One day she asked me, as she had asked me before, not to come home that evening until late. She wanted to spend it alone with him. She wanted a relation in which I could be no part, which could not be if I were there, something excluding me! Dumb rage took possession of me, but at the same time I longed to take the strong and independent attitude, the attitude that might win myself for myself, that might win the greater Her for me—the Her for me that I had never had!
So I went away and dined and spent the evening in a gathering of men and women who lightly talked of love and freedom and society. As I looked on these faces and heard not what they said, I wondered if they felt as I felt, if their lives were as mine, and I knew instinctively that they were; I knew that all lovers understand and that this book is a universal book, that all human beings who feel at all must feel as I feel. In my mind and senses, in my conscious self and in the clearness of my definite thoughts, I was with her and him—not with these my talking brothers and sisters whose faces only I saw, for their faces, not their words, mirrored my soul. Did her being remember me? Doubt of her and doubt of myself came with alternating violence and when I went home I was completely exhausted.
I found her proud and silent, instinct with that torturing and amazing recessional remoteness which was of her inner being, of the inner being of all things. She looked at me with quiet, searching questionings, as if she were looking deep into my nature and wondering if there were any consistency there, anything that remained and endured, anything that was necessary, after all that was conventional and accidental and vain and merely respectable had passed. She was deeply serious and it was with a certain quiet anxiety that she met me.
But her quiet passed into silent reproach as I nervously demanded talk from her. She withdrew into that infinity of distance that I knew and hated, and refused to answer my violent demand to tell me all that had happened between her and him. The strong part for me to have taken was dignified trust, an obvious confidence that the best existed between us and was inalienable. But I did not have that trust. That confidence was lacking in me and I was not strong and clever enough to assume it.
So she with clear disappointment was obstinately silent, and this in spite of my growing excitement and violence. And suddenly something happened which had never happened before and never since, although in after years even more acute crises arose; without premeditation I took her by the throat! I did not know I was doing it until I caught myself in the act. Never had the possibility of using physical violence occurred to me. In my consciousness it was incredible—but here it happened without consciousness! The underlying brute in me terrified me, even in the act itself! At that moment I understood murder, and knew that assassination might become inevitable for any one at any moment.
Terror at myself was followed by surprise at the way she took it. She made no resistance, but in a deep quiet whisper she breathed my name. Her eyes grew big and a profound wonder was in that silent sound that seemed to come from all of her. I think the perception that I was capable of absolute unreason appealed in some primitive way to her imagination. Me she had always regarded as a finally civilized creature, analytical, seeking reason and sophistication. The passion which was me she had perhaps never so clearly felt. At any rate I sensed with a kind of shameful pride that she was gazing at me as at an interesting stranger. Not the slightest touch of fear was in her look, but a wonderful quiet excitement dominated her.
Why was it that, in after years, when the waves of passion came on me perhaps even more strongly, I never again resorted to physical violence? It may be the shock to myself when I felt what I was capable of; perhaps it was the contempt that must be ours when we use the uttermost weapon without reserve. To lose all possible control is the final degradation of the soul. And she, too, never again used her final weapon—impenetrable silence to the same terrible degree. Her silence was with her as unreasonable, as much a part of primitive instinct, as was my violence. And she had on that occasion indulged her form of unreasonable violence to the limit. And my violence had been born of hers. I think at that moment a new fear of ourselves was born in each, and that although we did not then know it we were nearer together than ever before.
At that moment we felt the degree of savageness which each could show the other; and the first symbolic response was a wild, fierce embrace, mordant, painful, without limit, sad with passion, born of the new element of recognized mutual strangeness that had been excitingly revealed to us. And in the languid, unnervous reconciliation that followed, the wonderful complete peace, she quietly and fully told me what I had so fiercely needed to know; and I remember how ashamed I was of my relief when I knew that she had been unable to give herself to him, and at the same time of a certain vague disappointment; perhaps because she was still finally untested and doubt of the inalienable bond continued its periodic possession.
Chapter IX
