Part 10 (1/2)
November 10.--I try to persuade myself that I have become her lover wholly out of pity; but the more intimate self which listens is not to be persuaded. Certainly I do not love her, but is it only because she loves me, and because she is the most unfortunate of women, that ... No, there is something else, some animal attraction, which comes to me in spite of my repugnance; a gross, unmistakable desire, which I would not admit even to myself if the consciousness of it were not forced upon me.
What I should not have believed in another, I experience, beyond denial, in myself.
Shall a man never know what it is in him that responds, without love, to a woman's gesture? Is it a kind of animal vanity? Is it that love creates, not love, but a flattered readiness to be loved? Did I not think how terrible it would be if she fell in love again, and did I not mean, for the main part, because she could expect no return? And I was wrong. Something has taken hold of me, an appeal, a partly honest and partly perverse attraction; and I say to myself that it is pity, but though pity is part of it, it is not all pity; and I find myself, as I have always found myself, doing the exact opposite of what seems most natural and desirable. Why?
November 20.--I have made a mistake, but it was inevitable. I have put back my shoulders under the yoke, and all the peace is over. I have had just time enough to rest, and to get ready for the old labour, and now I am troubled with all a woman's ingenuity of trouble: her nerves, her cares, her affections, her solicitudes, her whole minute and never-ceasing possession. How am I to explain myself? There was no choice; it is useless to regret what could but have been accepted. She has a calm will to love, she is like some force of nature against which it is useless to struggle.
November 22.--I do not know why it is, but all my old nervous uneasiness is coming back on me again, against all sense or reason. I have that curious feeling that something is going to happen; I find myself listening to noises, unable to sit quiet, watching my own brain. All the restlessness has come back, and some of the fear. I am afraid of this woman's love. I could not leave her, but I am afraid of what will happen to me.
December 3.--No, I shall never get accustomed to it; the same physical horror will always be there; it has been there when the attraction was strongest; it has never been out of my mind, or away from the eyes of my senses. She is aware of it, and suffers; and I am helpless before her suffering. And it is this, nothing but this, which turns my thoughts morbid, whenever I think over a situation which might otherwise have had nothing unusual in it. The husband studies me with a kind of curious and mocking interest, which he allows to remain on his face when he sees us together. Does he suspect, know, approve, or disapprove? Do I seem to him ... But in any case all that is beside the question: I once thought that it would be a generous revenge to make him suffer; now I am conscious how idle the thought was. Is it not all idle, is not everything more or less beside the question?
I am tired of writing in my journal, always the same things. I will shut the book, and perhaps not open it again.
January 5.--I have not written anything in my journal for years (how many years is it?), and I do not know what impulse or what accident has led me to open it again, and to turn over some of the pages on which the dust has settled, and to begin to write there as I am doing, half mechanically. What is it that seems strange as I read what I have written here? I suppose that I should have considered, discussed, questioned the very things which are now as if they had always been. I do not dream of changing them, any more than I dream of changing the course of life itself, on its inevitable way. But a rage in me never quite dies out: against this woman who has taken me from myself, and against life that is wasting me daily. I have no happiness if I look either forward or backward. I have always succ.u.mbed to what I have most dreaded, and every reluctance has turned in me to an irresistible force of attraction. And now I am softly, stealthily entangled, held by loving hands, imprisoned in comfort; I do some good at last, for certainly I help to make a wronged and pitiable woman happy; I have no will to break any bond, and yet I am more desolately alone than I have ever been, more fretted by the old self, by apprehensions and memories, by the pa.s.sing of time and the lack of hope or desire. I would welcome any change, though it brought worse things, if I could but end this monotony in which there is no rest; end it somehow, and rest a little, and be alone.
