“But there! I am losing control of myself, crying out and raving in my despair. But what I have set myself to do, is to keep perfectly calm, and, by the aid of all my forces, to try to give you a clear statement of what I have been through. If I ever succeed in making you realize how thoroughly I have understood your pain, how completely I have appreciated the enormity of my own conduct, and how bitterly I have repented it, I shall be almost happy, and I shall have discharged a duty toward you—the only duty that I have a right any more to owe you.
“Well, now, I tell you that in that one minute—in the time that elapsed from the instant I first caught sight of you, down to the instant when you disappeared in the street below—in that minute, with intensity proportionate to the rapidity, I lived through nearly every thing that I have lived through since. All my vivid realization of how utterly base I myself had been, and of your unspeakable agony, caused by me, your despair, your humiliation; all my remorse, my yearning to atone for what could never be atoned for, to repair the irreparable wrong that I had done; all my sense of what I had wantonly flung away, and lost beyond recovery; all my despair; in a word, all my love—love that had lain stunned, as I supposed dead, but now suddenly had come to, never to let me rest any more: these, and much else that I shall not attempt to reduce to words, these were what sprang upon me all at once, shaking my soul to its foundations, and holding me rigid, horrified, in their grasp. Oh, help me to find an expression for what strains so hard to be spoken. I have just read over what I have written. It sounds vague, cold, formal. If I had left the paper blank, it would have done about as well. What I have written conveys only the weak echo of what I want to say, of what I feel. I stood there in the lobby of Steinway Hall; and I watched you pass under my eyes; and I saw how pale you were, how large and dark and sorrowful your eyes were; and suddenly I knew, I understood, how I, my very self, had made you suffer, you whom I loved, and how never, never, no matter how long I might live, could I in any way do any thing to soothe you, to comfort you, to make up to you for the suffering I had caused you; I knew and understood all this; and my heart went out to you, bounding and burning with a thousand fierce emotions, with an anguish of remorse and love—oh, my sweet, injured lady beautiful, frail Christine!—and now, now when I try to give you some faint idea of it, I am as helpless to do so, as if I were trying to scream out in a nightmare, and my voice failed me, and my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth. What if I had trampled down all conventional restraints, and then and there, in spite of the crowd, in spite of every thing, had rushed forward and stopped you, and thrown myself upon the ground before you, abasing myself at your feet, and just moaned out loud—letting it all burst forth in one good, deep, satisfying sob? My heart throbs hard at the thought. Yet, of course, I had no right to do it. If I had done it, I should only have relieved myself, at the cost of paining you—you whom, God knows, I have already pained enough.. . . Oh, well, I must try to do my best with pen and ink. Well, as I say, I stood there, breathing heavily, at last, after many months of death, at last alive, I stood there like that, when—when my wife came up, and took my arm, and demanded, startled by my appearance, what the matter was. My wife! And I had just seen you; and my soul was full of you, you whom I had wronged and lost! And here was my wife, taking my arm, speaking to me, emphasizing the antithesis. The past and the present! What I had given up, and what I had got in place of it! After my glimpse of you, the reality—Tillie! Oh, it was as though a starving man had just seen bread, smelled meat, and then, looking into his own hand, had found a stone there. She took my arm; and I turned her question as best I could; and I led her home. Conceive how, as I walked home from Steinway Hall this Friday afternoon, the ghost of a certain other Friday afternoon bore me company. One Friday afternoon, only a little more than a year earlier, in December, 1882, you had gone with me there, to hear the Damnation of Faust. Do you remember? You had sat at my side, close at my side. You had looked into my eyes, had touched my arm, had spoken to me. The sweetness of the rose that you wore in your bosom, had filled my nostrils. For one instant, one delirious instant, your breath, your very breath, had fallen upon my cheek! You had allowed me to wrap you in your cloak, when you felt a draught—in the fur circular you used to wear; I remember the faint perfume that always clung to it. We were so intimate, so confidential, you