so much more passive and
forgettable than luggage--abroad that is. And Justin usually in the old
days used to remember about them. And his valet used to see after
them,--a most attentive man. Justin cannot, he says, have his wife
abroad with merely a companion; people would talk; maid it must be as
well. And so in a week or less I shall start, unusually tailor-made, for
South Germany and all that jolly country, companioned and maided. I
shall tramp--on the feet God has given me--in stout boots. Miss
Summersley Satchel marches, I understand, like the British infantry but
on a vegetarian 'basis,'--fancy calling your nourishment a 'basis'!--the
maid and so forth by _Èilgut_...."
§ 7
After the letter containing that announcement she wrote to me twice
again, once from Oban and then after a long interval from Siena. The
former was a scornfully minute description of the English at their
holidays and how the conversation went among the women after dinner.
"They are like a row of Japanese lanterns, all blown out long ago and
swinging about in a wind," she wrote--an extravagant image that yet
conveys something of the large, empty, unilluminating effect of a sort
of social intercourse very vividly. In the second letter she was
concerned chiefly with the natural beauty of Italy and how latterly she
had thrice wept at beautiful things, and what this mystery of beauty
could be that had such power over her emotions.
"All up the hillside before the window as I write the herbage is thick
with anemones. They aren't scattered evenly and anyhow amongst the other
things but in little clusters and groups that die away and begin again,
like the repetitions of an air in some musical composition. I have been
sitting and looking at them for the better part of an hour, loving them
more and then more, and the sweet sunlight that is on them and in among
them.... How marvellous are these things, Stephen! All these little
exquisite things that are so abundant in the world, the gleaming lights
and blossoms, the drifting scents! At times these things bring me to
weeping.... I can't help it. It is as if God who is so stern and high,
so terrible to all our appeals, took pity for a moment and saw fit to
speak very softly and tenderly...."
That was the last letter I was ever to have from her.
CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH
THE LAST MEETING
§ 1
In the summer of 1911 immediately after the coronation of King George
there came one of those storms of international suspicion that ever and
again threaten Europe with war. It seems to have been brewed by some
German adepts at Welt-Politik, those privileged makers of giant bombs
who sit at the ears of foreign ministers suggesting idiotic wickedness,
and it was brewed with a sublime ignorance of nearly every reality in
the case. A German warship without a word of notice seized Agadir on the
Atlantic coast of Morocco, within the regions reserved to French
influence; an English demand for explanations was uncivilly disregarded
and England and France and presently Germany began vigorous preparations
for war. All over the world it was supposed that Germany had at last
flung down the gauntlet. In England the war party was only too eager to
grasp what it considered to be a magnificent opportunity. Heaven knows
what the Germans had hoped or intended by their remarkable coup; the
amazing thing to note is that they were not prepared to fight, they had
not even the necessary money ready and they could not get it; they had
perhaps never intended to fight, and the autumn saw the danger disperse
again into diplomatic bickerings and insincerely pacific professions.
But in the high summer the danger had not dispersed, and in common with
every reasonable man I found myself under the shadow of an impending
catastrophe that would have been none the less gigantic and tragic
because it was an imbecility. It was an occasion when everyone needs
must act, however trivially disproportionate his action may be to the
danger. I cabled Gidding who was in America to get together whatever
influences were available there upon the side of pacific intervention,
and I set such British organs as I could control or approach in the same
direction. It seemed probable that Italy would be drawn into any
conflict that might ensue; it happened that there was to be a Conference
of Peace Societies in Milan early in September, and thither I decided to
go in the not very certain hope that out of that assemblage some form of
European protest might be evolved.
That August I was very much run down. I had been staying in London
through almost intolerably hot weather to attend a Races Congress that
had greatly disappointed me. I don't know particularly now why I had
been disappointed nor how far the feeling was due to my being generally
run down by the pressure of detailed work and the stress of thinking
about large subjects in little scraps of time. But I know that a kind of
despair came over me as I sat and looked at that multicolored assembly
and heard in succession the heavy platitudes of white men, the slick,
thin cleverness of Hindoos, the rich-toned florid rhetoric of negroes. I
lost sight of any germ of splendid possibility in all those people, and
saw all too plainly the vanity, the jealousy, the self-interests that
show up so harshly against the professions of every altruistic movement.
It seemed all such a windy business against the firm prejudices, the
vast accumulated interests that grind race against race. We had no