THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

12

And mingled with these dreams of power and patriotic service there

was another series of a different quality and a different colour,

like the antagonistic colour of a shot silk. The white life and the

red life, contrasted and interchanged, passing swiftly at a turn

from one to another, and refusing ever to mingle peacefully one with

the other. I was asking myself openly and distinctly: what are you

going to do for the world? What are you going to do with yourself?

and with an increasing strength and persistence Nature in spite of

my averted attention was asking me in penetrating undertones: what

are you going to do about this other fundamental matter, the beauty

of girls and women and your desire for them?

I have told of my sisterless youth and the narrow circumstances of

my upbringing. It made all women-kind mysterious to me. If it had

not been for my Staffordshire cousins I do not think I should have

known any girls at all until I was twenty. Of Staffordshire I will

tell a little later. But I can remember still how through all those

ripening years, the thought of women's beauty, their magic presence

in the world beside me and the unknown, untried reactions of their

intercourse, grew upon me and grew, as a strange presence grows in a

room when one is occupied by other things. I busied myself and

pretended to be wholly occupied, and there the woman stood, full

half of life neglected, and it seemed to my averted mind sometimes

that she was there clad and dignified and divine, and sometimes

Aphrodite shining and commanding, and sometimes that Venus who

stoops and allures.

This travel abroad seemed to have released a multitude of things in

my mind; the clear air, the beauty of the sunshine, the very blue of

the glaciers made me feel my body and quickened all those

disregarded dreams. I saw the sheathed beauty of women's forms all

about me, in the cheerful waitresses at the inns, in the pedestrians

one encountered in the tracks, in the chance fellow travellers at

the hotel tables. "Confound it!" said I, and talked all the more

zealously of that greater England that was calling us.

I remember that we passed two Germans, an old man and a tall fair

girl, father and daughter, who were walking down from Saas. She

came swinging and shining towards us, easy and strong. I worshipped

her as she approached.

"Gut Tag!" said Willersley, removing his hat.

"Morgen!" said the old man, saluting.

I stared stockishly at the girl, who passed with an indifferent

face.

That sticks in my mind as a picture remains in a room, it has kept

there bright and fresh as a thing seen yesterday, for twenty

years…

I flirted hesitatingly once or twice with comely serving girls, and

was a little ashamed lest Willersley should detect the keen interest

I took in them, and then as we came over the pass from Santa Maria

Maggiore to Cannobio, my secret preoccupation took me by surprise

and flooded me and broke down my pretences.

The women in that valley are very beautiful-women vary from valley

to valley in the Alps and are plain and squat here and divinities

five miles away-and as we came down we passed a group of five or

six of them resting by the wayside. Their burthens were beside

them, and one like Ceres held a reaping hook in her brown hand. She

watched us approaching and smiled faintly, her eyes at mine.

There was some greeting, and two of them laughed together.

We passed.

"Glorious girls they were," said Willersley, and suddenly an immense

sense of boredom enveloped me. I sawmyself striding on down that

winding road, talking of politics and parties and bills of

parliament and all sorts of dessicated things. That road seemed to

me to wind on for ever down to dust and infinite dreariness. I knew

it for a way of death. Reality was behind us.

Willersley set himself to draw a sociological moral. "I'm not so

sure," he said in a voice of intense discriminations, "after all,

that agricultural work isn't good for women."

"Damn agricultural work!" I said, and broke out into a vigorous

cursing of all I held dear. "Fettered things we are!" I cried. "I

wonder why I stand it!"

"Stand what?"

"Why don't I go back and make love to those girls and let the world

and you and everything go hang? Deep breasts and rounded limbs-and

we poor emasculated devils go tramping by with the blood of youth in

us!…"

"I'm not quite sure, Remington," said Willersley, looking at me with

a deliberately quaint expression over his glasses, "that picturesque

scenery is altogether good for your morals."

That fever was still in my blood when we came to Locarno.