THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

4

But the other experience was still more cardinal. It was the first

clear intimation of a new motif in life, the sex motif, that was to

rise and increase and accumulate power and enrichment and interweave

with and at last dominate all my life.

It was when I was nearly fifteen this happened. It is inseparably

connected in my mind with the dusk of warm September evenings. I

never met the girl I loved by daylight, and I have forgotten her

name. It was some insignificant name.

Yet the peculiar quality of the adventure keeps it shining darkly

like some deep coloured gem in the common setting of my memories.

It came as something new and strange, something that did not join on

to anything else in my life or connect with any of my thoughts or

beliefs or habits; it was a wonder, a mystery, a discovery about

myself, a discovery about the whole world. Only in after years did

sexual feeling lose that isolation and spread itself out to

illuminate and pervade and at last possess the whole broad vision of

life.

It was in that phase of an urban youth's development, the phase of

the cheap cigarette, that this thing happened. One evening I came

by chance on a number of young people promenading by the light of a

row of shops towards Beckington, and, with all the glory of a

glowing cigarette between my lips, I joined their strolling number.

These twilight parades of young people, youngsters chiefly of the

lower middle-class, are one of the odd social developments of the

great suburban growths-unkindly critics, blind to the inner

meanings of things, call them, I believe, Monkeys' Parades-the shop

apprentices, the young work girls, the boy clerks and so forth,

stirred by mysterious intimations, spend their first-earned money

upon collars and ties, chiffon hats, smart lace collars, walking-

sticks, sunshades or cigarettes, and come valiantly into the vague

transfiguring mingling of gaslight and evening, to walk up and down,

to eye meaningly, even to accost and make friends. It is a queer

instinctive revolt from the narrow limited friendless homes in which

so many find themselves, a going out towards something, romance if

you will, beauty, that has suddenly become a need-a need that

hitherto has lain dormant and unsuspected. They promenade.

Vulgar!-it is as vulgar as the spirit that calls the moth abroad in

the evening and lights the body of the glow-worm in the night. I

made my way through the throng, a little contemptuously as became a

public schoolboy, my hands in my pockets-none of your cheap canes

for me!-and very careful of the lie of my cigarette upon my lips.

And two girls passed me, one a little taller than the other, with

dim warm-tinted faces under clouds of dark hair and with dark eyes

like pools reflecting stars.

I half turned, and the shorter one glanced back at me over her

shoulder-I could draw you now the pose of her cheek and neck and

shoulder-and instantly I was as passionately in love with the girl

as I have ever been before or since, as any man ever was with any

woman. I turned about and followed them, I flung away my cigarette

ostentatiously and lifted my school cap and spoke to them.

The girl answered shyly with her dark eyes on my face. What I said

and what she said I cannot remember, but I have little doubt it was

something absolutely vapid. It really did not matter; the thing was

we had met. I felt as I think a new-hatched moth must feel when

suddenly its urgent headlong searching brings it in tremulous

amazement upon its mate.

We met, covered from each other, with all the nets of civilisation

keeping us apart. We walked side by side.

It led to scarcely more than that. I think we met four or five

times altogether, and always with her nearly silent elder sister on

the other side of her. We walked on the last two occasions arm in

arm, furtively caressing each other's hands, we went away from the

glare of the shops into the quiet roads of villadom, and there we

whispered instead of talking and looked closely into one another's

warm and shaded face. "Dear," I whispered very daringly, and she

answered, "Dear!" We had a vague sense that we wanted more of that

quality of intimacy and more. We wanted each other as one wants

beautiful music again or to breathe again the scent of flowers.

And that is all there was between us. The events are nothing, the

thing that matters is the way in which this experience stabbed

through the common stuff of life and left it pierced, with a light,

with a huge new interest shining through the rent.

When I think of it I can recall even now the warm mystery of her

face, her lips a little apart, lips that I never kissed, her soft

shadowed throat, and I feel again the sensuous stir of her

proximity…

Those two girls never told me their surname nor let me approach

their house. They made me leave them at the corner of a road of

small houses near Penge Station. And quite abruptly, without any

intimation, they vanished and came to the meeting place no more,

they vanished as a moth goes out of a window into the night, and

left me possessed of an intolerable want…

The affair pervaded my existence for many weeks. I could not do my

work and I could not rest at home. Night after night I promenaded

up and down that Monkeys' Parade full of an unappeasable desire,

with a thwarted sense of something just begun that ought to have

gone on. I went backwards and forwards on the way to the vanishing

place, and at last explored the forbidden road that had swallowed

them up. But I never saw her again, except that later she came to

me, my symbol of womanhood, in dreams. How my blood was stirred! I

lay awake of nights whispering in the darkness for her. I prayed

for her.

Indeed that girl, who probably forgot the last vestiges of me when

her first real kiss came to her, ruled and haunted me, gave a Queen

to my imagination and a texture to all my desires until I became a

man.

I generalised her at last. I suddenly discovered that poetry was

about her and that she was the key to all that had hitherto seemed

nonsense about love. I took to reading novels, and if the heroine

could not possibly be like her, dusky and warm and starlike, I put

the book aside…

I hesitate and add here one other confession. I want to tell this

thing because it seems to me we are altogether too restrained and

secretive about such matters. The cardinal thing in life sneaks in

to us darkly and shamefully like a thief in the night.

One day during my Cambridge days-it must have been in my first year

before I knew Hatherleigh-I saw in a print-shop window near the

Strand an engraving of a girl that reminded me sharply of Penge and

its dusky encounter. It was just a half length of a bare-

shouldered, bare-breasted Oriental with arms akimbo, smiling

faintly. I looked at it, went my way, then turned back and bought

it. I felt I must have it. The odd thing is that I was more than a

little shamefaced about it. I did not have it framed and hung in my

room open to the criticism of my friends, but I kept it in the

drawer of my writing-table. And I kept that drawer locked for a

year. It speedily merged with and became identified with the dark

girl of Penge. That engraving became in a way my mistress. Often

when I had sported my oak and was supposed to be reading, I was

sitting with it before me.

Obeying some instinct I kept the thing very secret indeed. For a

time nobody suspected what was locked in my drawer nor what was

locked in me. I seemed as sexless as my world required.