and I! You were happy. And I loved you; and I had the possibility of winning your love open before me. And now! God, to think that the possibility which that afternoon held safe in store for me, had been used and wasted! To think that by no remaining possibility it could ever be won back! Every thing was destroyed. I myself, by my own voluntary act, had destroyed every thing—even hope. Well, well, my wife and I walked home. My brain and my heart were burning. Chaos was let loose in them. I wanted to scream out, to beat my breast, to rend my garments. But I had, instead, to put on an indifferent face, exchange commonplaces with her, take her home; and, it being Sabbath by this time, had to join in the praying and the Scripture-reading, and all that. Of course, I was eager, wild, to get away, by myself. But I had to sit it out with the family—my wife, her mother, my uncle—till ten o'clock that night. I was pretty nearly beside myself. But at last I escaped, and got into my studio. There is no use my writing about that night, the night I passed alone up here in my studio—alone with you; for, so intense was my thought of you, you were all but palpable at my side. I had given you back, as I supposed, all your letters—every keepsake I had to connect me with the past. But this night, as the reward of much ransacking, I found in the drawer of my desk the very first note you had ever written me, the one in which you said you would go with me to the exhibition. Do you remember? How we walked up and down the galleries? And how you leaned upon my arm? And the little red bonnet that you wore? And how, afterward, we went to Delmonico's? That little note, ever since, has been the most precious of all my possessions. Your own hand traced these letters! Your own breath fell upon this paper! What effect it had upon me that night, I shall not attempt to tell you. Think of this: it still kept a faint trace of its fragrance—of the sweet smell it had had, when you first sent it to me. That that should have remained, that immaterial, evanescent perfume! That that should have outlasted the rest! No; there is no use of my writing a line about that night. I should only be incoherent, if I tried. All I will say is this: if you had cared about revenge, and had witnessed my suffering that night, you would have been satisfied.”
Still elsewhere, he goes on as follows: “Christine, what I want to say to you is very simple. I don't understand why I should have so much difficulty in saying it, why every attempt I make at saying it should be such a wretched failure. I suppose it is because, when I bring my mind to bear upon it, when I look it squarely in the face, it appalls me so, I get so excited, my feelings get so wrought up, that I lose the self-command which a man must retain, in order to express himself clearly and fully with his pen. It is as if, instead of saying what I have to say, fluently and directly, I were to falter, and stammer, and gasp forth inarticulate, unmeaning sounds. If only the impossible were not impossible; if only the hopeless were not hopeless; if for one minute I could stand in your presence; alone with you, and look into your eyes, and touch your hand, and speak one word to you—just call you by your name, Christine!—or, no, not even do that, not even speak, but simply stand there silent, and look at you: then, I feel sure that somehow you would understand, and then I could find something like peace. You would understand by instinct, by intuition, what my mind and heart are full of. If such a meeting might only come to pass! But I do not delude myself. I know that it never can come to pass—never, not if we go on living in the same city for fifty years. Constant and intense as my longing to see you is, fiercely as my heart beats at the thought of meeting you, I know that I might as well long to see, think of meeting, one who is dead. I am a married man, and have no right to seek to see you. But even if I were not a married man, you, whose scorn and hatred of me must be bottomless, you would spurn me, you would refuse, shuddering, to look at me, or to listen to me. I know it. Even if you ever, in your holy goodness and mercy, can forgive me in some degree for what I have done, I know you never can forgive me enough to let me approach you, to let me speak to you by word of mouth. The mere idea of meeting me, I suppose, must always be full of horror for you. I can never atone for the wrong I have done you. I can never even tell you of my remorse, and beseech your forgiveness, except by writing. So I write, begging you, in charity, to read and to try and get my meaning. If it were not for the hope that you will read this letter through, I believe my agony would drive me mad. This hope is the only thing that mitigates it, and makes it bearable.
