So they were married.
XIX
FIRST of all, weakened in body and mind by an epileptic stroke; then scared literally out of his wits, terrified into a mental and emotional stupor, by the belief that that which we know to have been an epileptic stroke was a visitation from an angry God; a victim, rather than a villain; the creature of disease and superstition, of heredity and education; Elias Bacharach had deserted and forgotten the woman whom he loved, and had allowed himself to be seduced into a marriage with a woman whom he did not love. That a reawakening, accompanied by all the horrors of despair and remorse, should come sooner or later, was, of course, inevitable. It did not come, however, till some nine months after his separation from Christine Redwood, which was some nine months too late.
I have in my possession a quantity of manuscript, in Elias's crabbed handwriting, which gives a deep and clear, though fragmentary, insight into the life he led after his marriage. It is in the form of a long, turbulent, and often hysterical letter, addressed by him, under circumstances which will in due time be explained, to Christine—a letter, however, which was never sent—and it bears date February, 1885. I have already made one or two quotations from it. I shall avail myself freely of it in the present chapter.
About the relations between himself and Tillie, Elias writes, “there is not much to be said. Our relations were perfectly amicable, but perfectly superficial. Man and wife in name, in reality we were simply good friends; scarcely that, indeed; scarcely more than friendly acquaintances. She was invariably bright, cheerful, amiable, unselfish. I tried to do my duty by her, as I conceived it; to be always kind to her, and to seize every opportunity that I saw to afford her pleasure, or to spare her annoyance. I dare say this was not enough. I dare say she deserved better of me than she got; that I ought to have striven to be her husband in a more genuine and vital sense of the word. But I did not; and if, in this way, I sinned against her, it was at least an unintentional sin, a sin of omission, and one which she remained unaware of. I was egotistical and self-centered, as it is my nature to be. She was not at all exacting. If I would listen to her when she talked, and admire her dresses, and enjoy her playing, and take her to the theater or to parties, she was quite contented. She neither asked, nor appeared to expect, any thing further. So that, though we saw each other every day, and were together a good deal of the time, we were as far as possible from being intimate. Our real, innermost selves never approached each other. In fact, she and my uncle were much more intimate than she and I. He was always having her to sit with him in his study, where he would talk to her of the subjects that interested him, or get her to read aloud to him, or to act as his amanuensis, and write under his dictation. She thought my uncle was a 'perfectly adorable old man'; and he called her 'the light of his declining years.'
“I, meanwhile, lived my own life, such as it was, in silence. But it was not much of a life. It was not especially enjoyable, and it was altogether valueless. I produced nothing, accomplished nothing, was of no earthly use or benefit to anybody in the world—except a sort of convenient appendage to my wife. My favorite occupation—the only one that I cared any thing about—consisted in getting away by myself, and reading. My studio was my castle. Once inside it, with the door closed behind me, I was sure of not being disturbed. I, had forsworn my painting, as I fancied, for good and all. I had got utterly discouraged about it, had lost all zest in it, had vowed never to return to it. But up here in my studio I had a lot of books; and here for hours I would sit at the window, reading. My appetite for reading had recently become voracious, insatiable. I can't convey to you an idea of how dependent I was upon my books. They were the world in which I lived, moved, had my being. Away from them, I kept thinking about them, longing to get back to them. Not that I derived so much pleasure from them, but simply that I was unhappy unless I had them. They were to me, I suppose, in my dead-and-alive condition, something like what his drug is to an opium-eater—not so harmful, of course, but just as indispensable: a stimulant, which I could not do without. What the books were, doesn't matter. All sorts, from the latest sensational novel, or wildest exposition of spiritualism, up to Milton and the Bible. Yet, perhaps, I ought to give you the names of some of these books, for some of