patience which was born of my pity for him, won upon his affection, and
he began to please himself with the endeavour to make me fill any
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brother's place as fully as my feebler personality would admit. I saw that
the prospect which by and by presented itself of my becoming Bertha's
husband was welcome to him, and he even contemplated in my case what
he had not intended in my brother's--that his son and daughter-in-law
should make one household with him. My softened feelings towards my
father made this the happiest time I had known since childhood;--these last
months in which I retained the delicious illusion of loving Bertha, of
longing and doubting and hoping that she might love me. She behaved
with a certain new consciousness and distance towards me after my
brother's death; and I too was under a double constraint-- that of delicacy
towards my brother's memory and of anxiety as to the impression my
abrupt words had left on her mind. But the additional screen this mutual
reserve erected between us only brought me more completely under her
power: no matter how empty the adytum, so that the veil be thick
enough. So absolute is our soul's need of something hidden and
uncertain for the maintenance of that doubt and hope and effort which are
the breath of its life, that if the whole future were laid bare to us beyond
to-day, the interest of all mankind would be bent on the hours that lie
between; we should pant after the uncertainties of our one morning and
our one afternoon; we should rush fiercely to the Exchange for our last
possibility of speculation, of success, of disappointment: we should have a
glut of political prophets foretelling a crisis or a no-crisis within the only
twenty-four hours left open to prophecy. Conceive the condition of the
human mind if all propositions whatsoever were self-evident except one,
which was to become self-evident at the close of a summer's day, but in
the meantime might be the subject of question, of hypothesis, of debate.
Art and philosophy, literature and science, would fasten like bees on that
one proposition which had the honey of probability in it, and be the more
eager because their enjoyment would end with sunset. Our impulses, our
spiritual activities, no more adjust themselves to the idea of their future
nullity, than the beating of our heart, or the irritability of our muscles.
Bertha, the slim, fair-haired girl, whose present thoughts and emotions
were an enigma to me amidst the fatiguing obviousness of the other minds
around me, was as absorbing to me as a single unknown to-day--as a
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single hypothetic proposition to remain problematic till sunset; and all the
cramped, hemmed-in belief and disbelief, trust and distrust, of my nature,
welled out in this one narrow channel.
And she made me believe that she loved me. Without ever quitting
her tone of BADINAGE and playful superiority, she intoxicated me with
the sense that I was necessary to her, that she was never at ease, unless I
was near her, submitting to her playful tyranny. It costs a woman so little
effort to beset us in this way! A half- repressed word, a moment's
unexpected silence, even an easy fit of petulance on our account, will
serve us as hashish for a long while. Out of the subtlest web of scarcely
perceptible signs, she set me weaving the fancy that she had always
unconsciously loved me better than Alfred, but that, with the ignorant
fluttered sensibility of a young girl, she had been imposed on by the charm
that lay for her in the distinction of being admired and chosen by a man
who made so brilliant a figure in the world as my brother. She satirized
herself in a very graceful way for her vanity and ambition. What was it
to me that I had the light of my wretched provision on the fact that now it
was I who possessed at least all but the personal part of my brother's
advantages? Our sweet illusions are half of them conscious illusions,
like effects of colour that we know to be made up of tinsel, broken glass,
and rags.
We were married eighteen months after Alfred's death, one cold, clear
morning in April, when there came hail and sunshine both together; and
Bertha, in her white silk and pale-green leaves, and the pale hues of her
hair and face, looked like the spirit of the morning. My father was
happier than he had thought of being again: my marriage, he felt sure,
would complete the desirable modification of my character, and make me
practical and worldly enough to take my place in society among sane men.
For he delighted in Bertha's tact and acuteness, and felt sure she would be
mistress of me, and make me what she chose: I was only twenty- one,
and madly in love with her. Poor father! He kept that hope a little
while after our first year of marriage, and it was not quite extinct when
paralysis came and saved him from utter disappointment.
I shall hurry through the rest of my story, not dwelling so much as I
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have hitherto done on my inward experience. When people are well
known to each other, they talk rather of what befalls them externally,
leaving their feelings and sentiments to be inferred.
