There was then but one hope for me, and that hope was based upon the fact that I could not write to you. The pure, simple instincts of my girlhood, the ungratified passions, the real intelligence, lingered in me still. I dared not write to you—to you, who knew me so well, I dared not confess what my life had become. Yet more—I still had faith in my nature, because I felt I was silently degrading the crowning act of my mother’s life by my weak and unnatural submission. I had faith over all when I first shrunk from the compliance with my vow, and when I prayed its living fruit might be in her image and not in mine. I felt then the force of nature * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Thus year after year passed away, and thus should I have lived and died; but I saw him, I heard his voice, I learned daily his thoughts, I revelled in his nature! Then I wrote to you again; my faith had become a living power; I began a new life.
Then came the fall, as ever before. The influence of social restraint was too terrible, and I sunk back as I did that day when we were children. This last assertion and denial of my nature brought me to the verge of death, but it brought me to reason also; and then, an altered being, weak and broken down, I rose, and with one fearful, silent struggle, that our sex’s nature alone can know, I was forever free! Oh, the revelation of that hour! Life seemed in a moment no longer hard and difficult. Its relations were simple, its passions legitimate, its love supreme.
But let me narrate to you how I awakened to the reality of my position, my after experience, and how at last I had the strength to accomplish my emancipation.
The first few months of my married life I was truly not happy; but I cannot speak of that period as one of unhappiness. Indeed, during the whole spring I did not fully realize what that covenant means that disposes finally of the life of a woman, and that, too, at a time before the meaning of her nature consciously asserts itself. The novelty of the change, the new interests arising, the necessity to be a wife—all these feelings and emotions shut out myself from myself. And so it went on, month after month, in which I cannot recall anything that awakened me fully to the reality of my position.
But, E * * *, it was ordered in my life that it should come, and it came. A simple incident defined to me the meaning of my vow.
Among our visits to Earlham was one we made on the first day of the following autumn. I remember the date and the appearance of the country well. I shall never forget either. The fields were undulating with their golden grain. Costessy Park was in its fullest verdure. Everything seemed rejoicing in the coming harvest—the happy maternity of earth. And so we reached Earlham.
The first object I saw was Anna’s child. It impressed me profoundly. I took him in my arms, and as I looked at him everything grew dark about me. I had been before the toy of a ceremony; I was now a conscious wife. Beautiful lawn and woodland, summer breezes, kindness, marriage rites even, what can they avail against the first awakening consciousness of a crime against nature?
I was wholly without sympathy; there were none around me to understand me. If I had spoken my thought the very air would have been filled with condemnation. I, a wife, had I a right to entertain for an instant such an idea? Could I dare to experience an instinct of aversion? Had I a right to say I had been violated—that I was what all women loathe?
I could not understand it; yet there it remained, a fact of my nature, asserting itself against the condition in which I was placed, and from which apparently no earthly power existed to release me.