Latest / The H. G. Wells Library / The Passionate Friends Chapter 10 - Mary Writes Parts 5-7

Transcript

The Passionate Friends Chapter 10 - Mary Writes Parts 5-7 · The H. G. Wells Library

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Chapter ten, parts five to seven of The Passionate Friends
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: by H. G. Wells. This LibriVox recording is in the
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: public domain recording by Peter Eastman. Chapter the tenth, Merry
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: writes five, it was true that I did ignore or
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: minimize sexual questions as much as I could. I was
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: forced now to think why I did this. That carried
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: me back to those old days of passion memories. I
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: had never stirred for many years, And I wrote to
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: Mary that there was indeed no reason but a reasonable fear, that,
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: in fact I had dismissed them because they had been
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: beyond by patience and self control, because I could not
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: think very much about them without an egotistical reversion to
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: the bitterness of my own case. And in avoiding them,
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: I was only doing what the great bulk of men
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: in business and men in affairs find themselves obliged to do.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: They train themselves not to think of the rights and
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: wrongs of sexual life, not to tolerate liberties, even in
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: their private imaginations. They know it is like carrying a
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: torch into a powder magazine. They feel they cannot trust
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: their own minds beyond the experience tested usages and conventions
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: of the ages, because they know how many of those
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: who have ventured further have been blinded by mists and
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: clouds of rhetoric, lost in inexplicable puzzles, and wrecked disastrously there.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: And there's half explored and altogether unsettled hinterlands lurk desires
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: that sting like adders and hatreds cruel as hell. And
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: then I went on I do not clearly remember now
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: the exact line of argument I adopt did to urge
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: upon her that our insoluble puzzles were not necessarily insoluble
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: puzzles for the world at large, that no one soldier
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: fights anything but a partial battle, and that it wasn't
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: an absolute condemnation of me to declare that I went
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: on living and working for social construction with the cardinal
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: riddles of social order so far as they affected her unsolved.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: Wasn't I, at any rate preparing apparatus for that huge
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: effort at solution that mankind must ultimately make. Wasn't this
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: dredging out and deepening of the channels of thought about
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: the best that we could hope to do at the
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: present time, Seeing that to launch a keel of speculation
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: prematurely was only to strand oneself among hopeless reefs and confusions.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: Better prepare for a voyage tomorrow than sail to destruction
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: to day. What ever I put in that forgotten part
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: of my letter was put less strikingly than my first admissions.
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: And anyhow, it was upon these that Mary pounced to
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: the disregard of any other point. There you are, she wrote,
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: with something like elation. There is a tiger in the garden,
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: and you won't talk or think about it for fear
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: of growing excited. That is my grievance against so much
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: historical and political and social discussion, its hopeless futility, because
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: of its hopeless omissions. You plan the world's future, taking
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: the women and children for granted, with egotistical sex, as
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: you call it, a prowling monster, upsetting everything you do.
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: But I will not give you that particular letter in
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: its order, nor its successors altogether. She wrote me twenty
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: two letters, and I one or two more than that
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: number to her, and a thing almost inevitable in a
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: discussion by correspondence, there is a lot of overlapping and recapitulation.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: Those letters spread over a space of nearly two and
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: a half years. Again and again she insists upon the
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: monstrous exaggeration of the importance of sex in human life,
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: and of the need of some reduction of its importance,
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: and she makes the boldest experimental suggestions for the achievement
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: of that end. But she comes slowly to recognize that
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: there is a justification for an indirect attack, that sex
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: and the position of women do not constitute the primary
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: problem in that bristling system of riddles that lies like
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: a hostile army across the path of mankind. And she
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: realized too that through art, through science and literature, and
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: the whole inquiring it creative side of man's nature lies
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: the path by which those positions are to be outflanked,
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: and those eternal looking impossibles and inconceivables overcome. Here is
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: a fragment saturated with the essence of her thought. Three
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: quarters of her earlier letters are variations on this theme,
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: what you call social order, Stephen. All the arrangements seem
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: to me to be built on subjection to sex, even
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: more than they are built, as you say, on labor subjection.
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: And this is an age of release, you say, It
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: is an age of release for the workers. And they
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: know it, and so do the women, just as much
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: wild hopes. Indeed, the worker's hopes are nothing to the women's.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: It is not only the workers who are saying, let
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: us go free, manage things differently so that we may
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: have our lives relieved from this intolerable earthen of constant toil.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: But the women also are saying let us go free.
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: They are demanding release just as much from their intolerable,
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: endless specialization as females, the tramp on the roads who
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: won't work, the swindler and the exploiter who contrive not
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: to work, the strikers who throw down their tools no
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: longer for twopences and sixpences, as you say, but because
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: their way of living is no longer tolerable to them.