We lived in a round of visits for some time after our return home,
giving splendid dinner-parties, and making a sensation in our
neighbourhood by the new lustre of our equipage, for my father had
reserved this display of his increased wealth for the period of his son's
marriage; and we gave our acquaintances liberal opportunity for
remarking that it was a pity I made so poor a figure as an heir and a
bridegroom. The nervous fatigue of this existence, the insincerities and
platitudes which I had to live through twice over--through my inner and
outward sense--would have been maddening to me, if I had not had that
sort of intoxicated callousness which came from the delights of a first
passion. A bride and bridegroom, surrounded by all the appliances of
wealth, hurried through the day by the whirl of society, filling their
solitary moments with hastily-snatched caresses, are prepared for their
future life together as the novice is prepared for the cloister--by
experiencing its utmost contrast.
Through all these crowded excited months, Bertha's inward self
remained shrouded from me, and I still read her thoughts only through the
language of her lips and demeanour: I had still the human interest of
wondering whether what I did and said pleased her, of longing to hear a
word of affection, of giving a delicious exaggeration of meaning to her
smile. But I was conscious of a growing difference in her manner
towards me; sometimes strong enough to be called haughty coldness,
cutting and chilling me as the hail had done that came across the sunshine
on our marriage morning; sometimes only perceptible in the dexterous
avoidance of a tete-a-tete walk or dinner to which I had been looking
forward. I had been deeply pained by this--had even felt a sort of
crushing of the heart, from the sense that my brief day of happiness was
near its setting; but still I remained dependent on Bertha, eager for the last
rays of a bliss that would soon be gone for ever, hoping and watching for
some after-glow more beautiful from the impending night.
I remember--how should I not remember?--the time when that
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dependence and hope utterly left me, when the sadness I had felt in
Bertha's growing estrangement became a joy that I looked back upon with
longing as a man might look back on the last pains in a paralysed limb.
It was just after the close of my father's last illness, which had necessarily
withdrawn us from society and thrown us more on each other. It was the
evening of father's death. On that evening the veil which had shrouded
Bertha's soul from me--had made me find in her alone among my fellow-
beings the blessed possibility of mystery, and doubt, and expectation--was
first withdrawn. Perhaps it was the first day since the beginning of my
passion for her, in which that passion was completely neutralized by the
presence of an absorbing feeling of another kind. I had been watching by
my father's deathbed: I had been witnessing the last fitful yearning
glance his soul had cast back on the spent inheritance of life--the last faint
consciousness of love he had gathered from the pressure of my hand.
What are all our personal loves when we have been sharing in that
supreme agony? In the first moments when we come away from the
presence of death, every other relation to the living is merged, to our
feeling, in the great relation of a common nature and a common destiny.
In that state of mind I joined Bertha in her private sitting-room. She
was seated in a leaning posture on a settee, with her back towards the door;
the great rich coils of her pale blond hair surmounting her small neck,
visible above the back of the settee. I remember, as I closed the door
behind me, a cold tremulousness seizing me, and a vague sense of being
hated and lonely--vague and strong, like a presentiment. I know how I
looked at that moment, for I saw myself in Bertha's thought as she lifted
her cutting grey eyes, and looked at me: a miserable ghost-seer,
surrounded by phantoms in the noonday, trembling under a breeze when
the leaves were still, without appetite for the common objects of human
desires, but pining after the moon-beams. We were front to front with
each other, and judged each other. The terrible moment of complete
illumination had come to me, and I saw that the darkness had hidden no
landscape from me, but only a blank prosaic wall: from that evening forth,
through the sickening years which followed, I saw all round the narrow
room of this woman's soul--saw petty artifice and mere negation where I
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had delighted to believe in coy sensibilities and in wit at war with latent
feeling--saw the light floating vanities of the girl defining themselves into
the systematic coquetry, the scheming selfishness, of the woman--saw
repulsion and antipathy harden into cruel hatred, giving pain only for the
sake of wreaking itself.
For Bertha too, after her kind, felt the bitterness of disillusion. She had
believed that my wild poet's passion for her would make me her slave; and
that, being her slave, I should execute her will in all things. With the
essential shallowness of a negative, unimaginative nature, she was unable
to conceive the fact that sensibilities were anything else than weaknesses.
