It was not a mere coincidence that after the coming of the first child, my relations to other things than her, to my friends, and to my work began to undergo if not a change, at least a deepening. I saw much more in my chance café companions, in the peddler or the poet of the Ghetto, in the pickpocket and in the submerged generally than ever before. My interest in my work, which was formerly light and suggestive, a kind of playfulness, became more serious. The psychology of the thief and of the revolutionary immigrant formerly amused me as something exotic and unfamiliar. The boon companions and the girls excited my senses and satisfied my love of pleasure. But now all these things came to mean more to me, to connect themselves with my real life. My intimacy with her, the fact that I was having an ever-deepening relationship with her, made it impossible for me to approach anything else with free lightness, with superficial playfulness. Once for all, the deeper harmonies were touched and they permeated more and more all my interests and undertakings. As serious intimacy ever developed between her and me, it developed between me and everything else. I saw something in work more significant than art. Writing became for me a human occupation, not a matter of art, nor of business. A thief was a human being, not a thief; a drunkard became a fine soul in distress, not a drunkard. An abandoned woman became a figure about whom to construct a better society, not a prostitute.
My love for my wife, deepened, satisfied and exasperated with experience, enabled me to approach crime in a passionate and a profoundly æsthetic way. It led me step by step into what is called radicalism, into an infidelity to the conventions of my class. To have one purely passionate relation extends the impulse to be pure, that is passionate, in all things. The one love leads one to the love of all, and the love of all re-acts on the love of one, heightening and intensifying it. I saw everything in terms of the intimate seriousness my relation with her had developed in my soul.
Our first trip to Italy when the boy was a year and a half old was a strange and lovely blending of what had been with what was to be. The honeymoon quality was still there, but it was more sensuous and more significant, and for the time being it was not troubled. It was in the charming hill country where the climate is semi-tropical and everything invites to relaxation. The many hills are capped with beautiful old towns deserted largely of their inhabitants and as pure in form and color as shells on the beach. It represents a lovely death, and over these hills and through these valleys we loved to walk. More often I went alone, but alone only after being with her, in her arms always except on the walks. The embrace was as constant as before our marriage and far deeper and more voluptuous. It seemed to me in that lovely, languishing, liquid place there were only two realities, her embrace and the hills with their swoon-inducing atmospheric mantle.
My feeling for those hills and that relaxing, impregnated air, was indistinguishable from my feeling for her. It seems to me that it was the result of it, that it could not have been without it. Without the satisfaction and relaxation after the embrace, I could not have had that glorious passiveness, that sensuous receptivity in which Nature came to me as nothing foreign, but as part of my blood and bone, as a feeling from within. Already my intimacy with her was giving to external nature a new quality never felt by me before. How I returned to her from these walks and how I went to these walks from her! How she sent me forth and how they brought me back! O, the deep, relaxing sensuousness of it! The long, languid afternoons, the quiet warm nights! And in and out of it all was the little boy breaking in on our luxuries with his clear charm, interrupting and diverting his parents who were caught in a continuous moment of almost impersonal amorousness, so connected did it seem with the old town, the sky and the semi-tropical atmosphere!
As I write these memories of a lover I realize that the woman is hardly more than a shadow to the reader. Or rather, perhaps, she is what each reader makes her; each lover—and this book means nothing except to the lover—will see in her the particular woman about whom he has built his spiritual life—the woman who has realized for him the great adventure. I know if I can tell the inner truth to me it will be the inner truth to every lover. To him the doubt, the pleasure; to him the hope, the disillusion, the pain and joy, as to me—the certainty of her love for him, the certainty of her indifference. To him, as to me, the beloved seems one thing at one moment, another at the next, but always wonderful, always incomprehensible, and beyond all else perhaps, strange—foreign, giving glimpses always of magic casements opening on “faery seas,” sometimes forlorn or terrible, sometimes warming and infinitely consoling.
The inevitable is the deepest mystery; and the naturalness of her second pregnancy beginning in these languorous Italian hills did not take from its wonder; rather the contrary. This time to her the new life was from the first a welcome thing. Perhaps by now her nature had become adjusted to this intrusion, so that it was no longer intrusion but completion. Then, too, the first born had become a thing beloved and the little fellow had been rather lonely and bored in this to him unexciting quiet, and she foresaw for him a play-fellow. So this second pregnancy fitted in harmoniously with what she felt in the warm surroundings and what she hoped for in the colorful future.
But these no doubt are superficial explanations. Who can tell or know why she breathed in, so to speak, this second pregnancy as she breathed in the caressing air of this semi-tropical place? Perhaps she had become a more unconscious part of Nature which does not question why the seed bursts and grows in the rich, moist earth. And her skin, giving light and warmth, and suggesting the rich material within from which life springs was like the sun-bathed fields telling of the damp pregnancies underneath!
But a terrible disturbance again awaited this quietly brooding soul. Into her expectant state our daily interests wove themselves with tranquil ease; our literary work, and talks, our pleasant times with friends and all the little things and momentary values which relieve and put in bold relief the vital things of life. This deep disturbance was not this time due to me. I threw no cone at her in her second period of travail; nor did I irritate her sensibility. She did not weep because of me.
There came a bolt from the void—a cable-gram from America telling of the sudden violent death of her beloved father. I remember I brought her the message, fearing for her and for the unborn child, for I knew what that romantic man meant to her. But she took it in the quiet, deep way with which she takes all serious things. She said no word, she did not weep, but it went through her whole being and as we both now think affected deeply the temperament and character and life of the child that was to be. I have always felt that it was a deeper blow to her than if she had expressed it more violently. She took it—as she takes everything—did not throw it off by successive paroxysms, but wove it into her complete existence, thereby coloring herself and the child, introducing somber elements into what her nature insisted should always be harmonious.