The Story of a Lover

by Hutchins Hapgood

Then there came three years abroad. Economic necessity was removed to a point where we felt we could devote ourselves for a time to contemplative work—I to those psychological studies of temperament which were so fascinating to me, she to the forming of her experience into stories of human life. Dwelling as we both did in our writing on intimate nervous relations undoubtedly helped to make us more fully conscious of our own relation: and what added still farther to this awareness of our bond was my almost constant presence in the family. This had and has always been so with me, with some brief interruptions. Men who go regularly to their office and are only with their wives and children in the evenings and on holidays do not fully taste the domestic reality nor is made the full test of the personal relation. My being with her and the children was irregular but frequent and extended. All day and all night for weeks and weeks and months and months, then in the house all day and away most of the night; writing, she and I at the same time, I taking my share in care of the children, in teaching them, and in the thousand details of the domestic situation. It was a close partnership, full of variation from the usual, interesting, irritating, and replete with meaning and color.

It was soon after the crisis that we sailed; we were both very tired emotionally, but I think she felt as I did the charm of going off into the unknown together. We had left nothing behind us, not even furniture, and we were taking with us all we possessed, contained in three trunks, with no idea of the future except the decision not to live in hotels and pensions, but to keep house wherever we went. This we always did, no matter how short our stay in a place; we insisted on tasting the life as lived around us, and my domestic partnership with her helped us to get settled as well as unsettled very quickly. That we could bear nothing except keeping house had an inevitable meaning, no matter how exasperating those cares were at times to both of us. We were forced to live together in the external conditions of existence, as in the spiritual bond: it was strong, very strong, whatever it was.

On the steamer we were, I remember, unusually quiet. But I felt in her a new freer interest in other things. She, apparently, thought very little of the lover she had left, but because of him she saw the casual stranger in a warmer, more human light. Her feeling of companionship with me seemed stronger because of the recent experience; the element of additional strangeness added to the color of our common life, although I often relapsed into unreasoning pathos and pain. We were on the whole, however, calmly waiting for the future. We were on a broader base than ever, and, resting on our temperamental oars, there was something that whispered to us of exciting, adventurous things to come, for which we were instinctively saving our strength. I saw but not always with pain the fuller appreciation in her glance at other men as they swung freely and picturesquely along the deck. And on my part was unconsciously forming itself the resolution to attain emotional freedom from her by deeper intimacy with other women. Whenever I felt the full pain of my dependency on her, as I did whenever I fully realized her indestructible aloofness from me, I had an access of hope of attaining aloofness for myself through relations with other women—a hope, however, that has never been realized.

Never, however, even for a moment, have I ever felt any diminution of love for her. Indeed, as time went on and our relations grew more complex, more serious, and at times more painful, that love has seemed more profound, more all-embracing, and to be in a way a symbol of my love for beauty, for Nature, for Life itself.

And now, again in Italy, came another period of wonderful pleasure in her. In the beautiful intensity of an Italian spring and summer we realized ourselves to the joyous full, and for a time with no element of interwoven pain. The pleasures of the senses and of the mind, with civilized companions gracefully and indolently living out their unstrenuous lives, dining with them out-of-doors in the long wonderful evenings, and combining the serious languor of passionate Italy with the nervous charm of an epigrammatic Gallic civilization—these pleasures were of a broader, and more intellectualized but not less sensuous honeymoon, rendered all the more poignant by the recent crisis, hinting always of the possibility of volcanic happenings.

Now again began to stir within her the strange unconscious life, and she was pregnant for the third time. At the period of conception we were reveling in a beautiful, full translation into French of the Arabian Nights. Devoted to the sensuous unmoral charm of these gorgeous, colorful tales we lived a life quite out of harmony with Puritanical ideas. The sentimental and the narrowly ethical were far away and this child was started and was born in an atmosphere of mature sensuousness, in a complete acceptance of what is called the Pagan point of view. The tremulous, early lyricism of young love had given place to a rich decided determination to take in full measure the goods the Gods provide!

She was born—this sensitive little girl—on the Arno, on the banks of the stream that runs through Fiorenze, the Flowering City of Tuscany! And her mother this time felt the exhilaration of child-birth, the athletic triumph in the midst of pain, the accomplishment of the impossible with its resultant triumph. And soon afterwards came that full physical beauty, that springing of the blood and of the body, that intense enhancement of color and swelling of contour which gave her the look of a gorgeous Magdalene; more delicate in quality than Rubens or Titian, but suggesting both, richer and more voluptuous than the early Florentine painters, yet having the recessional purity of the Giottesque or Siennese madonna! No virgin could equal her full beauty. No lover could so richly love a maiden were it not for the unconscious purpose of this ultimate fruition!

My feeling for her at that time did not have, perhaps, as much of what is called sentiment as it had before, and was destined to have again; and I imagine it was the same with her. I liked her with an intense and destructive liking because she was life itself, and she had an impersonal relish in existence which included me, the children, the hills, the works of art, the Italian cooking and the witticisms of our æsthetic and self-indulgent friends! Never before had she enjoyed life, never had she trusted and believed in it, so much, never had she been so willing to embrace it!

Yes, she was willing to embrace it! Or, rather, have life embrace her. I saw that in her every attitude. Her feeling about literature and art, about Nature; the love of beauty, always strong and pure in her, was greatly intensified. And there was a subtle sensuousness in her friendly relations with the contemplative men on the hills; a cool freedom from any recognized bond. In her imagination she was as free as air: I could see this in everything; in a glance, in a sensuous movement towards a sunset, the kind of love she showed for a child, as well as her quiet appreciation of the personalities about her. That innate distrust of life which had always been hers, was in large measure displaced by the fully accepted sensuousness of her experience; art, children, the willingness to have lovers, the sense of freedom. The sense of freedom! How vitalizing, how refreshing, how indispensable to the living of every full life!

And this was in part the result of the sex crises we had had together and these were in part due to my interest in the philosophy of the proletariat! What a strange swing it is from the impersonal to the personal and the other way round! How I had fiercely desired this and how I feared it!