“Well, then, here is the simple truth, told as simply as, by my utmost effort, I can tell it. For a period of some months, I had been in a condition which you must let me compare roughly to somnambulism—a sort of daze, a dull, half-waking trance. While in that condition, a great number of my mental and moral faculties had lain absolutely dormant—just as much so, as if I had not possessed them. From that unconscious fit into which I fell on the night of our wedding, I had never perfectly recovered. My body had recovered, yes, and a part of my mind—the every-day, working part. But the rest of my mind, the better part of it, had never emerged from the coma which it sank into then. And during this period, I want to say, I do not think I was, in the ordinary sense, responsible for what I did. I was mentally responsible: that is, I knew what I was doing, and I chose to do it. But I was not exactly morally responsible, because morally I was blind. My moral sense—my heart and conscience, I mean, were in a state of suspended animation; and I acted without their guidance. I don't say this with a view to excusing myself. I say it, because I honestly believe that it is true, and because, to some extent, it accounts for my otherwise unaccountable way of acting. Well, let me call it somnambulism. Then, on that Friday afternoon, when I so unexpectedly caught sight of you in the lobby of Steinway Hall, there, at that instant, all of a sudden, I woke up; I came to my senses, in heart and mind was my complete self again. And awaking in this way, getting my moral eyes opened, my moral faculties into running order, I then for the first time, saw, realized, understood, what, while in that irresponsible, somnambulistic state, I had done. Dumfoundered, aghast, I saw the ruin I had wrought—ruin of your life, your world, and of mine—total, hopeless ruin. I have read of a man who dearly loved his wife, and who, one night, in his sleep, got up and murdered her. When he awoke next morning, and found her lying dead beside him, and made the horrible discovery that he himself had done it—well, he must have felt a little as I felt after I had seen you that day at Steinway Hall. And the worst of it—the aspect of it which was most unbearable, most infuriating—was this knowledge, that loomed up before me, as big and as unalterable as a mountain of granite: the knowledge that what I had done could never be undone; that the desolation to which I had reduced our world, could never be repaired; that, no matter how bitter my remorse was, no matter how poignant my regret, I could never atone for the wrong I had committed, never could win back again the treasure I had thrown away. It was a mountain of granite, I say, against which, frantically, with all my puny strength, I dashed myself; thereby making no impression, but falling back, bruised, stunned, disheartened. My knowledge now of your suffering, my knowledge of how I had made you suffer, and that, though my whole life yearned toward you with tenderness, love, contrition, unutterable, I never in all my life could do the slightest, smallest thing toward making amends to you, toward soothing the pain, healing the wounds, that I had inflicted upon you—upon you, my pale, sweet lady—oh, I ask you to imagine how heavily that knowledge weighed upon my spirit, how sharp its clutch was, how it would never let me rest, never allow me a moment of forgetfulness, but clung constantly and grimly, a monster with which it would be futile for me to hope to struggle. That last meeting between us, when you came here to my studio, to this very room, to the room I am writing in now, and I here, in my uncle's presence, threw you down and trampled upon you, and allowed him to lead you away, crushed and bleeding—that last meeting, when I still had it in my power to spare you all that shame and sorrow, to take you in my arms, and quiet all your pain, and kiss away all your fear, and to keep you—keep you for myself—oh, you may imagine how my memory of that meeting, my realization of how I had hurt and humiliated you, my recognition of the wasted possibilities it had held, would not out of my heart, but abode there all the time, eating into it like acid. The walls and ceiling of the room, which had been witnesses of that last meeting, seemed eternally to be crying it out at me. When I looked at the floor, it was as if I saw a blood-stain there where you had stood. Oh, to think that there for one long minute you did really stand, you yourself, within arm's-reach of me; and I might have put out my hand, and touched you, and taken hold of you, and kept you to me forever, but did not! To think that I let you go; and you went; and I did not call you back! Oh, God, if I had only come to my senses soon enough to have called