The Garden of Survival | Page 4

should get little sympathy, and probably less credence still.
For to have my experience disbelieved, or attributed to hallucination,
would be intolerable to me. Psychical investigators, I am told, prefer a
Medium who takes no cash recompense for his performance, a Healer
who gives of his strange powers without reward. There are, however,
natural-born priests who yet wear no uniform other than upon their face
and heart, but since I know of none I fall back upon yourself, my other
half, for in writing this adventure to you I almost feel that I am writing
it to myself.
The desire for confession is upon me: this thing must out. It is a story,
though an unfinished one. I mention this at once lest, frightened by the
thickness of the many pages, you lay them aside against another time,
and so perhaps neglect them altogether. A story, however, will invite
your interest, and when I add that it is true, I feel that you will bring
sympathy to that interest: these together, I hope, may win your
attention, and hold it, until you shall have read the final word.
That I should use this form in telling it will offend your literary
taste--you who have made your name both as critic and creative
writer--for you said once, I remember, that to tell a story in epistolary
form is a subterfuge, an attempt to evade the difficult matters of
construction and delineation of character. My story, however, is so
slight, so subtle, so delicately intimate too, that a letter to some one in
closest sympathy with myself seems the only form that offers.

It is, as I said, a confession, but a very dear confession: I burn to tell it
honestly, yet know not how. To withhold it from you would be to admit
a secretiveness that our relationship has never known--out it must, and
to you. I may, perhaps, borrow--who can limit the sharing powers of
twin brothers like ourselves?--some of the skill your own work spills so
prodigally, crumbs from your writing-table, so to speak; and you will
forgive the robbery, if successful, as you will accept lie love behind the
confession as your due.
Now, listen, please! For this is the point: that, although my wife is dead
these dozen years and more--I have found reunion and I love.
Explanation of this must follow as best it may. So, please mark tie
point which for the sake of emphasis I venture to repeat: that I know
reunion and I love.
With the jealous prerogative of the twin, you objected to that marriage,
though I knew that it deprived you of no jot of my affection, owing to
the fact that it was prompted by pity only, leaving the soul in me
wholly disengaged. Marion, by her steady refusal to accept my honest
friendship, by her persistent admiration of me, as also by her loveliness,
her youth, her singing, persuaded me somehow finally that I needed her.
The cry of the flesh, which her beauty stimulated and her singing
increased most strangely, seemed raised into a burning desire that I
mistook at the moment for the true desire of the soul. Yet, actually, the
soul in me remained aloof, a spectator, and one, moreover, of a
distinctly lukewarm kind. It was very curious. On looking back, I can
hardly understand it even now; there seemed some special power, some
special undiscovered tie between us that led me on and yet deceived me.
It was especially evident in her singing, this deep power. She sang, you
remember, to her own accompaniment on the harp, and her method,
though so simple it seemed almost childish, was at the same time
charged with a great melancholy that always moved me most
profoundly. The sound of her small, plaintive voice, the sight of her
slender fingers that plucked the strings in some delicate fashion native
to herself, the tiny foot that pressed the pedal--all these, with her dark
searching eyes fixed penetratingly upon my own while she sang of love
and love's endearments, combined in a single stroke of very puissant

and seductive kind. Passions in me awoke, so deep, so ardent, so
imperious, that I conceived them as born of the need of one soul for
another. I attributed their power to genuine love. The following
reactions, when my soul held up a finger and bade me listen to her still,
small warnings, grew less positive and of ever less duration. The
frontier between physical and spiritual passion is perilously narrow,
perhaps. My judgment, at any rate, became insecure, then floundered
hopelessly. The sound of the harp-strings and of Marion's voice could
overwhelm its balance instantly.
Mistaking, perhaps, my lukewarm-ness for restraint, she led me at last
to the altar you described as one of