The Passionate Friends
She paused and stuck her elbows on the desk and looked me in the eyes.
And suddenly that sweet, frank smile of hers swept like sunshine across
the wintry desolation of her face. "We've both been having a time," she
said. "This odd little world,--it's battered us with its fists. For such
a little. And we were both so ridiculously happy. Do you remember it,
the rocks and the sunshine and all those twisted and tangled little
plants? And how the boat leaked and you baled it out! And the parting,
and how you trudged up that winding path away from me! A grey figure
that stopped and waved--a little figure--such a virtuous figure! And
then, this storm! this _awful_ hullabaloo! Lawyers, curses, threats----.
And Stella Summersley Satchel like a Fury of denunciation. What hatred
that woman has hidden from me! It must have accumulated.... It's
terrible to think, Stephen, how much I must have tried her.... Oh! how
far away those Alps are now, Stephen! Like something in another life....
And here we are!--among the consequences."
"But,--you were saying we could stop the divorce."
"Yes. We can. I can. But I wanted to see you,--before I did. Somehow I
don't feel lonely with you. I had to see you.... It's good to see you."
She looked me in the face. Her tired eyes lit with a gleam of her former
humor.
"Have you thought," she asked, "of all that will happen if there is a
divorce?"
"I mean to fight every bit of it."
"They'll beat you."
"We'll see that."
"But they will. And then?"
"Why should one meet disaster half way?"
"Stephen!" she said; "what will happen to you when I am not here to make
you look at things? Because I shan't be here. Not within reach of
you.... There are times when I feel like a mother to you. Never more
than now...."
And then with rapid touches she began to picture the disaster before
me. She pictured the Court and our ineffectual denials, she made me
realize the storm of hostility that was bound to burst over us. "And
think of me," she said. "Stripped I shall be and outcast."
"Not while I live!"
"But what can you do for me? You will have Rachel. How can you stand by
me? You can't be cruel to Rachel. You know you can't be cruel to Rachel.
Look me in the face, Stephen; tell me. Yes.... Then how can you stand by
me?"
"Somehow!" I cried foolishly and stopped.
"They'll use me to break your back with costs and damages. There'll be
those children of yours to think of...."
"My God!" I cried aloud. "Why do you torment me? Haven't I thought
enough of those things?... Haven't I seen the ruin and the shame, the
hopeless trap, men's trust in me gone, my work scattered and ended
again, my children growing up to hear this and that exaggeration of our
story. And you----. All the bravery of your life scattered and wasted.
The thing will pursue us all, cling to us. It will be all the rest of
our lives for us...."
I covered my face with my hands.
When I looked up, her face was white and still, and full of a strange
tenderness. "I wouldn't have you, Stephen--I wouldn't have you be cruel
to Rachel.... I just wanted to know--something.... But we're wandering.
We're talking nonsense. Because as I said, there need be no divorce.
There will be no divorce at all. That's what I came to tell you. I shall
have to pay--in a way, Stephen.... Not impossibly. Don't think it is
anything impossible...."
Then she bit her lips and sat still....
"My dear," I whispered, "if we had taken one another at the
beginning...."
But she went on with her own thoughts.
"You love those little children of yours," she said. "And that trusting
girl-wife.... Of course you love them. They're yours. Oh! they're so
deeply--yours.... Yours...."
"Oh my dear! don't torture me! I do love them. But I love you too."
"No," she said, "not as you do them."
I made a movement of protest.
"No," she said, whitely radiant with a serenity I had never seen before
in her face. "You love me with your brain. With your soul if you like. I
_know_, my poor bleeding Stephen!--Aren't those tears there? Don't mind
my seeing them, Stephen.... Poor dear! Poor dear!.... You love _them_
with your inmost heart. Why should you mind that I see you do?... All my
life I've been wrong, Stephen, and now I know too late. It's the things
we own we love, the things we buy with our lives.... Always I have been
hard, I've been a little hard.... Stephen, my dear, I loved you, always
I have loved you, and always I have tried to keep myself.... It's too
late.... I don't know why I am talking like this.... But you see I can
make a bargain now--it's not an impossible bargain--and save you and
save your wife and save your children----"
"But how?" I said, still doubting.
"Never mind how, Stephen. Don't ask me how now. Nothing very difficult.
Easy. But I shall write you no more letters--see you--no more. Never.
And that's why I had to come, you see, why I was able to come to you,
just to see you and say good-bye to you, and take leave of you, dear
Love that I threw away and loved too late...."
She bit her lip and faced me there, a sweet flushed living thing, with a
tear coursing down her cheek, and her mouth now firm and steady.
"You can stop this divorce?" I said, "But how, Mary?"
"No, don't ask me how. At a price. It's a bargain. No, no! Don't think
that,--a bargain with Justin, but not degrading. Don't, my dear, let the
thought of it distress you. I have to give earnests.... Never, dear,
never through all the dusty rest of life again will you and I speak
together. Never! Even if we come face to face once more--no word...."
"Mary," I said, "what is it you have to do? You speak as if---- What is
it Justin demands?"
