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The Passionate Friends Chapter 12 - The Arraignment of Jealousy · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Chapter twelve of The Passionate Friends by H. G. Wells.
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  Speaker 1: This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by
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  Speaker 1: Peter Eastman, Chapter the twelfth, the Arraignment of Jealousy One.
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  Speaker 1: I sit here in this graciously proportioned little room, which
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  Speaker 1: I shall leave forever next week, for already your mother
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  Speaker 1: begins to pack for England again. I look out upon
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  Speaker 1: the neat French garden that I have watched the summer round,
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  Speaker 1: And before me is the pile of manuscript that has
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  Speaker 1: grown here, the story of my friendship and love for Mary,
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  Speaker 1: and of its tragic end, and of all the changes
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  Speaker 1: of my beliefs and purposes that have arisen out of that.
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  Speaker 1: I had meant it to be the story of my life.
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  Speaker 1: But how little of my life is in it. It gives,
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  Speaker 1: at most, certain acute points, certain salient aspects. I begin
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  Speaker 1: to realize for the first time, how thin and suggestive
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  Speaker 1: and sketchy a thing any novel or biography must be,
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  Speaker 1: how we must simplify, how little we can convey the
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  Speaker 1: fullness of life, the glittering interests, the interweaving secondary aspects,
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  Speaker 1: the dawns and dreams, and double refractions of experience. Even Mary,
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  Speaker 1: of whom I have labored to tell you, seems not
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  Speaker 1: so much expressed as hidden beneath these corrected sheets. She
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  Speaker 1: who was so abundantly living, who could love like a
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  Speaker 1: burst of sunshine, and give herself as God gives the world?
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  Speaker 1: Is she here at all in this pile of industrious,
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  Speaker 1: inexpert writing. Life is so much fuller than any book
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  Speaker 1: can be. All the story can be read, I suppose,
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  Speaker 1: in a couple of hours or so. But I have
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  Speaker 1: been living, and reflecting upon and reconsidering the substance of
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  Speaker 1: it for over forty years. I do not see how
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  Speaker 1: this book can give you any impression but that of
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  Speaker 1: a career, all strained upon the frame of one tragic relationship.
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  Speaker 1: Yet no life, unless it is a very short young life,
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  Speaker 1: can have that simplicity. Of all the many things I
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  Speaker 1: have found beautiful and wonderful, Mary was the most wonderful
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  Speaker 1: to me. She is in my existence like a sunlit
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  Speaker 1: lake seen among mountains. Of all the edges by which
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  Speaker 1: life has wrought me, she was the keenest. Nevertheless, she
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  Speaker 1: was not all my life, nor the form of all
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  Speaker 1: my life. For a time after her death I could
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  Speaker 1: endure nothing of my home. I could not bear the
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  Speaker 1: presence of your mother or you. I hated the possibility
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  Speaker 1: of consolation. I went away into Italy, and it was
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  Speaker 1: only by an enormous effort that I could resume my
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  Speaker 1: interest in that scheme of work to which my life
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  Speaker 1: is given. But it is manifest. I still live. I
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  Speaker 1: live and work, and feel and share beauty. It seems
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  Speaker 1: to me more and more as I live longer, that
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  Speaker 1: most poetry and most literature, and particularly the literature of
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  Speaker 1: the past, is discordant with the vastness and variety, the
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  Speaker 1: reserves and resources and recuperations of life as we live
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  Speaker 1: it to day. It is the expression of life under
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  Speaker 1: cruder and more rigid conditions than ours, lived by people
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  Speaker 1: who loved and hated more naively, aged sooner, and died
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  Speaker 1: younger than we do. Solitary persons and single events dominated them,
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  Speaker 1: as they do not dominate us. We range wider, last longer,
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  Speaker 1: and escape more and more from intensity towards understanding, And
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  Speaker 1: already this astounding begins to take its place among other
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  Speaker 1: events as a thing strange and terrible, indeed, but related
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  Speaker 1: to all the strangeness and mystery of life, part of
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  Speaker 1: the universal mysteries of despair and futility and death that
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  Speaker 1: have troubled my consciousness since childhood. For a time, the
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  Speaker 1: death of Mary obscured her life for me. But now
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  Speaker 1: her living presence is more in my mind again, I
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  Speaker 1: begin to see that it is the reality of her
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  Speaker 1: existence and not the accidents of her end, that matter most.
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  Speaker 1: It signifies less that she should have flung out of
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  Speaker 1: life when it seemed that her living could only have
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  Speaker 1: meant disaster to herself and to all she loved, than
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  Speaker 1: that all her life should have been hampered and restricted.
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  Speaker 1: Through all her life, this brave and fine and beautiful
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  Speaker 1: being was for the most part of her possibilities wasted
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  Speaker 1: in a splendid sense, magnificently wasted, if you will, but
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  Speaker 1: wasted two. It was that idea of waste that dominated
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  Speaker 1: my mind in a strange interview I had with Justin,
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  Speaker 1: for it became necessary for me to see Justin in
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  Speaker 1: order that we should stamp out the whispers against her
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  Speaker 1: that followed her death. He had made it seem an
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  Speaker 1: accidental death due to an overdose of the narcotic she employed,
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  Speaker 1: but he had not been able to obliterate altogether the
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  Speaker 1: beginnings of his divorce proceedings. There had been talk on
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  Speaker 1: the part of clerks and possible witnesses. But of all
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  Speaker 1: that I need not tell you here. What matters is
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  Speaker 1: that Justin and I could meet without hatred or violence.
