The Greater Inclination

Lago d’Iseo, August 14th.

When I said good-by to you yesterday I promised to come back to Venice in a week:  I was to give you your answer then.  I was not honest in saying that; I didn’t mean to go back to Venice or to see you again.  I was running away from you—­and I mean to keep on running!  If you won’t, I must.  Somebody must save you from marrying a disappointed woman of—­well, you say years don’t count, and why should they, after all, since you are not to marry me?

That is what I dare not go back to say. You are not to marry me.  We have had our month together in Venice (such a good month, was it not?) and now you are to go home and write a book—­any book but the one we—­didn’t talk of!—­and I am to stay here, attitudinizing among my memories like a sort of female Tithonus.  The dreariness of this enforced immortality!

But you shall know the truth.  I care for you, or at least for your love, enough to owe you that.

You thought it was because Vincent Rendle had loved me that there was so little hope for you.  I had had what I wanted to the full; wasn’t that what you said?  It is just when a man begins to think he understands a woman that he may be sure he doesn’t!  It is because Vincent Rendle didn’t love me that there is no hope for you.  I never had what I wanted, and never, never, never will I stoop to wanting anything else.

Do you begin to understand?  It was all a sham then, you say?  No, it was all real as far as it went.  You are young—­you haven’t learned, as you will later, the thousand imperceptible signs by which one gropes one’s way through the labyrinth of human nature; but didn’t it strike you, sometimes, that I never told you any foolish little anecdotes about him?  His trick, for instance, of twirling a paper-knife round and round between his thumb and forefinger while he talked; his mania for saving the backs of notes; his greediness for wild strawberries, the little pungent Alpine ones; his childish delight in acrobats and jugglers; his way of always calling me you—­dear you, every letter began—­I never told you a word of all that, did I?  Do you suppose I could have helped telling you, if he had loved me?  These little things would have been mine, then, a part of my life—­of our life—­they would have slipped out in spite of me (it’s only your unhappy woman who is always reticent and dignified).  But there never was any “our life;” it was always “our lives” to the end….

If you knew what a relief it is to tell some one at last, you would bear with me, you would let me hurt you!  I shall never be quite so lonely again, now that some one knows.

Let me begin at the beginning.  When I first met Vincent Rendle I was not twenty-five.  That was twenty years ago.  From that time until his death, five years ago, we were fast friends.  He gave me fifteen years, perhaps the best fifteen years, of his life.  The world, as you know, thinks that his greatest poems were written during those years; I am supposed to have “inspired” them, and in a sense I did.  From the first, the intellectual sympathy between us was almost complete; my mind must have been to him (I fancy) like some perfectly tuned instrument on which he was never tired of playing.  Some one told me of his once saying of me that I “always understood;” it is the only praise I ever heard of his giving me.  I don’t even know if he thought me pretty, though I hardly think my appearance could have been disagreeable to him, for he hated to be with ugly people.  At all events he fell into the way of spending more and more of his time with me.  He liked our house; our ways suited him.  He was nervous, irritable; people bored him and yet he disliked solitude.  He took sanctuary with us.  When we travelled he went with us; in the winter he took rooms near us in Rome.  In England or on the continent he was always with us for a good part of the year.  In small ways I was able to help him in his work; he grew dependent on me.  When we were apart he wrote to me continually—­he liked to have me share in all he was doing or thinking; he was impatient for my criticism of every new book that interested him; I was a part of his intellectual life.  The pity of it was that I wanted to be something more.  I was a young woman and I was in love with him—­not because he was Vincent Rendle, but just because he was himself!