She had thought my weaknesses would put me in her power, and she
found them unmanageable forces. Our positions were reversed. Before
marriage she had completely mastered my imagination, for she was a
secret to me; and I created the unknown thought before which I trembled
as if it were hers. But now that her soul was laid open to me, now that I
was compelled to share the privacy of her motives, to follow all the petty
devices that preceded her words and acts, she found herself powerless with
me, except to produce in me the chill shudder of repulsion--powerless,
because I could be acted on by no lever within her reach. I was dead to
worldly ambitions, to social vanities, to all the incentives within the
compass of her narrow imagination, and I lived under influences utterly
invisible to her.
She was really pitiable to have such a husband, and so all the world
thought. A graceful, brilliant woman, like Bertha, who smiled on
morning callers, made a figure in ball-rooms, and was capable of that light
repartee which, from such a woman, is accepted as wit, was secure of
carrying off all sympathy from a husband who was sickly, abstracted, and,
as some suspected, crack- brained. Even the servants in our house gave
her the balance of their regard and pity. For there were no audible
quarrels between us; our alienation, our repulsion from each other, lay
within the silence of our own hearts; and if the mistress went out a great
deal, and seemed to dislike the master's society, was it not natural, poor
thing? The master was odd. I was kind and just to my dependants, but I
excited in them a shrinking, half-contemptuous pity; for this class of men
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and women are but slightly determined in their estimate of others by
general considerations, or even experience, of character. They judge of
persons as they judge of coins, and value those who pass current at a high
rate.
After a time I interfered so little with Bertha's habits that it might seem
wonderful how her hatred towards me could grow so intense and active as
it did. But she had begun to suspect, by some involuntary betrayal of
mine, that there was an abnormal power of penetration in me--that fitfully,
at least, I was strangely cognizant of her thoughts and intentions, and she
began to be haunted by a terror of me, which alternated every now and
then with defiance. She meditated continually how the incubus could be
shaken off her life--how she could be freed from this hateful bond to a
being whom she at once despised as an imbecile, and dreaded as an
inquisitor. For a long while she lived in the hope that my evident
wretchedness would drive me to the commission of suicide; but suicide
was not in my nature. I was too completely swayed by the sense that I
was in the grasp of unknown forces, to believe in my power of self-release.
Towards my own destiny I had become entirely passive; for my one ardent
desire had spent itself, and impulse no longer predominated over
knowledge. For this reason I never thought of taking any steps towards a
complete separation, which would have made our alienation evident to the
world. Why should I rush for help to a new course, when I was only
suffering from the consequences of a deed which had been the act of my
intensest will? That would have been the logic of one who had desires to
gratify, and I had no desires. But Bertha and I lived more and more aloof
from each other. The rich find it easy to live married and apart.
That course of our life which I have indicated in a few sentences filled
the space of years. So much misery--so slow and hideous a growth of
hatred and sin, may be compressed into a sentence! And men judge of
each other's lives through this summary medium. They epitomize the
experience of their fellow-mortal, and pronounce judgment on him in neat
syntax, and feel themselves wise and virtuous--conquerors over the
temptations they define in well- selected predicates. Seven years of
wretchedness glide glibly over the lips of the man who has never counted
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them out in moments of chill disappointment, of head and heart throbbings,
of dread and vain wrestling, of remorse and despair. We learn WORDS
by rote, but not their meaning; THAT must be paid for with our life-blood,
and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.
But I will hasten to finish my story. Brevity is justified at once to
those who readily understand, and to those who will never understand.
Some years after my father's death, I was sitting by the dim firelight in
my library one January evening--sitting in the leather chair that used to be
my father's--when Bertha appeared at the door, with a candle in her hand,
and advanced towards me. I knew the ball-dress she had on--the white
ball-dress, with the green jewels, shone upon by the light of the wax
candle which lit up the medallion of the dying Cleopatra on the
mantelpiece. Why did she come to me before going out? I had not seen
her in the library, which was my habitual place for months. Why did she
stand before me with the candle in her hand, with her cruel contemptuous
eyes fixed on me, and the glittering serpent, like a familiar demon, on her
breast? For a moment I thought this fulfilment of my vision at Vienna
marked some dreadful crisis in my fate, but I saw nothing in Bertha's mind,
as she stood before me, except scorn for the look of overwhelming misery
with which I sat before her . . . "Fool, idiot, why don't you kill yourself,
then?"--that was her thought. But at length her thoughts reverted to her
errand, and she spoke aloud. The apparently indifferent nature of the
errand seemed to make a ridiculous anticlimax to my prevision and my
agitation.