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  Speaker 1: I met to Justin gray haired, and it seemed to
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  Speaker 1: me physically shrunken more than ever, slow, speaking with his
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  Speaker 1: habit of attentive silences more marked, and that dark scar
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  Speaker 1: spread beyond his brows. We had come to our parting,
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  Speaker 1: We had done our business with an affectation of emotional aloofness.
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  Speaker 1: And then suddenly he gripped me by the arm stratton.
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  Speaker 1: He said, we two, We killed her. We tore her
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  Speaker 1: to pieces between us. I made no answer to this outbreak.
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  Speaker 1: We tore her to pieces, he repeated. It's so damned silly.
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  Speaker 1: One gets angry like an animal. I became grotesquely anxious
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  Speaker 1: to assure him that, indeed she and I had been,
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  Speaker 1: as they say, innocent throughout our last day together. You
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  Speaker 1: were wrong, and all that I said, she kept her
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  Speaker 1: faith with you. We never planned to meet, and when
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  Speaker 1: we met, if we had been brother and sister, indeed
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  Speaker 1: there was nothing I suppose, he said. I ought to
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  Speaker 1: be glad of that, But now it doesn't seem to
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  Speaker 1: matter very much. We killed her. What does that matter
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  Speaker 1: to me now? Three? And it is upon this effect
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  Speaker 1: of sweet and beautiful possibilities caught in the net of
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  Speaker 1: animal jealousies and thoughtless motives and ancient, rigid institutions, that
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  Speaker 1: I would end this riding In Mary, it seems to
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  Speaker 1: me I found both womanhood and fellowship. I found what
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  Speaker 1: many have dreamt of, love and friendship freely given. And
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  Speaker 1: I could do nothing but clutch at her to make
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  Speaker 1: her my possession. I would not permit her to live
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  Speaker 1: except as a part of my life. I see her
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  Speaker 1: now and understand her better than when she was alive.
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  Speaker 1: I recall things that she said and wrote, and it
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  Speaker 1: is clear to me, clearer perhaps than it ever was
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  Speaker 1: to her, that she, with her resentment at being in
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  Speaker 1: any sense property, her self, reliant thought, her independence of standard,
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  Speaker 1: was the very prototype of that sister lover, who must
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  Speaker 1: replace the seductive and abject womanhood, owned, mastered and deceiving
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  Speaker 1: who waste the world today. And she was owned, she
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  Speaker 1: was mastered, she was forced into concealment. What alternative was
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  Speaker 1: there for her? What alternative is there for any woman?
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  Speaker 1: She might perhaps have kept her freedom by some ill
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  Speaker 1: paid work, and at the price of every other impulse.
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  Speaker 1: In her swift and eager nature, she might have become
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  Speaker 1: one of those poor neuters, an independent woman. Life was
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  Speaker 1: made impossible for her, and she was forced to die
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  Speaker 1: according to the fate of all untimely things. She was
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  Speaker 1: destroyed not merely by the unconsidered, undisciplined passions of her
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  Speaker 1: husband and her lover, but by the vast tradition that
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  Speaker 1: sustains and enforces the subjugation of her sex. What I
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  Speaker 1: had from her and what she was, is but a
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  Speaker 1: mere intimation of all that she and I might have
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  Speaker 1: made of each other and the world. And perhaps in
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  Speaker 1: this story I have said enough for you to understand
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  Speaker 1: why Mary has identified herself with something worldwide, has added
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  Speaker 1: to herself a symbolical value, and why it is I
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  Speaker 1: find in the whole crowded spectacle of mankind a quality
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  Speaker 1: that is also hers, a sense of fine things entangled
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  Speaker 1: and stifled and unable to free themselves from the ancient
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  Speaker 1: limiting jealousies which law and custom and body. For I
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  Speaker 1: know that a growing multitude of men and women outwear
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  Speaker 1: the ancient ways, the blood stained organized jealousies of religious intolerance,
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  Speaker 1: the delusions of nationality and cult and race. That black
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  Speaker 1: hatred which simple people and young people and common people
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  Speaker 1: cherish against all that is not in the likeness of themselves,
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  Speaker 1: cease to be the undisputed ruling forces of our collective life.
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  Speaker 1: We want to emancipate our lives from the slavery and
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  Speaker 1: these stupidities, from dull hatreds and suspicion. The ripening mind
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  Speaker 1: of our race tires of these boorish and brutish and
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  Speaker 1: childish things. A spirit that is like hers arises and
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  Speaker 1: increases in human affairs, a spirit that demands freedom and
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  Speaker 1: gracious living, as our inheritance too long deferred, And I,
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  Speaker 1: who loved so blindly and narrowly, now love her spirit
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  Speaker 1: with a dawning understanding. I will not be content with
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  Speaker 1: that compromise of jealousies, which is the established life of humanity.
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  Speaker 1: To day I give myself, and if I can, I
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  Speaker 1: will give you to the destruction of jealousy and of
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  Speaker 1: the forms and shelters and instruments of jealousy, both in
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  Speaker 1: my own self and in the thought and laws and
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  Speaker 1: usage of the world. End of chapter twelve. End of
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  Speaker 1: the Passionate Friends by H. G. Wells, recorded by Peter
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  Speaker 1: Eastman two thousand twelve.