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: And we women who don't bear children, or work or help,
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: we are all in one movement together. We are part
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: of the general strike. I have been a striker all
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: my life. We are doing nothing. By the hundred thousand,
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: Your old social machine is working without us, and in
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: spite of us, it carries us along with it, and
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: we are sand in the bearings. I'm not a wheel, Stephen.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: I'm writ what you say about the reactionaries and suppressionists
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: who would stifle the complaints of labor and crush out
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: its struggles to be free. Is exactly true about the
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: reactionaries and suppressionists who would stifle the discussion of the
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: woman's position and crush out her hopes of emancipation. And
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: here is a page of the peculiar doubt that was
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: as characteristic of her as the quick changes of her eyes.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: It gives just that pessimistic touch that tempered her valiant adventurousness,
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: that gave a color at last to the tragedy of
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: her death. Have you ever thought, Stephen, that perhaps these
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: repressionist people are righter than you are, That if the
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: worker gets free, he won't work, and that if the
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: woman gets free, she won't fur all her sex and
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: stop disturbing things. Suppose she is wicked as a sex,
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: those she will trade on her power of exciting imaginative men.
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: A lot of these new women run with the hare
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: and hunt with the hounds, beguile some poor innocent of
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: a man to ruin them, and then call in fathers, brothers,
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: husband's friends, chivalry, all the rest of it, and make
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: the best of both sides of a sex Suppose we
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: go on behaving like that after we've got all our emancipations.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: Suppose that the liberation of common people simply means loafing,
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: no discipline, nothing being done, an end to labor and
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: the beginning of nothing to replace it. And that the
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: liberation of women simply means the elaboration of mischief. Suppose
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: that it is so. Suppose you are just tumbling the
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: contents of the great into the middle of the room.
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: Then all this emancipation is a decay, even as conservative
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: minded people say, it's nonetheless a decay because we want it,
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: and the only thing to stop it is to stop it,
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: and to have more discipline and more suppression, and say
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: to women and the common people, back to the sterner virtues,
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: back to servitude. I wish I hadn't these reactionary streaks
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: in my thoughts, but I have, and there you are.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: And then towards the second year, her letters began to
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: break away from her preoccupation with her position as a woman,
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: and to take up new aspects of life, more general
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: aspects of life. Altogether. It had an effect not of
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: her having exhausted the subject, but as if despairing of
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: a direct solution, she turned deliberately to the relief of
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: other considerations. She ceased to question her own life, and,
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: taking that for granted, wrote more, largely of less tangible things.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: She remembered that she had said that life, if it
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: was no more than its present appearances, was utter nonsense.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: She went back to that one says things like that,
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: she wrote, and not for a moment does one believe it.
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: I grumble at my life. I seem to be always
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: weakly and fruitlessly fighting my life, and I love it.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: I would not be willingly dead for anything. I'd rather
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: be an old matchwoman selling matches on a freezing night
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: in the streets than be dead. Nothing nonsensical ever held
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: me so tightly or kept me so interested. I suppose,
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: really I am full of that very same formless faith
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: on which you rely. But with me it's not only
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: shapeless but intangible. I nibble at religion. I am immensely attracted.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: I stand in the doorway. Only when they come out
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: to persuade me to come in, I am like a
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: shy child, and I go away. The temples beguile me,
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: and the music, but not the men. I feel I
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: want to join it, and they say join us. They
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: are like vertures, such small things, such dreadful, little arguing men.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: They don't let you come in. They want you to
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: say they are right. All the really religious people seem
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: to be outside nowadays, and all the pretending, cheating, atheistical,
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: vain and limited people within. But the beautiful things religion
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: gives the beauty. Do you know, Saint Paul's Stephen Latterly?
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: I have been their time after time. It is the
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: most beautiful interior in all the world, so great, so
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: somberly dignified, so perfectly balanced, and filled with such wonderful music,
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: brimming with music, just as crystal water brims in a
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: bowl of crystal. The other day I went there up
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: into a little gallery, high up under the dome, to
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: hear box passion music. The Saint Matthew Passion one hangs
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: high and far above the little multitudes below, the white
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: robed singers, the white robed musicians, ranks and ranks the
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: great organ, the rose and rows and rows of congregation,
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: receding this way that way, into the haze of the
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: aisle and the transepts, and out of it all streams
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: the sound and the singing. It pours up past you
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: like a river, a river that rushes upward to some
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: great sea, some unknown sea. The whole place is music
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: and singing. I hang on to the railings, Stephen, and weep.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: I have to weep, and I wonder and wonder. One
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: prays then, as naturally as one drinks when one is
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: thirsty and cold water comes to hand. I don't know
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: whom I pray too, but I pray, of course, I pray. Latterly, Stephen.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: I have been reading devotional works and trying to catch
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: that music again. I never do, definitely never. But at
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: times I put down the book, and it seems to
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: me that, surely a moment ago I heard it, that
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: if I sit very still in a moment, I shall
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: hear it again. And I can feel it is there.