them produced a very deep and vivid impression upon me, and no doubt contributed more or less to my subsequent state of mind—helped, I mean, to bring it on. Well, I reread Wilhelm Meister; and I read for the first time Rousseau's Confessions, de Musset's La Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle, and Browning's Inn Album and The Ring and the Book, besides many of his shorter poems. I mention these five particularly, because they were the ones that had really strong effects. They stirred me; pierced to my heart, and hurt me; where other books merely interested or amused me. What I mean is, they appealed to my emotions, where other books merely appealed to my intelligence. Especially Browning. When I read Browning, the exhilaration was almost physical. It was like breathing some vivifying atmosphere, like drinking some powerful elixir. It made me glow and tingle through and through. It was as though the very inmost quick of my spirit had been touched, and made to throb and thrill. I had never supposed, I would never have believed, that any book could possibly have exerted such a profound and irresistible influence over the reader. My sensation was like an acute pain, that yet somehow verged toward—not pleasure—something deeper and better than pleasure. No music, not even Beethoven's or Wagner's, ever moved me, ever carried me away, as these poems of Browning's did. They literally transfixed me, magnetized me, like the spell of a magician. The reason was, of course, partly because the poetry is in itself so great; so intense, so penetrating, so vibrant with the living truth, so warm with human blood and passion; and I don't believe that any man could read it understandingly without being affected by it very much as I was. But the reason was also partly personal. In The Ring and the Book I found expressed, in clear, straightforward language, all those deep, strenuous emotions which I myself had experienced in my love of you, which had always groped and struggled for expression, but which to me had always been inexpressible—yearnings which I had felt with all their force and ardor, which I had labored hard to speak, but which I had never been able to speak, any more than as if I had been dumb; which, pent up in my heart, and straining for an outlet, had sought one by means of broken syllables, glances, caresses. In The Ring and the Book I found them expressed; found my own unutterable secrets uttered. Oh, if only when you and I were together I had had The Ring and the Book to read aloud to you from! Then, perhaps, I could have made you feel how deeply, utterly, I loved you. In the Inn Album, too, another chapter of my own story was told, more of my own secrets were laid bare. The material conditions, the circumstances, the accidentals, to be sure, were totally different; but the essentials seemed to me the same. A man had irretrievably wronged a woman—a noble, beautiful woman, who loved him and trusted him. A lover had acted basely toward his sweetheart. And there, also, I found an expression for my remorse and my despair. But now I am anticipating. For the present these thoughts had not come to me—the thought of you, and of what had been between you and me, and of how I had wronged you. I mean to say, they had come to me after a fashion; now and then, spasmodically, by fits and starts; but they had not pierced more than skin-deep, and they had not taken fast hold. They had come and gone. Later on, they came and staid—like coals burning in my heart. For the present, I did a great deal of reading and scarcely any thinking. Sometimes, it is true, instead of reading, I would sit still, looking out of the window, and carrying on a certain mental process which might perhaps have been called thinking: but it was the sort of thinking known as mooning. I mean it was vague, listless, purposeless; it had no vigor, no point; and it bore no result. You, and our love, and the misery I had caused you, were the subjects of it, yes; but it was like thinking in a fog. It had not grown intense and clear. It had not crystallized. It awoke in my breast a sort of sluggish, languid melancholy, instead of the pain that I ought to have felt, and by and by did feel—and feel now, and so long as I live shall feel. Whatever there is in me that is not wholly bad and callous, what I suppose would be called my better nature, was just preparing to wake up; and these were the dull, premonitory throes. I was just beginning to come to myself, out of a long lethargy. My remorse was just beginning to kindle. It had not yet sprung into the white-hot continuous fire that it has since become.”
