The Sea, the Sea

was very strong. And she escaped.

I had to go back to London. After a day or two I could not believe in the possibility of anything so dreadful. I wrote to her commandingly, understandingly, confidently. I cancelled everything and ran back. I saw her again, and there was the same scene, and again. Then suddenly she was gone. I called at her house. Her parents, her brother, looked at me with hostility. She had gone to stay with friends, they did not know the address. I called again the next week. Then I got a letter from her mother saying that Hartley did not want to see me and asking me not to pester them. I searched, I asked, I watched. How in the twentieth century can people just vanish, why is there not a register one can consult, a department one can write to? I spent my holidays on detective work. None of our school friends knew where she was. I put a notice in the local paper. I visited every place she had mentioned, everyone who had known her well. I wrote dozens of letters. Much later of course it was clear to me that she could only have escaped by running, by vanishing.

Some time during this period her parents left the district, then I got a curt letter from her mother, giving no address, and saying that Hartley was married. I did not believe her. The parents were liars, a sinister influence, they hated me because Hartley loved me. I went on searching, I went on waiting. I felt that there must be some particular special cause for her flight, and that time would remove the cause and make things as they were. I conducted myself in such a wild crazy manner that quite a lot of people came to know about my love, and I became quite famous as a mad lover. By then I wanted to advertise my plight, since someone might then bring me news. And someone did. Mr McDowell wrote to me and said that it was true, Hartley was married. I believed him. He gave no details (perhaps he feared I might commit some act of violence) and I asked for none. He said in his letter, ‘You must simply accept that she does not want you, that she loves someone else. With this no man can argue.’

Of course I ‘recovered’ in a sense. I worked. I met Clement Makin and let her kidnap me. I told her the whole story, I think the first time I met her. I never told my parents, and I believe they never knew. They were such simple unsuspicious people and they never met anybody. Clement nursed me, she nursed my jealousy, it was a great ‘topic’ between us for a while. She rather enjoyed it all, she felt she was curing me and I let her think so, but she was mistaken. The wound was too deep and now it was infected by the raging bitterness of jealousy. That awful leprosy came into my life when I read Mr McDowell’s letter, and has never left it since. ‘She does not want you, she loves someone else.’ When I was searching for her I was bemused by hope. I constantly forgave her in my heart, and this constantly renewed act of forgiveness brought me comfort. I felt that she must somehow know how I suffered, and that the antennae of my thought must touch her. But I always thought of her as alone. After I really understood that she was married I did not hate her, but the demon of jealousy befouled the past and left my mind no place to rest. Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.

Hartley made a permanent metaphysical crisis of my life by refusing me for moral reasons. Did this lead me to make immorality my mask? Such pompous speculations are of course a kind of nonsense and I surprise myself by writing them down. What were Hartley’s ‘reasons’? I shall never know. It is possible that some demonic sense of a surrender of innocence entered into my affair with Clement, as if I were saying to Hartley: You did not trust me. Well, I will show you, now and forever after, how right you were! Perhaps all my love affairs have been vicious attempts to show Hartley that she was right after all. But she was only right because she left me. You die at heart from a withdrawal of love. My mother’s threats of such a withdrawal made me utterly vulnerable to Hartley’s crime. Hartley destroyed my innocence, she and the demon of jealousy. She made me faithless. But with her I would have been faithful, with her my whole life would have been different, less rootless, less empty. Do I then think my life has been empty, my life? A ridiculous judgment! Could Hartley really have thought the youth that I then was ‘a worldly man’? If so she was more like my mother than I ever suspected. She made me a worldly man by rejecting me, that failure ruined me morally. Did she think I would be ‘lost’ in the theatre? She never said that. It was her rejection that made me lose my way. Would I have been faithful? How could I not have been, if she had lived with me, sewed for me, cooked for me. We would have become one, and the holiness of marriage would have been our safety and our home forever. She was a part, an evidence, of some pure uncracked un-fissured confidence in the good which was never there for me again.

