"Stephen, my dear, my brother, I am intolerably unhappy. I do not know what to do with myself, or what there is to hope for in life. I am like a prisoner in a magic cage and I do not know the word that will release me. How is it with you? Are you unhappy beyond measure or are you not; and if you are not, what are you doing with life? Have you found any secret that makes living tolerable and understandable? Write to me, write to me at least and tell me that.... Please write to me.
"Do you remember how long ago you and I sat in the old Park at Burnmore, 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....