In another place he says: “As I write to you now, what I am trying hard to do, is to get at close quarters with the real, bare truth; to look straight and steadily at it; and to tell you, as clearly and as calmly as I can, what I see. But the truth is so deep and subtle, though so unmistakable; and I am so unused to writing; and it is so hard for me to keep down my feelings, that I can't seem to find the right words. After I have written a sentence, when I come to read it over, it seems almost as though I might as well not have written at all. What I write does not express half clearly, or fully, or forcibly enough what is in my mind. So I can't help fearing that you may not understand. Yet my desire that you shall understand is so strong, I am so serious, so much in earnest, I can hardly believe it possible that my words can entirely fail to show you what I mean. If they should do so, if in this letter I do fail to make you understand, then I will say this: the only purpose that I have left in life will be defeated. That is the only object that I care to live for: to make you understand. Oh, I beg of you, try to understand. I have no right to ask you to do any thing, to expect any kindness, any common mercy even, from you: and yet I do ask, I implore you to read this letter through, and to try to understand what I am trying to express. Not a single line is written which I do not feel in the bottom of my heart. I am striving honestly, with all my might, to strip my soul naked before you. And when what I write seems feeble or obscure, please endeavor to pierce through to the meaning and the feeling of it. You have a kind and pitiful heart; and if a human being, no matter how low or base, called out to you in great pain to stoop and do a little thing—a little, easy thing—to soothe and relieve him, I know you would do it. Well, that is the way I call out to you now, and beg you to read and try to understand my letter. As I write, I feel like a dumb man, his heart big and sore with something that presses desperately to be spoken, laboring to speak. Well, what I want to make you understand is this. Very slowly and gradually, by imperceptible degrees, a great change was coming over me, was being wrought in me. This change was really nothing but a return to health, mental and moral health. Ever since that night on which we were to have been married, I had been mentally and morally sick—in an unhealthy, unnatural state. My moral nature, and many of my mental faculties, had lain torpid and inactive, as if deadened—had not performed their functions. Well, health was now slowly returning to them, health and vitality. The depths of my spirit—it is a canting phrase, but it expresses exactly what I mean—the depths of my spirit, which had long lain stagnant, were being stirred. I had always comprehended, as a mere intellectual proposition, how much you must have suffered. It was obvious. Dull and half stupefied as I was, I could not help comprehending that. It was like two-and-two-make-four. But the comprehension had got no further than my brain. It had not touched my heart, and made it shudder with horror, and burn with remorse, for my own baseness, and for the agony that I had inflicted upon you, as it has done since. I had comprehended, but I had not felt it. My love of you had been struck dead; and my imagination—or whatever the faculty is, which causes us to sympathize with another's pain—was failing to act. So I had gone about the daily affairs of my life, in no wise troubled or affected by the fact, which I was perfectly aware of, that you, at the same time, in solitude, were suffering the worst sorrow possible in the world—yes, absolutely the worst; I know it. I had gone about, and got what apology for enjoyment, what vulgar amusement, I could, out of life; had eaten, drunken, talked, laughed, read, smoked, paid calls, listened to music, all precisely as though you did not exist, never had existed; and finally I had become engaged and married; and all the while I knew what hopeless, speechless anguish you were enduring, thanks to me; I knew it, but did not care. Now and then I would think of it; but so dead was my heart, the thought never aroused a single throe of pain in it. I thought of it on the night of my wedding. In the midst of the dancing, in the midst of the loud, romping merriment, I thought: 'What is she doing at this moment?' But it was nothing like sympathy or self-reproach, that prompted me. It was a sense of the curious incongruity. I shrugged my shoulders, said to myself that I could not help it, and went on dancing. This will show you how low I had sunken, how callous I had become; and you may imagine how I despise myself, how I hate and abhor myself, as I recall it now. Oh, my God! my God!—Christine, for God's sake, when you read this, don't harden against me, because of it, and refuse to read any more. Don't stop reading. For God's sake, in mercy to me, go on reading to the end. Don't close your ears against me, and refuse to listen. The only alleviation of my torments that I have, is the hope that you will read this letter through, and understand how I have repented.... Well, as I say, this state of being was now slowly, gradually, changing. Not a day passed now but I would think of you, and of every thing that had been between you and me, from the beginning to the end; and now these thoughts did arouse pains in my heart—vague pains, that I did not understand—dull pains, such as one feels in sleep, or while under the influence of an opiate—but still, certainly, pain. As I said before, I was only just beginning to come to myself. My realization of what I had done, of what you had suffered, of what I had made you suffer, had not yet crystallized. My love had not yet waked up. My remorse had not yet got really afire. But all of a sudden, one day, the complete change came. The change was precipitated.