Much later on it was a little as if the past had recovered. The past can recover. I saw again, far away like a dulled yet glowing painting of Adam and Eve upon an old fresco, two innocent beings bathed in a clear light. She became my Beatrice. As I went on, all the goodness of my life seemed to reside there with her. Goodness-or was it just a very special blend of innocence and chaste passion? I have been able to write about her as she then was, and I am deeply glad to find that I can do it. There is that faint smell of fire and brimstone when something of the past comes tearing to the surface vivid and complete. Of course the whole of my life has been a tissue of memories of Hartley. But earlier on I think I could not have written these things down; or admitted that, in her despite and in mine, that ancient love is somehow still alive. Of course I never saw her again. In the years to come I thanked God that the demon of jealousy itself had warned me not to find out any details, the suffering would have been too great, and I never even knew her married name. I stopped searching; I did not want to know where she was dragging out her obscure existence. I did not want my circling thought to have names and places to feed upon. But it pleased me to think of her life as dull. And then when I became well known and my name was often in the papers, it pleased me to imagine that she felt terrible secret pangs of remorse and regret, and that a bitter worm gnawed her as painfully as it has gnawed me. She threw away her happiness when she threw away mine. I would have made her a queen in this world.

Ever since those terrible days I have feared the possibility of an overwhelmingly powerful pain-source in my life, and I have nursed myself so as not to suffer too much. Possibly this is the deep reason why I have not married. What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for the choice? They may have been forgotten. Did one know what one was choosing? Certainly not. There are such chasms of might-have-beens in any human life. When I was confirmed I was determined to be good forever, and I still feel a ghostly illusion that I could have been. The image of Hartley changed in my mind from fiery pain to sadness, but never became blank. And in a way I did keep on searching for her, only it was a different and quite involuntary kind of search, a sort of dream-search. It was as if in my persisting memory of her I seemed to ‘body her forth’, the ways she moved, the ways she walked, as if a physical scheme of her being kept me always company. And so, and especially as the pain faded, I kept ‘seeing’ her, seeing shadow forms of her imposed upon quite different women; her shoulders, her hair, her walk, her puzzled fey expression. I still sometimes see these shadows. I saw one lately upon an old woman in the village, a transient look of her head placed like a mask upon somebody entirely different. Once or twice in London, long ago, I even followed these ghosts, not because I thought they were she, but simply to torment myself, to punish myself for still remembering.

A little while ago the thought came to me that she was dead. That strange pallor, those dilated pupils: perhaps these were presages of disease, of some quiet killer biding its time? Perhaps really she had died long ago when I was still young? In a way I would be glad to know that she was dead. What would my love for her do then? Would it peacefully die too, or be transformed into something selfless and innocent? Would jealousy, the jealousy which has burned even in these pages, leave me at last, and the smell of fire and brimstone fade away?

Even now I shake and tremble as I write. Memory is too weak a name for this terrible evocation. Oh Hartley, Hartley, how timeless, how absolute love is. My love for you is unaware that I am old and you perhaps are dead.

I ate three oranges at eleven o’clock this morning. Oranges should be eaten in solitude and as a treat when one is feeling hungry. They are too messy and overwhelming to form part of an ordinary meal. I should say here that I am not a breakfast eater though I respect those who are. I breakfast on delicious Indian tea. Coffee and China tea are intolerable at breakfast time, and, for me, coffee unless it is very good and made by somebody else is pretty intolerable at any time. It seems to me an inconvenient and much overrated drink, but this I will admit to be a matter of personal taste. (Whereas other views which I hold on the subject of food approximate to absolute truths.) I do not normally eat at breakfast time since even half a slice of buttered toast can induce an inconvenient degree of hunger, and eating too much breakfast is a thoroughly bad start to the day. I am however not at all averse to elevenses which can come in great variety. There are, as indicated above, moments for oranges. There are also moments for chilled port and plum cake.

The orange feast did not dim my appetite for lunch, which consisted of fish cakes with hot Indian pickle and a