SHE: I don’t think so. I may have liked other people, but I never dreamed of marrying anyone but you. . . . No, and I never thought any of them understood me either. I took very good care they shouldn’t.
HE: Why, it was only the other day that you said Hank understood you better than I ever could. You said I was too virtuous and that if I were worse you might see me!
SHE: As usual, you misquote me. What I said was that Hank and I were more alike and you are a virtuous stranger—a sort of wandering John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness!
HE: Preachers don’t do the things I do!
SHE: Oh, don’t they!
HE: Well, I know I am as vicious as man can be. You would see that if you loved me. I am fully as bad as Hank.
SHE: Hank doesn’t pretend to be virtuous, so perhaps you’re worse. But I think you ought to make up your mind whether you’re virtuous or vicious, and not assume to be both.
HE: I am both as a matter of fact, like everybody else. I am not a hypocrite. I love the virtuous and also the vicious. But I don’t like to be left out in the cold when you are having an affair. When you are interested in the other, you are not in me.
SHE: Why do you pretend to fuss about lamps and such things when you are simply jealous? I call that hypocritical. I wish it were possible for a man to play fair. But what you want is to censor and control me, while you feel perfectly free to amuse yourself in every possible way.
HE: I am never jealous without cause and you are. You object to my friendly and physical intimacies and then expect me not to be jealous of your soul’s infidelities, when you lose all feeling for me. I am tired of it. It is a fundamental misunderstanding and we ought to separate at once!
SHE: Oh, very well, if you’re so keen on it. But remember you suggested it. I never said I wanted to separate from you—if I had, I wouldn’t be here now.
HE: No, because I’ve given all I had to you. I have nourished you with my love. You have harassed and destroyed me. I am no good because of you. You have made me work over you to the degree that I have no real life. You have enslaved me, and your method is cool aloofness. You want to keep on being cruel. You are the devil, who never really meant any harm, but who sneers at desires and never wants to satisfy. Let us separate—you are my only enemy!
SHE: Well, you know we are told to love our enemies.
HE: I have done my full duty in that respect. People we love are the only ones who can hurt us. They are our enemies, unless they love us in return.
SHE: “A man’s enemies are those of his own household”—Yes, especially if they love. You, on account of your love for me, have tyrannized over me, bothered me, badgered me, nagged me, for fifteen years. You have interfered with me, taken my time and strength, and prevented me from accomplishing great works for the good of humanity. You have crushed my soul, which longs for serenity and peace, with your perpetual complaining.
HE: Too bad. (Indignantly.) Perpetual complaining!
SHE: Yes, of course. But you see, my dear, I am more philosophical than you, and I recognize all this as necessity. Men and women are natural enemies, like cat and dog, only more so. They are forced to live together for a time, or this wonderful race couldn’t go on. In addition, in order to have the best children, men and women of totally opposed temperaments must live together. The shock and flame of two hostile temperaments meeting is what produces fine children. Well, we have fulfilled our fate and produced our children, and they are good ones. But really—to expect also to live in peace together—we as different as fire and water, or sea and land—that’s too much!
HE: If your philosophy is correct, that is another argument for separation. If we have done our job together, let’s go on our ways and try to do something else separately.
SHE: Perfectly logical. Perhaps it will be best. But no divorce-that’s so commonplace.
HE: Almost as commonplace as your conventional attitude toward husbands—that they are necessarily uninteresting—mon bete de mari—as the typical Frenchwoman of fiction says. I find divorce no more commonplace than real infidelity.
SHE: Both are matters of every day. But I see no reason for divorce unless one of the spouses wants to marry again. I shall never divorce you. But men can always have children, and so they are perpetually under the sway of the great illusion. If you want to marry again, you can divorce me.
HE: As usual, you want to see me as a brute. I don’t accept your philosophy. Children are the results of love, not the cause of it, and love should go on. It does go on, if once there has been the right relation. It is not re-marrying nor the unconscious desire for further propagation that moves me—but the eternal need of that peculiar sympathy which has never been satisfied—to die without that is failure in what most appeals to the imagination of human beings.
SHE: But that is precisely the great illusion. That is the unattainable that lures us on, and that will lead you, I foresee, if you leave me, into the arms of some other woman.
HE: Illusion! Precisely what is, you call illusion. Only there do we find Truth. And certainly I am bitten badly with illusion or truth, whichever it is. It is Truth to me. But I fear it may be too late. I fear the other woman is impossible.
