THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

7

I didn't see things with Altiora's simplicity.

I admired Margaret very much, I was fully aware of all that she and

I might give each other; indeed so far as Altiora went we were quite

in agreement. But what seemed solid ground to Altiora and the

ultimate footing of her emasculated world, was to me just the

superficial covering of a gulf-oh! abysses of vague and dim, and

yet stupendously significant things.

I couldn't dismiss the interests and the passion of sex as Altiora

did. Work, I agreed, was important; career and success; but deep

unanalysable instincts told me this preoccupation was a thing quite

as important; dangerous, interfering, destructive indeed, but none

the less a dominating interest in life. I have told how flittingly

and uninvited it came like a moth from the outer twilight into my

life, how it grew in me with my manhood, how it found its way to

speech and grew daring, and led me at last to experience. After

that adventure at Locarno sex and the interests and desires of sex

never left me for long at peace. I went on with my work and my

career, and all the time it was like-like someone talking ever and

again in a room while one tries to write.

There were times when I could have wished the world a world all of

men, so greatly did this unassimilated series of motives and

curiosities hamper me; and times when I could have wished the world

all of women. I seemed always to be seeking something in women, in

girls, and I was never clear what it was I was seeking. But never-

even at my coarsest-was I moved by physical desirealone. Was I

seeking help and fellowship? Was I seeking some intimacy with

beauty? It was a thing too formless to state, that I seemed always

desiring to attain and never attaining. Waves of gross sensuousness

arose out of this preoccupation, carried me to a crisis of

gratification or disappointment that was clearly not the needed

thing; they passed and left my mind free again for a time to get on

with the permanent pursuits of my life. And then presently this

solicitude would have me again, an irrelevance as it seemed, and yet

a constantly recurring demand.

I don't want particularly to dwell upon things that are disagreeable

for others to read, but I cannot leave them out of my story and get

the right proportions of the forces Iam balancing. I was no

abnormal man, and that world of order we desire to make must be

built of such stuff as I was and am and can beget. You cannot have

a world of Baileys; it would end in one orderly generation.

Humanity is begotten in Desire, lives by Desire.

"Love which is lust, is the Lamp in the Tomb;

Love which is lust, is the Call from the Gloom."

I echo Henley.

I suppose the life of celibacy which the active, well-fed, well-

exercised and imaginatively stirred young man of the educated

classes is supposed to lead from the age of nineteen or twenty, when

Nature certainly meant him to marry, to thirty or more, when

civilisation permits him to do so, is the most impossible thing in

the world. We deal here with facts that are kept secret and

obscure, but I doubt for my own part if more than one man out of

five in our class satisfies that ideal demand. The rest are even as

I was, and Hatherleigh and Esmeer and all the men I knew. I draw no

lessons and offer no panacea; I have to tell the quality of life,

and this is how it is. This is how it will remain until men and

women have the courage to face the facts of life.

I was no systematic libertine, you must understand; things happened

to me and desire drove me. Any young man would have served for that

Locarno adventure, and after that what had been a mystic and

wonderful thing passed rapidly into a gross, manifestly misdirected

and complicating one. I can count a meagre tale of five illicit

loves in the days of my youth, to include that first experience, and

of them all only two were sustained relationships. Besides these

five "affairs," on one or two occasions I dipped so low as the inky

dismal sensuality of the streets, and made one of those pairs of

correlated figures, the woman in her squalid finery sailing

homeward, the man modestly aloof and behind, that every night in the

London year flit by the score of thousands across the sight of the

observant…

How ugly it is to recall; ugly and shameful now without

qualification! Yet at the time there was surely something not

altogether ugly in it-something that has vanished, some fine thing

mortally ailing.

One such occasion I recall as if it were a vision deep down in a

pit, as if it had happened in another state of existence to someone

else. And yet it is the sort of thing that has happened, once or

twice at least, to half the men in London who have been in a

position to make it possible. Let me try and give you its peculiar

effect. Man or woman, you ought to know of it.

Figure to yourself a dingy room, somewhere in that network of

streets that lies about Tottenham Court Road, a dingy bedroom lit by

a solitary candle and carpeted with scraps and patches, with

curtains of cretonne closing the window, and a tawdry ornament of

paper in the grate. I sit on a bed beside a weary-eyed, fair-

haired, sturdy young woman, half undressed, who is telling me in

broken German something that my knowledge of German is at first

inadequate to understand…

I thought she was boasting about her family, and then slowly the

meaning came to me. She was a Lett from near Libau in Courland, and

she was telling me-just as one tells something too strange for

comment or emotion-how her father had been shot and her sister

outraged and murdered before her eyes.

It was as if one had dipped into something primordial and stupendous

beneath the smooth and trivial surfaces of life. There was I, you

know, the promising young don from Cambridge, who wrote quite

brilliantly about politics and might presently get into Parliament,

with my collar and tie in my hand, and a certain sense of shameful

adventure fading out of my mind.

"Ach Gott!" she sighed by way of comment, and mused deeply for a

moment before she turned her face to me, as to something forgotten

and remembered, and assumed the half-hearted meretricious smile.

"Bin ich eine hubsche?" she asked like one who repeats a lesson.

I was moved to crave her pardon and come away.

"Bin ich eine hubsche?" she asked a little anxiously, laying a

detaining hand upon me, and evidently not understanding a word of

what I was striving to say.