The Greater Inclination | Page 6

to talk, of course--I was Vincent Rendle's Mrs. Anerton;
when the Sonnets to Silvia appeared, it was whispered that I was Silvia.
Wherever he went, I was invited; people made up to me in the hope of
getting to know him; when I was in London my doorbell never stopped
ringing. Elderly peeresses, aspiring hostesses, love-sick girls and
struggling authors overwhelmed me with their assiduities. I hugged my
success, for I knew what it meant--they thought that Rendle was in love
with me! Do you know, at times, they almost made me think so too?
Oh, there was no phase of folly I didn't go through. You can't imagine
the excuses a woman will invent for a man's not telling her that he
loves her--pitiable arguments that she would see through at a glance if
any other woman used them! But all the while, deep down, I knew he

had never cared. I should have known it if he had made love to me
every day of his life. I could never guess whether he knew what people
said about us--he listened so little to what people said; and cared still
less, when he heard. He was always quite honest and straightforward
with me; he treated me as one man treats another; and yet at times I felt
he must see that with me it was different. If he did see, he made no sign.
Perhaps he never noticed--I am sure he never meant to be cruel. He had
never made love to me; it was no fault of his if I wanted more than he
could give me. The Sonnets to Silvia, you say? But what are they? A
cosmic philosophy, not a love-poem; addressed to Woman, not to a
woman!
But then, the letters? Ah, the letters! Well, I'll make a clean breast of it.
You have noticed the breaks in the letters here and there, just as they
seem to be on the point of growing a little--warmer? The critics, you
may remember, praised the editor for his commendable delicacy and
good taste (so rare in these days!) in omitting from the correspondence
all personal allusions, all those _détails intimes_ which should be kept
sacred from the public gaze. They referred, of course, to the asterisks in
the letters to Mrs. A. Those letters I myself prepared for publication;
that is to say, I copied them out for the editor, and every now and then I
put in a line of asterisks to make it appear that something had been left
out. You understand? The asterisks were a sham--there was nothing to
leave out.
No one but a woman could understand what I went through during
those years--the moments of revolt, when I felt I must break away from
it all, fling the truth in his face and never see him again; the inevitable
reaction, when not to see him seemed the one unendurable thing, and I
trembled lest a look or word of mine should disturb the poise of our
friendship; the silly days when I hugged the delusion that he must love
me, since everybody thought he did; the long periods of numbness,
when I didn't seem to care whether he loved me or not. Between these
wretched days came others when our intellectual accord was so perfect
that I forgot everything else in the joy of feeling myself lifted up on the
wings of his thought. Sometimes, then, the heavens seemed to be
opened....

* * * * *
All this time he was so dear a friend! He had the genius of friendship,
and he spent it all on me. Yes, you were right when you said that I have
had more than any other woman. _Il faut de l'adresse pour aimer_,
Pascal says; and I was so quiet, so cheerful, so frankly affectionate with
him, that in all those years I am almost sure I never bored him. Could I
have hoped as much if he had loved me?
You mustn't think of him, though, as having been tied to my skirts. He
came and went as he pleased, and so did his fancies. There was a girl
once (I am telling you everything), a lovely being who called his poetry
"deep" and gave him Lucile on his birthday. He followed her to
Switzerland one summer, and all the time that he was dangling after her
(a little too conspicuously, I always thought, for a Great Man), he was
writing to me about his theory of vowel-combinations--or was it his
experiments in English hexameter? The letters were dated from the
very places where I knew they went and sat by waterfalls together and
he thought out adjectives for her hair. He talked to me about it quite
frankly afterwards. She was perfectly beautiful and