He is also unhappy on account of me. I don’t let him breathe freely. He might have been happy with another, but I give him no chance. I disturb his life. I will add that this condition has gone on now for several years and there is no prospect of its ending.
Dear editor, give me an advice before I commit a deed after which marriage is impossible. I wait for your wise advice. Perhaps you will be my savior.[[15]]
The varieties of love in women are greater than in men, for we are to include here not only physical passion but parental feeling—that fund of emotion which is fixed on the child. The capacity of response to the child, mother love, is notorious and is painfully evident in document 11, p. 18, where the mother has no thought left for anything but the child. The mother is one who does not refuse. She does not refuse the breast to the lusty child even when she is herself ailing. And while this feeling is developed as a quality of motherhood it is present before motherhood and is capable of being transferred to any object calling for sympathy,—a doll, a man, or a cause. The women of the Malay Peninsula suckle little wild pigs when these are found motherless.
I have seen (through the kindness of Hutchins Hapgood) the life history of a woman who has had sexual relations with numbers of men. At the same time she has always fed men. She has kept a restaurant, partly I think to feed men. When one of her friends committed suicide she dreamed of him for months and always dreamed that she was feeding him. While she was sexually passionate her concern was mainly to satisfy the sexual hunger of others, as she satisfied their food-hunger. When two of her lovers were jealous, unhappy, and desperate, she ran from one to the other like a mother visiting two sick children in different hospitals. More than once she attempted suicide. When she tried to explain herself to me she said that without some human relationship she felt unbearably lonely, and that she was drawn to lonely men without regard to their social condition. Many of her friends were criminals and she would speak to any bum on a park bench. She was never a prostitute. One of her friends said, “Martha is a woman to whom everything has happened that should logically break a woman’s character and spirit. She ought to be a demoralized victim of society. She has done nearly everything that is supposed to ruin and destroy a person, especially a woman, but she is not a bit destroyed. She knows the so-called lowest things in life, but she wants the best and feels it. She feels what is beautiful and fine and loves it. She does things that sometimes mean sordidness in others but not in her. She gets drunk, but is not drunken. She is loose sexually in her acts, but her spirit is as simple as the flowers.”
A touching expression of response from a man, a devotion to a parent as deep as mother love, is found in a letter of the psychologist William James, written to his father from England when the death of the latter was anticipated.
13. My blessed old Father: I scribble this line (which may reach you, though I should come too late) just to tell you how full of the tenderest memories and feelings about you my heart has for the last few days been filled. In that mysterious gulf of the past, into which the present will soon fall and go back and back, yours is still for me the central figure. All my intellectual life I derive from you; and though we have often seemed at odds in the expression thereof, I’m sure there’s a harmony somewhere and that our strivings will combine. What my debt to you is goes beyond all my power of estimating—so early, so penetrating and so constant has been the influence.
You need be in no anxiety about your literary remains. I will see them well taken care of, and that your words shall not suffer from being concealed. At Paris I heard that Milsand, whose name you may remember is in the Revue des Deux Mondes and elsewhere, was an admirer of the Secret of Swedenborg, and Hodgson told me your last book had deeply impressed him. So will it be....
As for us, we shall live on, each in his way—feeling somewhat unprotected, old as we are, for the absence of the parental bosoms as a refuge, but holding fast together in that common sacred memory. We will stand by each other and by Alice, try to transmit the torch in our offspring as you did in us, and when the time comes for being gathered in, I pray we may, if not all, some at least, be as ripe as you.
As for myself, I know what trouble I’ve given you at various times through my peculiarities; and as my own boys grow up I shall learn more and more of the kind of trial you had to overcome in superintending the development of a creature different from yourself, for whom you felt responsible. I say this merely to show how my sympathy with you is likely to grow much livelier, rather than to fade—and not for the sake of regrets.
As for the other side, and Mother, and our all possibly meeting, I can’t say anything. More than ever at this moment do I feel that if that were true all would be solved and justified. And it comes strangely over me in bidding you good-by how a life is but a day and expresses mainly but a single note. It is so much like the act of bidding an ordinary good-night.