People began to talk, of course—­I was Vincent Rendle’s Mrs. Anerton; when the Sonnets to Silvia appeared, it was whispered that I was Silvia.  Wherever he went, I was invited; people made up to me in the hope of getting to know him; when I was in London my doorbell never stopped ringing.  Elderly peeresses, aspiring hostesses, love-sick girls and struggling authors overwhelmed me with their assiduities.  I hugged my success, for I knew what it meant—­they thought that Rendle was in love with me!  Do you know, at times, they almost made me think so too?  Oh, there was no phase of folly I didn’t go through.  You can’t imagine the excuses a woman will invent for a man’s not telling her that he loves her—­pitiable arguments that she would see through at a glance if any other woman used them!  But all the while, deep down, I knew he had never cared.  I should have known it if he had made love to me every day of his life.  I could never guess whether he knew what people said about us—­he listened so little to what people said; and cared still less, when he heard.  He was always quite honest and straightforward with me; he treated me as one man treats another; and yet at times I felt he must see that with me it was different.  If he did see, he made no sign.  Perhaps he never noticed—­I am sure he never meant to be cruel.  He had never made love to me; it was no fault of his if I wanted more than he could give me.  The Sonnets to Silvia, you say?  But what are they?  A cosmic philosophy, not a love-poem; addressed to Woman, not to a woman!

But then, the letters?  Ah, the letters!  Well, I’ll make a clean breast of it.  You have noticed the breaks in the letters here and there, just as they seem to be on the point of growing a little—­warmer?  The critics, you may remember, praised the editor for his commendable delicacy and good taste (so rare in these days!) in omitting from the correspondence all personal allusions, all those details intimes which should be kept sacred from the public gaze.  They referred, of course, to the asterisks in the letters to Mrs. A. Those letters I myself prepared for publication; that is to say, I copied them out for the editor, and every now and then I put in a line of asterisks to make it appear that something had been left out.  You understand?  The asterisks were a sham—­there was nothing to leave out.

No one but a woman could understand what I went through during those years—­the moments of revolt, when I felt I must break away from it all, fling the truth in his face and never see him again; the inevitable reaction, when not to see him seemed the one unendurable thing, and I trembled lest a look or word of mine should disturb the poise of our friendship; the silly days when I hugged the delusion that he must love me, since everybody thought he did; the long periods of numbness, when I didn’t seem to care whether he loved me or not.  Between these wretched days came others when our intellectual accord was so perfect that I forgot everything else in the joy of feeling myself lifted up on the wings of his thought.  Sometimes, then, the heavens seemed to be opened….

* * * * *

All this time he was so dear a friend!  He had the genius of friendship, and he spent it all on me.  Yes, you were right when you said that I have had more than any other woman. Il faut de l’adresse pour aimer, Pascal says; and I was so quiet, so cheerful, so frankly affectionate with him, that in all those years I am almost sure I never bored him.  Could I have hoped as much if he had loved me?

You mustn’t think of him, though, as having been tied to my skirts.  He came and went as he pleased, and so did his fancies.  There was a girl once (I am telling you everything), a lovely being who called his poetry “deep” and gave him Lucile on his birthday.  He followed her to Switzerland one summer, and all the time that he was dangling after her (a little too conspicuously, I always thought, for a Great Man), he was writing to me about his theory of vowel-combinations—­or was it his experiments in English hexameter?  The letters were dated from the very places where I knew they went and sat by waterfalls together and he thought out adjectives for her hair.  He talked to me about it quite frankly afterwards.  She was perfectly beautiful and it had been a pure delight to watch her; but she would talk, and her mind, he said, was “all elbows.”  And yet, the next year, when her marriage was announced, he went away alone, quite suddenly … and it was just afterwards that he published Love’s Viaticum.  Men are queer!

After my husband died—­I am putting things crudely, you see—­I had a return of hope.  It was because he loved me, I argued, that he had never spoken; because he had always hoped some day to make me his wife; because he wanted to spare me the “reproach.”  Rubbish!  I knew well enough, in my heart of hearts, that my one chance lay in the force of habit.  He had grown used to me; he was no longer young; he dreaded new people and new ways; il avait pris son pli.  Would it not be easier to marry me?

I don’t believe he ever thought of it.  He wrote me what people call “a beautiful letter;” he was kind; considerate, decently commiserating; then, after a few weeks, he slipped into his old way of coming in every afternoon, and our interminable talks began again just where they had left off.  I heard later that people thought I had shown “such good taste” in not marrying him.

So we jogged on for five years longer.  Perhaps they were the best years, for I had given up hoping.  Then he died.