SHE: (Pensively.) “I cannot comprehend this wild swooning desire to wallow in unbridled unity.” (He makes angry gesture, she goes on quickly.) I was quoting your favorite philosopher. But as to being too late—no, no—you’re more attractive than you ever were, and that shows your ingratitude to me, for I’m sure I have been a liberal education to you. You will easily find someone to adore you and console you for all your sufferings with me. But do be careful this time—get a good housekeeper.
HE: And you are more attractive than you ever were. I can see that others see that. I have been a liberal education to you too.
SHE: Yes, a Pilgrim’s Progress.
HE: I never would have seen woman, if I hadn’t suffered you.
SHE: I never would have suffered Man, if I hadn’t seen you.
HE: You never saw me!
SHE: Alas—yes! (With feeling.) I saw you as something very beautiful—very fine, sensitive—with more understanding than anyone I’ve ever known-more feeling—I still see you that way—but from a great—distance.
HE: (Startled.) Distance?
SHE: Yes. Don’t you feel how far away from one another we are?
HE: I have felt it, as you know—more and more so—that you were pushing me more and more away and seeking more and more somebody-something else. But this is the first time you had admitted feeling it.
She: Yes- l didn’t want to admit it. But now I see it has gone very far. It is as though we were on opposite banks of a stream that grows wider—separating us more and more.
HE: Yes—
SHE: You have gone your own way, and I mine—and there is a gulf between us.
HE: Now you see what I mean—
SHE: Yes, that we ought to separate—that we are separated-and yet I love you.
HE: Two people may love intensely, and yet not be able to live together—it is too painful, for you, for me—
SHE: We have hurt one another too much—
He: We have destroyed one another—we are enemies— (Pause.)
SHE: I don’t understand it—how we have come to this—after our long life together. Have you forgotten all that? What wonderful companions we were? How gayly we took life with both hands—how we played with it and with one another!—At least we have the past!
HE: The past is bitter—because the present is bitter.
SHE: You wrong the past.
HE: The past is always judged by the present. Dante said, the worst hell is in present misery to remember former happiness—
SHE: Dante was a man and a poet, and so ungrateful to life. (Pause, with feeling.) Our past to me is wonderful and will remain so, no matter what happens—full of color and life, complete!
HE: That is because our life together has been for you an episode.
SHE: No, it is because I take life as it is, not asking too much of it—not asking that any person or any relation be perfect. But you are an idealist—you can never be content with it—You have the poison, the longing for perfection in your soul.
HE: No, not for perfection but for union. That is not demanding the impossible. Many people have it who do not love as much as we do. No work of art is right, no matter how wonderful the material and the parts, if the whole, the unity, is not there.
SHE: That’s just what I mean. You have wanted to treat our relation, and me, as clay, and model it into the form you saw in your imagination. You have been a passionate artist. But life is not a plastic material. It models us.
HE: You are right. I have had the egotism of the artist, directed to a material that cannot be formed. I must let go of you, and satisfy my need of union, of marriage, otherwise than with you.
SHE: Yes, but you cannot do that by seeking another woman. You would experience the same illusion—the same disillusion.
HE: How then can I satisfy this mystic need?
SHE: That is between you and your God, whom I know nothing about.
HE: If I could have stripped you of divinity and sought it elsewhere—in religion, in work—with the same intensity I sought it in you—we would not have needed this separation.
SHE: And we should have been very happy together!
HE: Yes—as interesting strangers.
SHE: Exactly. The only sensible way for two fully grown people to be together-and that is wonderful too—think! To have lived together for fifteen years and never to have bored one another! To be still for one another the most interesting persons in the world! How many married people can say that? I’ve never bored you, have I, Deacon?
HE: You have harassed, plagued, maddened, tortured me! Bored me? No, never, you bewitching devil! (Moving toward her.)
SHE: I’ve always adored the poet and mystic in you, though you’ve almost driven me crazy, you Man of God!
HE: I’ve always adored the woman in you, the mysterious, the beckoning and flying, that I cannot possess!
SHE: Can’t you forget God for a while, and come away with me?
HE: Yes, darling, after all you’re one of God’s creatures!
SHE: Faithful to the end! A truce then, shall it be? (Opening her arm.) An armed truce?
HE: (Seizing her.) Yes, and in a trice! (She laughs.)
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