"No! do not ask me that.... Tell me--you see we've so much to talk
about, Stephen--tell me of all you are going to do. Everything. Because
I've got to make a great vow of renunciation--of you. Not to think
again--not even to think of you again.... No, no. I'm not even to look
for you in the papers any more. There's to be no tricks this time. And
so you see I want to fill up my mind with you. To store myself with you.
Tell me your work is worth it--that it's not like the work of everyone.
Tell me, Stephen--_that_. I want to believe that--tremendously. Don't be
modest now. That will be cruel. I want to believe that I am at last to
do something that is worth doing, something not fruitless...."
"Are you to go into seclusion," I asked suddenly, "to be a nun----?"
"It is something like that," she said; "very like that. But I have
promised--practically--not to tell you that. Tell me your soul, Stephen,
now. Give me something I may keep in my mind through--through all those
years of waiting...."
"But where?" I cried. "What years of waiting?"
"In a lonely place, my dear--among mountains. High and away. Very
beautiful, but lonely. A lake. Great rocks.... Yes,--like that place. So
odd.... I shall have so much time to think, and I shall have no
papers--no news. I mustn't talk to you of that. Don't let me talk to you
of that. I want to hear about this world, this world I am going to
leave, and how you think you are going on fighting in the hot and dusty
struggle--to make the world cool and kind and reasonable, to train minds
better, to broaden ideas ... all those things you believe in. All those
things you believe in and stick to--even when they are dull. Now I am
leaving it, I begin to see how fine it is--to fight as you want to
fight. A tiresome inglorious lifelong fight.... You really believe,
Stephen?"
§ 11
And then suddenly I read her purpose.
"Mary," I cried, and stood up and laid my hand upon her arm, "Tell me
what is it you mean to do. What do you mean to do?"
She looked up at me defensively and for a moment neither of us spoke.
"Mary," I said, and could not say what was in my thoughts.
"You are wrong," she lied at last....
She stood up too and faced me. I held her shoulder and looked into her
eyes.
The gong of my little clock broke the silence.
"I must go, Stephen," she said. "I did not see how the time was slipping
by."
I began to entreat her and she to deny. "You don't understand," she
said, "you don't understand. Stephen!--I had hoped you would understand.
You see life,--not as I see it. I wanted--all sorts of splendid things
and you--begin to argue. You are shocked, you refuse to understand....
No. No. Take your hands off me, Stephen dear, and let me go. Let me go!"
"But," I said, stupid and persistent, "what are you going to do?"
"I've told you. Stephen. I've told you. As much as I can tell you. And
you think--this foolish thing. As though I could do that! Stephen, if I
promise, will you let me go?..."
§ 12
My mind leaps from that to the moment in the afternoon, when torn by
intolerable distresses and anxiety I knocked and rang, and again knocked
at the door of the house she occupied in South Street, with the
intention of making one last appeal to her to live--if, indeed, it was
death she had in mind. I had let her go from me and instantly a hundred
neglected things had come into my head. I could go away with her, I
could threaten to die with her; it seemed to me that nothing in all the
world mattered if only I could thrust back the dark hand of death to
which she had so manifestly turned. I knew, I knew all along that her
extorted promise would not bind her. I knew and I let the faintest
shadow of uncertainty weaken and restrain me. And I went to her too
late. I saw instantly that I was too late when the door opened and
showed me the scared face of a young footman whose eyes were red with
tears.
"Are you Doctor----?" he asked of my silence.
"I want----" I said. "I must speak to Lady Mary."
He was wordless for a moment. "She--she died, sir," he said. "She's died
suddenly." His face quivered, he was blubbering. He couldn't say
anything more; he stood snivelling in the doorway.
For some moments I remained confronting him as if I would dispute his
words. Some things the mind contests in the face of invincible
conviction. One wants to thrust back time....
CHAPTER THE TWELFTH
THE ARRAIGNMENT OF JEALOUSY
§ 1
I sit here in this graciously proportioned little room which I shall
leave for ever next week, for already your mother begins to pack for
England again. I look out upon the neat French garden that I have
watched the summer round, and before me is the pile of manuscript that
has grown here, the story of my friendship and love for Mary and of its
tragic end, and of all the changes of my beliefs and purposes that have
arisen out of that. I had meant it to be the story of my life, but how
little of my life is in it! It gives, at most, certain acute points,
certain salient aspects. I begin to realize for the first time how thin
and suggestive and sketchy a thing any novel or biography must be. How
we must simplify! How little can we convey the fullness of life, the
glittering interests, the interweaving secondary aspects, the dawns and
dreams and double refractions of experience! Even Mary, of whom I have
labored to tell you, seems not so much expressed as hidden beneath these
corrected sheets. She who was so abundantly living, who could love like
a burst of sunshine and give herself as God gives the world, is she here
at all in this pile of industrious inexpert writing?
Life is so much fuller than any book can be. All this story can be
read, I suppose, in a couple of hours or so, but I have been living and
reflecting upon and reconsidering the substance of it for over forty
years. I do not see how this book can give you any impression but that
of a career all strained upon the frame of one tragic relationship, yet
no life unless it is a very short young life can have that simplicity.