After his death—­this is curious—­there came to me a kind of mirage of love.  All the books and articles written about him, all the reviews of the “Life,” were full of discreet allusions to Silvia.  I became again the Mrs. Anerton of the glorious days.  Sentimental girls and dear lads like you turned pink when somebody whispered, “that was Silvia you were talking to.”  Idiots begged for my autograph—­publishers urged me to write my reminiscences of him—­critics consulted me about the reading of doubtful lines.  And I knew that, to all these people, I was the woman Vincent Rendle had loved.

After a while that fire went out too and I was left alone with my past.  Alone—­quite alone; for he had never really been with me.  The intellectual union counted for nothing now.  It had been soul to soul, but never hand in hand, and there were no little things to remember him by.

Then there set in a kind of Arctic winter.  I crawled into myself as into a snow-hut.  I hated my solitude and yet dreaded any one who disturbed it.  That phase, of course, passed like the others.  I took up life again, and began to read the papers and consider the cut of my gowns.  But there was one question that I could not be rid of, that haunted me night and day.  Why had he never loved me?  Why had I been so much to him, and no more?  Was I so ugly, so essentially unlovable, that though a man might cherish me as his mind’s comrade, he could not care for me as a woman?  I can’t tell you how that question tortured me.  It became an obsession.

My poor friend, do you begin to see?  I had to find out what some other man thought of me.  Don’t be too hard on me!  Listen first—­consider.  When I first met Vincent Rendle I was a young woman, who had married early and led the quietest kind of life; I had had no “experiences.”  From the hour of our first meeting to the day of his death I never looked at any other man, and never noticed whether any other man looked at me.  When he died, five years ago, I knew the extent of my powers no more than a baby.  Was it too late to find out?  Should I never know why?

Forgive me—­forgive me.  You are so young; it will be an episode, a mere “document,” to you so soon!  And, besides, it wasn’t as deliberate, as cold-blooded as these disjointed lines have made it appear.  I didn’t plan it, like a woman in a book.  Life is so much more complex than any rendering of it can be.  I liked you from the first—­I was drawn to you (you must have seen that)—­I wanted you to like me; it was not a mere psychological experiment.  And yet in a sense it was that, too—­I must be honest.  I had to have an answer to that question; it was a ghost that had to be laid.

At first I was afraid—­oh, so much afraid—­that you cared for me only because I was Silvia, that you loved me because you thought Rendle had loved me.  I began to think there was no escaping my destiny.

How happy I was when I discovered that you were growing jealous of my past; that you actually hated Rendle!  My heart beat like a girl’s when you told me you meant to follow me to Venice.

After our parting at Villa d’Este my old doubts reasserted themselves.  What did I know of your feeling for me, after all?  Were you capable of analyzing it yourself?  Was it not likely to be two-thirds vanity and curiosity, and one-third literary sentimentality?  You might easily fancy that you cared for Mary Anerton when you were really in love with Silvia—­ the heart is such a hypocrite!  Or you might be more calculating than I had supposed.  Perhaps it was you who had been flattering my vanity in the hope (the pardonable hope!) of turning me, after a decent interval, into a pretty little essay with a margin.

When you arrived in Venice and we met again—­do you remember the music on the lagoon, that evening, from my balcony?—­I was so afraid you would begin to talk about the book—­the book, you remember, was your ostensible reason for coming.  You never spoke of it, and I soon saw your one fear was I might do so—­might remind you of your object in being with me.  Then I knew you cared for me! yes, at that moment really cared!  We never mentioned the book once, did we, during that month in Venice?

I have read my letter over; and now I wish that I had said this to you instead of writing it.  I could have felt my way then, watching your face and seeing if you understood.  But, no, I could not go back to Venice; and I could not tell you (though I tried) while we were there together.  I couldn’t spoil that month—­my one month.  It was so good, for once in my life, to get away from literature….

You will be angry with me at first—­but, alas! not for long.  What I have done would have been cruel if I had been a younger woman; as it is, the experiment will hurt no one but myself.  And it will hurt me horribly (as much as, in your first anger, you may perhaps wish), because it has shown me, for the first time, all that I have missed….