October 12.--I have been ill, I am better, I am in Venice. Surely one gets well of every trouble in Venice, where, if anywhere in the world, there should be peace, the oblivion of water, of silence, the unreal life of sails? I have come to an old house on the Giudecca, where one is islanded even from the island life of Venice: I look across and see land, the square white Dogana, the Salute, like a mosque, the whole Riva, with the Doges' Palace. There lies all that is most beautiful in the world, and I have only to look out of my windows to see it. Palladio built the house, and the rooms are vast; the beams overhead are so high that I feel shrunk as I look at them, as if lost in all this s.p.a.ce; which, however, delights my humour.
October 14.--The art in life is to sit still, and to let things come towards you, not to go after them, or even to think that they are in flight. How often I have chased some divine shadow, through a whole day till evening, when, going home tired, I have found the visitor just turning away from my closed door.
To sit still, in Venice, is to be at home to every delight. I love St.
Mark's, the Piazza, the marble benches under the colonnade of the Doges'
Palace, the end of land beyond the Dogana, the steps of the Redentore; above all, my own windows. Sitting at any one of these stations one gathers as many floating strays of life as a post in the sea gathers weeds. And it is all a sort of immense rest, literally a dream, for there is sleep all over Venice. I have been sitting for a long time in St. Mark's, thinking of nothing. The voices of the priests chanting hummed and buzzed like echoes in an iron bell. They troubled me a little, but without breaking the enchantment, as importunate insects trouble a summer afternoon. Very old men in purple sat sunk into the stalls of the choir, loth to move, almost overcome with sleep; waiting, with an accustomed patience, till the task was over.
Here (infinite relief!) I can think of nothing. She writes to me, and I put aside the letters, and I forget quite easily that some day she will come for me, and the old life must begin over again. I do not dread it, because I do not remember it. I am still weak, and I must not excite myself; I must sink into this delicious Venice, where forgetfulness is easier than anywhere in the world. The autumn is like a gentler summer; no such autumn has been known, even in Venice, for many years; and I am to be happy here, I think.
October 25.--I have been roaming about the strange house, upstairs, in these vast garrets paved with stone, with old carved chimneys, into which they have put modern stoves, and beams, the actual roof-trees overhead; nearly all unoccupied s.p.a.ce, out of which a room is walled up or boarded off here and there. Some of the windows look right over the court, the two stone angels on the gateway, and the broad green and brown orto, the fruit garden which stretches to the lagoon, its vine trellises invisible among the close leaves of the trees. Beyond the brown and green, there is a little strip of pale water, and then mud flats, where the tide has ebbed, the palest brown, and then more pale water, and the walls and windows of the madhouse, San Servolo, coming up squarely out of the lagoon.
October 26.--Does the too exciting exquisiteness of Venice drive people mad? Two madhouses in the water! It is like a menace.
I went out in the gondola yesterday on the lagoon on the other side of the island. It was an afternoon of faint, exquisite suns.h.i.+ne, and the water lay like a mirror, bright and motionless, reflecting nothing but a small stake, or the hull, hoisted nets, and stooping back of a fisher and his boat. I looked along the level, polished surface to where sails rose up against the sky, between the black, compact bulk of the forts.
The water lapped around the oar as it dipped and lifted, and trickled with a purring sound from the prow. I lay and felt perfectly happy, not thinking of anything, hardly conscious of myself. I had closed my eyes, and when I opened them again we were drifting close to a small island, on which there was a many-windowed building, most of the windows grated over, and a church with closed doors; the building almost filled the island; it had a walled garden with trees. A kind of moaning sound came from inside the walls, rising and falling, confused and broken. 'It is San Clemente,' said the gondolier over my shoulder; 'they keep mad people there, mad women.'
November 1.--She writes affectionate letters to me, without a respite; she will not let me alone to get well. For I am sure I could get well here if I were quite left to myself. And now even Venice is turning evil. Is it in the place, in myself, is it my disease returning to take hold of me? Is it the power of the woman coming back across land and water to take hold of me? I am getting afraid to go about this strange house at night; the wind comes in from the sea, and tears at the old walls and the roof; I scarcely know if it is the wind I hear when I wake up in the night.