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: I know it is there, like a bat's cry pitched
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: too high for my ears. I know it is there,
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: just as I should still know there was poetry somewhere.
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: If some poor, toothless idiot with no roof to his
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: mouth and no knowledge of but the commonest words tried
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: to read Shelley to me, I wish I could pray
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: with you, Stephen. I wish I could kneel down somewhere
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: with you, of all people, and pray six Presently our
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: correspondence fell away, the gaps between our letters lengthened out.
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: We never wrote regularly, because for that there must be
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: a free exchange upon daily happenings, and neither of us
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: cared to dwell too closely on our immediate lives. We
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: had a regard for one another that left our backgrounds
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: vague and shadowy. She had made her appeal across the
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: sundering silences to me, and I had answered, and we
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: had poured out certain things from our minds. We could
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: not go on discussing. I was a very busy man now,
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: and she did not write except on my replies. For
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: a gap of nearly four months. Neither of us had
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: anything to say in a letter at all. I think
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: that in time our correspondence might have altogether died away.
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: Then she wrote again, in a more familiar strain, to
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: tell me of certain definite changes of relationship and outlook.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: She said that the estrangement between herself and Justin had
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: increased during the past year, that they were going to
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: live practically a part. She for the most part in
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: the Surrey house where her two children lived with their
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: governesses and maids. But also she meant to snatch weeks
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: and seasons for travel upon that they had been disputing
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: for some time. I know it is well with the children,
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: she wrote, Why should I be in perpetual attendance? I
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: do nothing for them except an occasional kiss or half
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: an hour's rompin. Why should one pretend justin that. I
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: have wrangled over this question of going away for weeks,
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: but at last feminine persistence has won. I am going
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: to travel in my own fashion and see the world
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: with periodic appearances at his side in London and Scotland.
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: We have agreed at least on one thing, and that
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: is upon a companion. She is to be my secretary, entitle,
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: my moral guaranteur. In fact, and her name, which is
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: her crowning glory, is Stella Summersley Satchel. She is blonde, erect, huffy, mannered,
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: and thoroughly up to both sides of her work. I
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: partly envy her independence and rectitude partly. Only it's odd
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: and quite inconsistent of me that I don't envy her altogether.
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: In theory, I insist that a woman should not have charm.
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: It is our undis. But when I meet one without it,
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: I shall also trail a maid. But I guess that
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: young woman will learn what it is to be left
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: behind in half the cities of Europe before I have
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: done with her. I always lose my maids. They are
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: so much more passive and forgettable than luggage abroad. That is,
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: and Justin usually in the old days used to remember
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: about them, and his valet used to see after them.
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: A most attentive man. Justin cannot, he says, half his
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: wife abroad with merely a companion, people would talk made.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: It must be as well. And so in a week
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: or less I shall start unusually tailor maid for South
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: Germany and all that jolly country. Companioned and maided, I
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: shall tramp on the feet God has given me in
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: stout boots. Miss Summersley Satchel marches, I understand like the
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: British infantry, but on a vegetarian basis. Fancy calling your
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: nourishment a basis the maid. And so forth by Eilgout seven.
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: After the letter containing that announcement, she wrote to me
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: twice again, once from Open and then after a long interval,
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: from Siena. The former was a scornfully minute description of
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: the English at their holidays, and how the conversation went
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: among the women after dinner. They are like a row
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: of Japanese lanterns, all blown out long ago and swinging
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: about in a wind. She wrote, an extravagant image that
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: yet conveys something of the large, empty, unilluminating effect of
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: a sort of social intercourse, very vividly. In the second letter,
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: she was concerned chiefly with the natural beaut beauty of Italy,
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: and how latterly she had thrice wept at beautiful things,
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: and what this mystery of beauty could be that had
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: such power over her emotions. All up the hill side
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: before the window, as I write, the herbage is thick
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: with anemones. They aren't scattered evenly and anyhow amongst the
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: other things, but in little clusters and groups that die
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: away and begin again, like the repetitions of an air
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: in some musical composition. I have been sitting and looking
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: at them for the better part of an hour, loving
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: them more and then more, and the sweet sunlight that
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: is on them and in among them. How marvelous are
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: these things, Stephen, all these little exquisite things that are
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: so abundant in the world, the gleaming lights and blossoms,
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: the drifting scents. At times these things bring to weeping.
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: I can't help it. It is as if God, who
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: was so stern and high, so terrible to all our appeals,
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: took pity for a moment and saw fit to speak
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: very softly and tenderly. That was the last letter I
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: was ever to have from her. End of Chapter ten.