who, of all
moderns, has caught the mystery of women. Women are very like
ships: ships sailing over waters of whose depths they themselves
know nothing; ships upon whose masts strange wild birds--thoughts
wandering from island to island of remote enchantment--settle for a
moment and then fly off forever; ships that can ride the maddest and
most tragical storms in safety; ships that some hidden rock,
unmarked on any earthly chart, may sink to the bottom without
warning and without mercy!

Conrad reveals to us the significant fact that what the deepest love
of women suffers from--the kind of storm which shakes it and
troubles it--is not sensuality of any sort but a species of blind and
fatal fury, hardly conscious of any definite cause, but directed
desperately and passionately against the very object of this love
itself. Conrad seems to indicate, if I read him correctly, that this mad,
wild, desperate fury with which women hurl themselves against
what they love best in a blind desire to hurt it, is nothing less than a
savage protest against that deep and inviolable gulf which isolates
every human being from every other human being.

Such a gulf men--in a measure--pass, or dream they pass, on the
swift torrent of animal desire; but women are more clairvoyant in
these things, and their love being more diffused, and, in a sense,
more spiritual, is not so easily satisfied by mere physical possession.

They want to possess more. They want to possess body, soul and
spirit. They want to share every thought of their beloved, every
instinct, every wish, every ambition, every vision, every remotest
dream.

That they are forbidden this complete reciprocity by a profound law
of nature excites their savage fury, and they blindly wreak their
anger upon the innocent cause of their bewildered un-happiness.

It is their maternal instinct which thus desires to take complete and
absolute possession of the object of their love. The maternal instinct
is always--as Conrad makes quite clear--at the bottom of the
love-passion in the most normal types of women; and the maternal
instinct is driven on by a mad relentless force to seek to destroy
every vestige of separate independence, bodily, mental or spiritual,
in the person it pursues.

Conrad shows with extraordinary subtlety how this basic craving in
women, resulting in this irrational and, apparently, inexplicable
anger, is invariably driven to cover its tracks by every kind of
cun