"I have had to hire a new maid. Fletcher is going to be married, and
she wants me to ask you to let her husband have the public- house and
farm at Molton. I wish him to have it. You must give the promise now,
because Fletcher is going to-morrow morning--and quickly, because I'm in
a hurry."
"Very well; you may promise her," I said, indifferently, and Bertha
swept out of the library again.
I always shrank from the sight of a new person, and all the more when
it was a person whose mental life was likely to weary my reluctant insight
with worldly ignorant trivialities. But I shrank especially from the sight
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of this new maid, because her advent had been announced to me at a
moment to which I could not cease to attach some fatality: I had a vague
dread that I should find her mixed up with the dreary drama of my life-that
some new sickening vision would reveal her to me as an evil genius.
When at last I did unavoidably meet her, the vague dread was changed
into definite disgust. She was a tall, wiry, dark-eyed woman, this Mrs.
Archer, with a face handsome enough to give her coarse hard nature the
odious finish of bold, self-confident coquetry. That was enough to make
me avoid her, quite apart from the contemptuous feeling with which she
contemplated me. I seldom saw her; but I perceived that she rapidly
became a favourite with her mistress, and, after the lapse of eight or nine
months, I began to be aware that there had arisen in Bertha's mind towards
this woman a mingled feeling of fear and dependence, and that this feeling
was associated with ill- defined images of candle-light scenes in her
dressing-room, and the locking-up of something in Bertha's cabinet. My
interviews with my wife had become so brief and so rarely solitary, that I
had no opportunity of perceiving these images in her mind with more
definiteness. The recollections of the past become contracted in the
rapidity of thought till they sometimes bear hardly a more distinct
resemblance to the external reality than the forms of an oriental alphabet
to the objects that suggested them.
Besides, for the last year or more a modification had been going
forward in my mental condition, and was growing more and more marked.
My insight into the minds of those around me was becoming dimmer and
more fitful, and the ideas that crowded my double consciousness became
less and less dependent on any personal contact. All that was personal in
me seemed to be suffering a gradual death, so that I was losing the organ
through which the personal agitations and projects of others could affect
me. But along with this relief from wearisome insight, there was a new
development of what I concluded--as I have since found rightly--to be a
provision of external scenes. It was as if the relation between me and my
fellow-men was more and more deadened, and my relation to what we call
the inanimate was quickened into new life. The more I lived apart from
society, and in proportion as my wretchedness subsided from the violent
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throb of agonized passion into the dulness of habitual pain, the more
frequent and vivid became such visions as that I had had of Prague--of
strange cities, of sandy plains, of gigantic ruins, of midnight skies with
strange bright constellations, of mountain-passes, of grassy nooks flecked
with the afternoon sunshine through the boughs: I was in the midst of
such scenes, and in all of them one presence seemed to weigh on me in all
these mighty shapes--the presence of something unknown and pitiless.
For continual suffering had annihilated religious faith within me: to the
utterly miserable--the unloving and the unloved--there is no religion
possible, no worship but a worship of devils. And beyond all these, and
continually recurring, was the vision of my death--the pangs, the
suffocation, the last struggle, when life would be grasped at in vain.
Things were in this state near the end of the seventh year. I had
become entirely free from insight, from my abnormal cognizance of any
other consciousness than my own, and instead of intruding involuntarily
into the world of other minds, was living continually in my own solitary
future. Bertha was aware that I was greatly changed. To my surprise
she had of late seemed to seek opportunities of remaining in my society,
and had cultivated that kind of distant yet familiar talk which is customary
between a husband and wife who live in polite and irrevocable alienation.
I bore this with languid submission, and without feeling enough interest in
her motives to be roused into keen observation; yet I could not help
perceiving something triumphant and excited in her carriage and the
expression of her face--something too subtle to express itself in words or
tones, but giving one the idea that she lived in a state of expectation or
hopeful suspense. My chief feeling was satisfaction that her inner self
was once more shut out from me; and I almost revelled for the moment in
the absent melancholy that made me answer her at cross purposes, and
betray utter ignorance of what she had been saying. I remember well the
look and the smile with which she one day said, after a mistake of this
kind on my part: "I used to think you were a clairvoyant, and that was
the reason why you were so bitter against other clairvoyants, wanting to
keep your monopoly; but I see now you have become rather duller than
the rest of the world."
