THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

5

My cousins did more than illustrate Marx for me; they also undertook

a stage of my emotional education. Their method in that as in

everything else was extremely simple, but it took my inexperience by

surprise.

It must have been on my third visit that Sybil took me in hand.

Hitherto I seemed to have seen her only in profile, but now she

became almost completely full face, manifestly regarded me with

those violet eyes of hers. She passed me things I needed at

breakfast-it was the first morning of my visit-before I asked for

them.

When young men are looked at by pretty cousins, they become

intensely aware of those cousins. It seemed to me that I had

always admired Sybil's eyes very greatly, and that there was

something in her temperament congenial to mine. It was odd I had

not noted it on my previous visits.

We walked round the garden somewhen that morning, and talked about

Cambridge. She asked quite a lot of questions about my work and my

ambitions. She said she had always felt sure I was clever.

The conversation languished a little, and we picked some flowers for

the house. Then she asked if I could run. I conceded her various

starts and we raced up and down the middle garden path. Then, a

little breathless, we went into the new twenty-five guinea summer-

house at the end of the herbaceous border.

We sat side by side, pleasantly hidden from the house, and she

became anxious about her hair, which was slightly and prettily

disarranged, and asked me to help her with the adjustment of a

hairpin. I had never in my life been so near the soft curly hair

and the dainty eyebrow and eyelid and warm soft cheek of a girl, and

I was stirred-

It stirs me now to recall it.

I became a battleground of impulses and inhibitions.

"Thank you," said my cousin, and moved a little away from me.

She began to talk about friendship, and lost her thread and forgot

the little electric stress between us in a rather meandering

analysis of her principal girl friends.

But afterwards she resumed her purpose.

I went to bed that night with one propostion overshadowing

everything else in my mind, namely, that kissing my cousin Sybil was

a difficult, but not impossible, achievement. I do not recall any

shadow of a doubt whether on the whole it was worth doing. The

thing had come into my existence, disturbing and interrupting its

flow exactly as a fever does. Sybil had infected me with herself.

The next day matters came to a crisis in the little upstairs

sitting-room which had been assigned me as a study during my visit.

I was working up there, or rather trying to work in spite of the

outrageous capering of some very primitive elements in my brain,

when she came up to me, under a transparent pretext of looking for a

book.

I turned round and then got up at the sight of her. I quite forget

what our conversation was about, but I know she led me to believe I

might kiss her. Then when I attempted to do so she averted her

face.

"How COULD you?" she said; "I didn't mean that!"

That remained the state of our relations for two days. I developed

a growing irritation with and resentment against cousin Sybil,

combined with an intense desire to get that kiss for which I

hungered and thirsted. Cousin Sybil went about in the happy

persuasion that I was madly in love with her, and her game, so far

as she was concerned, was played and won. It wasn't until I had

fretted for two days that I realised that I was being used for the

commonest form of excitement possible to a commonplace girl; that

dozens perhaps of young men had played the part of Tantalus at

cousin Sybil's lips. I walked about my room at nights, damning her

and calling her by terms which on the whole she rather deserved,

while Sybil went to sleep pitying "poor old Dick!"

"Damn it!" I said, "I WILL be equal with you."

But I never did equalise the disadvantage, and perhaps it's as well,

for I fancy that sort of revenge cuts both people too much for a

rational man to seek it…

"Why are men so silly?" said cousin Sybil next morning, wriggling

back with down-bent head to release herself from what should have

been a compelling embrace.

"Confound it!" I said with a flash of clear vision. "You STARTED

this game."

"Oh!"

She stood back against a hedge of roses, a little flushed and

excited and interested, and ready for the delightful defensive if I

should renew my attack.

"Beastly hot for scuffling," I said, white with anger. "I don't

know whether I'm so keen on kissing you, Sybil, after all. I just

thought you wanted me to."

I could have whipped her, and my voice stung more than my words.

Our eyes met; a realhatred in hers leaping up to meet mine.

"Let's play tennis," I said, after a moment's pause.

"No," she answered shortly, "I'm going indoors."

"Very well."

And that ended the affair with Sybil.

I was still in the full glare of this disillusionment when Gertrude

awoke from some preoccupation to an interest in my existence. She

developed a disposition to touch my hand by accident, and let her

fingers rest in contact with it for a moment,-she had pleasant soft

hands;-she began to drift into summer houses with me, to let her

arm rest trustfully against mine, to ask questions about Cambridge.

They were much the same questions that Sybil had asked. But I

controlled myself and maintained a profile of intelligent and

entirely civil indifference to her blandishments.

What Gertrude made of it came out one evening in some talk-I forget

about what-with Sybil.

"Oh, Dick!" said Gertrude a little impatiently, "Dick's Pi."

And I never disillusioned her by any subsequent levity from this

theory of my innate and virginal piety.