The Passionate Friends
Of all the many things I have found beautiful and wonderful, Mary was
the most wonderful to me, she is in my existence like a sunlit lake seen
among mountains, of all the edges by which life has wrought me she was
the keenest. Nevertheless she was not all my life, nor the form of all
my life. For a time after her death I could endure nothing of my home, I
could not bear the presence of your mother or you, I hated the
possibility of consolation, I went away into Italy, and it was only by
an enormous effort that I could resume my interest in that scheme of
work to which my life is given. But it is manifest I still live, I live
and work and feel and share beauty....
It seems to me more and more as I live longer, that most poetry and most
literature and particularly the literature of the past is discordant
with the vastness and variety, the reserves and resources and
recuperations of life as we live it to-day. It is the expression of life
under cruder and more rigid conditions than ours, lived by people who
loved and hated more naïvely, aged sooner and died younger than we do.
Solitary persons and single events dominated them as they do not
dominate us. We range wider, last longer, and escape more and more from
intensity towards understanding. And already this astounding blow begins
to take its place among other events, as a thing strange and terrible
indeed, but related to all the strangeness and mystery of life, part of
the universal mysteries of despair and futility and death that have
troubled my consciousness since childhood. For a time the death of Mary
obscured her life for me, but now her living presence is more in my mind
again. I begin to see that it is the reality of her existence and not
the accidents of her end that matter most. It signifies less that she
should have flung out of life when it seemed that her living could only
have meant disaster to herself and to all she loved, than that all her
life should have been hampered and restricted. Through all her life this
brave and fine and beautiful being was for the most part of her
possibilities, wasted in a splendid setting, magnificently wasted if you
will, but wasted.
§ 2
It was that idea of waste that dominated my mind in a strange interview
I had with Justin. For it became necessary for me to see Justin in order
that we should stamp out the whispers against her that followed her
death. He had made it seem an accidental death due to an overdose of the
narcotic she employed, but he had not been able to obliterate altogether
the beginnings of his divorce proceedings. There had been talk on the
part of clerks and possible witnesses. But of all that I need not tell
you here; what matters is that Justin and I could meet without hatred or
violence. I met a Justin grey-haired and it seemed to me physically
shrunken, more than ever slow-speaking, with his habit of attentive
silences more marked and that dark scar spread beyond his brows.
We had come to our parting, we had done our business with an
affectation of emotional aloofness, and then suddenly he gripped me by
the arm. "Stratton," he said, "we two---- We killed her. We tore her to
pieces between us...."
I made no answer to this outbreak.
"We tore her to pieces," he repeated. "It's so damned silly. One gets
angry--like an animal."
I became grotesquely anxious to assure him that, indeed, she and I had
been, as they say, innocent throughout our last day together. "You were
wrong in all that," I said. "She kept her faith with you. We never
planned to meet and when we met----. If we had been brother and
sister----. Indeed there was nothing."
"I suppose," he said, "I ought to be glad of that. But now it doesn't
seem to matter very much. We killed her.... What does that matter to me
now?"
§ 3
And it is upon this effect of sweet and beautiful possibilities, caught
in the net of animal jealousies and thoughtless motives and ancient
rigid institutions, that I would end this writing. In Mary, it seems to
me, I found both womanhood and fellowship, I found what many have dreamt
of, love and friendship freely given, and I could do nothing but clutch
at her to make her my possession. I would not permit her to live except
as a part of my life. I see her now and understand her better than when
she was alive, I recall things that she said and wrote and it is clear
to me, clearer perhaps than it ever was to her, that she, with her
resentment at being in any sense property, her self-reliant thought, her
independence of standard, was the very prototype of that sister-lover
who must replace the seductive and abject womanhood, owned, mastered and
deceiving, who waste the world to-day. And she was owned, she was
mastered, she was forced into concealment. What alternative was there
for her? What alternative is there for any woman? She might perhaps have
kept her freedom by some ill-paid work and at the price of every other
impulse in her swift and eager nature. She might have become one of
those poor neuters, an independent woman.... Life was made impossible
for her and she was forced to die, according to the fate of all untimely
things. She was destroyed, not merely by the unconsidered, undisciplined
passions of her husband and her lover, but by the vast tradition that
sustains and enforces the subjugation of her sex. What I had from her,
and what she was, is but a mere intimation of all that she and I might
have made of each other and the world.
And perhaps in this story I have said enough for you to understand why
Mary has identified herself with something world-wide, has added to
herself a symbolical value, and why it is I find in the whole crowded
spectacle of mankind, a quality that is also hers, a sense of fine
things entangled and stifled and unable to free themselves from the
ancient limiting jealousies which law and custom embody. For I know that
a growing multitude of men and women outwear the ancient ways. The
blood-stained organized jealousies of religious intolerance, the
delusions of nationality and cult and race, that black hatred which
simple people and young people and common people cherish against all
that is not in the likeness of themselves, cease to be the undisputed
ruling forces of our collective life. We want to emancipate our lives
from this slavery and these stupidities, from dull hatreds and
suspicion. The ripening mind of our race tires of these boorish and
brutish and childish things. A spirit that is like hers, arises and
increases in human affairs, a spirit that demands freedom and gracious
living as our inheritance too long deferred, and I who loved her so
blindly and narrowly now love her spirit with a dawning understanding.
I will not be content with that compromise of jealousies which is the
established life of humanity to-day. I give myself, and if I can I will
give you, to the destruction of jealousy and of the forms and shelters
and instruments of jealousy, both in my own self and in the thought and
laws and usage of the world.
THE END
* * * * *
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