During that year she had been consciously willing to have another lover; she had seen beautiful men whom she admired and who admired her, but deeper than her mind was her fundamental disillusionment. She knew that this for her was not to be. I saw that she was on the look-out, and yet I knew that there was nothing deep in her demand, that she was satisfied with life, disillusioned with what is called being in love, but loving more what she had—children, friends, work and me. Yes, me! She loved me more after all this strange and twisted travail! Even when she calmly told me, as she did, that she no longer wanted me in any temperamental way—that the little she had felt was gone—even then I felt a strange certainty of her love for me! For her love for me was of Platonic purity and strength, unmixed with sex or sentimentality, that seemed to me to be of the essence of tenderness.
She seems now to have given up her futile desire to desire others and to have accepted for herself a deep aloof affection and tenderness for me and for all who touch her. This same she wants from me and only accepts but does not desire my metaphysical needs, my sexual straining towards the universe’s oblivion. This she neither understands nor likes. This she feels should be put on other things, on work, on thought and impersonal activity, and she is right, but I, although going in that direction, am not ready—yet.
As yet my soul is not satisfied. It is with a deep unwillingness that I feel her temperamental withdrawal—which in a less degree has always been true of her but never so clearly seen by me. That she loves me more, perhaps, in another way, can never meet that fundamental madness that every lover has. I can never be satisfied until I find the Other—and I know I can never find the Other, and never really want to. I know that what I passionately want is a deep illusion, which can never come. It is of Life’s essence, which is to us illusory, as it can never be known and does not respond to our Ideal. It is a passion that leads to death, but when real as mine is, never leads to satisfaction.
Here I am at middle life living with the one woman I want to live with, hopeful for my fine children, interested in a work I have chosen and which was not forced upon me, rich in friends, in good health, and seeing progressively the sad splendid beauty of Nature and Art, hopeful for man’s struggle to break his bonds and interested in coöperating with him, and yet, in spite of all, passionately unsatisfied!
Passionately unsatisfied, and yet to me she is more beautiful, more wonderful than ever! This inaccessible woman, approaching middle age, more loving to me and more remote than ever, consciously rejecting me as a lover and accepting me warmly as a child, her complete and impersonal loveliness, is the one perfect experience of my life, the experience that permeates and affects all others, that has subtly intertwined itself in my love for children and nature, for work and for the destiny of my fellow-men. It has been the sap of my life, which has urged the slender stalk into the full-grown tree with its many branches and its decorative voluminous lines.
The sap still urges its undeniable way; my youthful passion still maintains itself but now more than ever it meets only the rich maternal smile, full of knowledge and a kind of tender scorn. As I write these lines—she, for the moment, distant from me by the length of an ocean—I remember the days when with a certain response she played with me with a light grace. Two little incidents come back to me from the multitudinous deluge of the past—one, when, with the laughter of unconventionality, we openly and completely embraced on the bosom of a Swiss glacier encouraged by the full sun of noon! Again, when, in our fancy, she was the wife of another, and we indulged in sweet mutual infidelity after a delicious supper in a French garden on the banks of the Seine! How we talked and smiled, and how we held for the moment aloof the serious madness that was behind my passion! How we enjoyed the decorous and polite knowledge of the host who ushered us to the guilty couch! And how our French epigrams were mixed up with our light and happy caresses! And at that time, she was beginning to see Him, and I had thrown my cone—my play with the lady in Italy! And this added zest, and she threw at me with more than joyous lightness a glass of wine which stained my white immaculate shirt and brought me to her with a quick reproachful embrace!
Yes, these gestures I must remember, in this the day of the waning of our lighter relations! The waning, yes, of our lighter amorousness, indeed the beginning of the day when she pushes me away, but at the same time the beginning of a love for me that passes understanding, that has no material expression, that is full of compassion, of a kind of dignified pity! A love in which the temperament plays no part, but to which all that has been between us—pleasure, pain, difficulties, work and infidelities—give an indescribable solidity and depth. Nothing on earth can separate us. Our relation, indeed, is built on a fortress which nothing but a double death can destroy, and perhaps not even that!
What is the romance of a young couple, previous to their first nuptials, as compared with our full experience? Why do novels, as a rule, end with the first slight lyrical gesture? Why do we inculcate in the imagination of the young and in our moral code a false conception of the nature of virtue? Why do we imply that chastity in woman has anything to do with goodness, or that physical movements necessarily affect a soul relation? I do not know why we have built up historically these colossal lies which give us pain and unnecessary jealousy and despair.
But what is to me the deepest mystery of all—and this a glorious mystery which distils a spiritual fragrance to all of life—is what holds a man and woman together through an entire eternity of experience. She is to me the key of existence that opens up the realm of the Infinite which, though I can never reach, yet sheds upon all things its colorful meaning. It is only the conception of the Eternal which gives interest to every concrete detail. God inheres as a quality in all things. Religion is right when it points the fact that without Him there is nothing.