you back! But no, no; you went; and there was an end of it all. Love, happiness, hope, all went out with you. I drove you out. I drove them out. Christine, for every single pain that I inflicted upon you at that meeting, I ask you to believe, I have never ceased to pay with the acutest anguish that I am capable of feeling. That spot on my floor where you stood—ah, God, how many thousand times have I kissed it since! Ah, God, if there were only some power in earth or heaven that could bring you back there, make you stand there, again, for just one minute more! And it was I—I, whose soul goes out to you with an immensity of love that I can not find words for—— I, who would give all the rest of my life for the privilege of caressing and comforting you for a single instant—I, whose place it was to shield you and protect you—I myself, who drove you awray from here, heart-broken, never to return. Oh, my beautiful, pale darling! Christine, lost, lost forever! Here am I, my heart bursting with the desire to be, in some way, of some sort of service to you; and there are you, needing perhaps some little service: and yet if we were upon different planets, it could not be more impossible for me ever to lift my finger in your aid! Oh, I say, it is infuriating. It is too much. Oh, if I could tear open my breast, and let you look in, and see!—see the love, the remorse, the despair, that are stirring in perpetual fever there.. . . Oh, the misery I caused you! The long, hateful days that you had to drag through afterward, while I was amusing myself, dining out, learning to dance, getting engaged and married! Far and wide, as far as your eye could see, the world, which had been a fair and fragrant garden in your sight, had crumbled suddenly to a bleak waste of dust and ashes. The hand that you loved had dealt you a blow worse than a death-blow. You had entrusted your happiness to me, and I had betrayed my trust; had taken it, and deliberately dashed it to the ground, and shattered it beyond possibility of mending. My frail, beautiful lady. Yes, if I had stabbed you with a knife, I should not have been so brutal, so base, so cruel; your pain would not have been so great; I should have less to reproach myself with to-day. Yes, I know it.”
But, the reader may curiously ask, how about his theology? his belief that it had been the act of heaven? This question he touches upon only incidentally, and disposes of briefly: “In the light of my resuscitated love, the mere remembrance of that blasphemous delusion filled me with loathing for myself—made me shudder, and draw back, sickened. It was a monstrous lie. I can not bring myself to write about it.” And on another page, he says: “My superstition was the dragon, whose breath poisoned our joy, withered our world, burned out our hearts. The dragon was killed at last, but too late—after its ravages had been accomplished, after it had done its worst.”
I may seize this opportunity, also, to request that if Elias is not always so scrupulous about his syntax and rhetoric as one might wish, the reader will charitably pardon him, in view of the high degree of mental excitement under which he is manifestly laboring.
“Well,” he continues, “after this reawakening, what of my life? Externally my life went on precisely as before. I was married. I had married of my own free will. I knew that, however detestable my marriage might now have become to me, I was bound in all honor and decency not to do any thing that could make my wife unhappy. I had already done mischief enough in the world. I must not, if I could help it, do any more. I must keep my secret. Though all the forces of my body and soul were sucked up and concentrated in that one fierce secret, as they were, I must not let it appear. So, the relations between my wife and myself went on precisely as before; and I tried to be a good husband to her, and to give her what pleasure, and spare her what pain, I could. The same theaters, dinners, parties; the same talk about dresses, the same piano playing. Sometimes, even while, with as much nonchalance of manner as I could master, I was listening to her prattle, my secret would be burning so hot in my breast, it was a wonder to me that she did not guess it, or suspect it—that she did not feel it. Sometimes, even while I was directly speaking to her, answering some question that she had asked me, or what not, my heart was being wrung by such strong emotions, it seemed as though she could not help but divine them. It was hard work, keeping this constant guard over myself, wearing this mask. But, of course, I was in duty bound to wear it. The relief was immense when I could get away by myself, and let it drop off. Away by myself, I could, any how, be myself—lead my own life, without dissembling.