“It was a Friday afternoon late in February, a year ago—dark, rainy, warmish. My wife had gone to the rehearsal at Steinway Hall. I had agreed to meet her in the lobby, at the end, and bring her home. All day long, that day, I had done nothing but mope. I had sat at my studio window looking out into the gray, wet park, or up into the heavy, inky clouds, and giving myself over to the blues—thinking that there was the world, full of interests and activities, the same world that I had used to find so pleasant, and in which I had hoped to work and to be of service, the same world quite unaltered; and that yet, somehow, unchanged as it appeared to be, it had changed totally for me, had lost all its flavor for me, all its attraction for me; the light, the spirit, had died out of it. I got no pleasure from it. I was of no use in it. I was so much inert, obstructive stuff and lumber. Then, why did I continue to exist? Neither useful nor happy, what excuse for being had I? Why should I not at once be annihilated and done away with? etc., etc. This was the strain that my mind had been running in all day long. Then, toward five o'clock, I put on my hat and walked around to Steinway Hall to wait for Tillie. It was singular, and even now I can not account for it by any ordinary theory, that, as I stood there in the lobby waiting, while the audience, mostly women, passed out, I was conscious of a strange trembling of the heart, such as one feels in anticipation of some momentous event, such as usually accompanies what we call a presentiment—a presentiment that something portentous for our good or for our evil is about to happen. I could not understand it at all. I could not imagine what it was caused by. And yet, notwithstanding, I could not subdue it. It went on from moment to moment getting more intense; troubling me, perplexing me. I concluded that it must be the wind-up and climax of my blues, just as a dull, dark day sometimes winds up and reaches its climax in a thunder-storm. I said to myself, 'You have not felt any thing like this for nearly a year. This is the sort of thing you used to feel when you were in love—after you had rung Christine's door-bell, while you were waiting and chafing for the door to be opened.' Meantime the audience were pouring out past me, laughing, chatting, greeting their acquaintances, putting up their umbrellas; and I was keeping a look-out for my wife. When, all of a sudden, my heart, which had been trembling in the way I have described, all of a sudden it gave a great, terrible leap, and then stood stock still; and I could not breathe nor move, but was literally petrified, rooted to the spot, and felt a fearful pain begin to burn in my breast. For I saw—I saw you. Oh, my God! I saw you come out of the hall, and move slowly through the lobby, passing within almost a yard of me, so that I could have stretched out my hand and touched you, so that, if I had whispered your name, you would have heard me, and saw you go down the stairs and disappear in the street. I stood there with wide, staring eyes and parted lips, like a man turned to stone. How shall I ever disentangle, and put before you in some sort of consecutive order, the great crowd of thoughts and emotions that suddenly, and all at the same time, broke loose in my heart and brain? In that brief interval—it could not have been more than a minute altogether—I lived through almost every thing that I have lived through since. It was all compressed into that minute. I shall try hard to give you some sort of an account of it, to make it as clear and as comprehensible as I can. But I know that, however hard I try, I shall only be able to give you a very meager and faint conception. If I could only see you, and speak to you—if for one moment I could kneel down at your feet, and touch your hand, and look into your face, and utter one long, deep sigh—oh, I should feel then as though I had in some degree expressed what was, and has been ever since, in my heart and mind. Sometimes, when I have listened to certain pieces of music, I have felt that in them was the expression for my unspeakable emotions. I have felt this about some of Chopin's impromptus and nocturnes—that if I could somehow make you hear them, you would somehow understand. Do you know the Impromptu in C-sharp minor? That sometimes seems to express almost perfectly my grief and passion and remorse and hopeless longing. But—but to touch your hand, and look into your eyes, and sob at your feet—I would be willing to die at the end of one minute spent that way. But see—see how I am compelled to sit here, away from you, and realize that never, never, so long as I live, shall I be allowed to approach you, or speak to you. Can you imagine the agony it is, to yearn with your whole soul to speak one word to a woman; to have your whole soul and heart and mind burdened with something that burns like fire, and will never cease burning until you have emptied soul and heart and mind at her feet; and to know that she is scarcely a mile distant from you, in the same city with you; and yet to know that if she were dead she would not be further removed from you, it could not be more impossible for you ever to approach her, ever to speak with her? Can you imagine that? Oh, sometimes I can not believe it—believe that facts can be so inexorable. Sometimes it seems against nature that a man's whole strength, whole life, can be concentrated in one single wish, and yet the fulfillment of that wish be absolutely beyond hope. It is too stupendous, too monstrous. Oh, to think! To think that at this very moment you, your own living self, are almost within reach of my voice! It would not take half an hour to bring me to your side. And once there, once in your actual presence—Oh, my God! This unceasing agony would be ended, this unutterable agony would be uttered. We two should be together once again—you and I. Oh, the joy, the joy, to sob out all our grief together, and soothe each other's pain! And yet, if I were at the other extremity of the earth, or if you were dead, it could not be more impossible, I could not be more hopeless. Christine!