“My own life—what was it like? Well, outwardly it was a life of silence and inaction. My real life was an inward life—lived in my own heart. My heart was like a furnace. Shut up there, my love, my remorse, my despair at the past, my hopelessness of the future, a hundred nameless, restless, futile fears and longings, burned steadily all day long from day to day. Sometimes one emotion would be paramount, sometimes another. Sometimes memory would take possession of me; and, seated at my studio window, with my one relic of you clasped in my hand, I would go back, and live over again all that had passed between us, from the day when I first saw you, down to the day when, in this same room, I had put you from me. Do you remember that day—the day I first saw you? Do you remember our first speech together? And how awkward I was? and embarrassed? Do you remember the night of the party—New Year's Eve— when the heel of your slipper broke off? And how jealous I was? And how angry you got with me? And how you scolded me? And then—in the carriage, going home? Do you remember your birthday? and mine? The silk handkerchief you embroidered for me with my initials? The concerts we used to go to together? and the little suppers afterward? The books we read together? Detmold? The Portrait of a Lady? The poems you were so fond of? The letters we used to write to each other, even when we were going to see each other the very same day?... Or, perhaps, instead of sitting still here at my studio window, I would leave the house, and go for a walk in the old places—the places that were associated with our love, and now for me were sorrowfully consecrated by it. I would walk up Eighth Avenue, over the ground that I had used to cover every time I went to see you; would cross the great circle at Fifty-ninth Street; would come within eye-shot of your door, look up at your window, recall the time when I had had right of entrance, wonder what you were doing now; would enter the park, and even seek out our pine-trees, and stay for a while there in their shadow—there, where—! Do you remember? You may imagine whether this was bitter-sweet. To go back to the time when you had been mine, wholly mine, and live over all the rapture of that time, in all its minute, intimate details; and then, with an infinite hunger for you gnawing in my heart, to return to the present, look into the future, and realize that I, by my own act, had let you go, had lost you forever! You may imagine with what woe and fury, deep and frantic, and yet dumb, I would recall and repeat to myself that verse of Rossetti's poetry: 'Could we be so now?' And there was the truth, the relentless truth, for me to confront, and reconcile myself to, if I could: 'Not if all beneath heaven's pall lay dead but I and thou, could we be so now!' The truth which, as I said, was like a mountain of granite, separating you and me. Oh, but at other times I could not believe that the truth was the truth. It was too cruel. It was incredible. It must be some hideous hallucination—some nightmare, that I should sooner or later wake up from. I could not believe that it was in the possible order of nature for a man and a woman to have loved each other as you and I had loved each other, and yet to have become so utterly lost to each other as it now seemed that we were; for two human lives to have been so perfectly fused together, blended together like two colors upon my palette, and yet afterward to have become so completely rent asunder. I could not believe it possible for my soul to yearn toward you and thirst for you constantly, as it did, and yet be debarred forever from any sort of communion with you. It seemed as though somehow, sometime, somewhere, we must come together—you and I once more!—and all our sorrow be swept away by the great joy of our reunion. Oh, Christine, if it might be so! If only it might be so! At these moments my imagination would break the bonds of reason and fly off in daydreams, long, delicious flights of fancy, visiting wondrous air castles where you and I dwelt together—only shortly to drop back upon the awful reality. The reality: I married, and all your love for me, your priceless love for me, by my fault, turned to horror and hatred. And yet, in spite of the reality, in the very teeth of it, I would think: 'Well, what if my wife should die?' As long as I am telling you the truth, I may as well tell you the whole truth, no matter how bad it may make you think I am. Yes, I would say: 'What if my wife should die?' And then I would repeat to myself what you had once said about that very same verse of Rossetti's poetry: 'I can't understand why it should be so absolutely hopeless. If they really were all alone together, and she saw how dreadfully he had suffered, I don't understand how she could help forgiving him and loving him again.' And then, for an instant my heart would bound with something like hope. But only for an instant. As soon as my reason could make itself heard, I would acknowledge that I had sinned too much ever to expect forgiveness from you. No, it would be past human nature.... At still other times my uppermost feeling would be simply an intense desire to see you—not for any special purpose, not with a view to speaking to you—simply a craving for the sight of your face. I felt that if I could only look upon you for an instant, catch one brief glimpse of you, I should have something to remember and cherish, something for my heart to feed upon, which was feeding upon itself. It would be an agony.