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Book 1: The Making of a ManAdolescence13
Along the hot and dusty lower road between the Orrido of Traffiume and Cannobio Willersley had developed his first blister. And partly because of that and partly because there was a bag at the station that gave us the refreshment of clean linen and partly because of the lazy lower air into which we had come, we decided upon three or four days` sojourn in the Empress Hotel.
We dined that night at a table-d`hote, and I found myself next to an Englishwoman who began a conversation that was resumed presently in the hotel lounge. She was a woman of perhaps thirty-three or thirty-four, slenderly built, with a warm reddish skin and very abundant fair golden hair, the wife of a petulant-looking heavy- faced man of perhaps fifty-three, who smoked a cigar and dozed over his coffee and presently went to bed. "He always goes to bed like that," she confided startlingly. "He sleeps after all his meals. I never knew such a man to sleep."
Then she returned to our talk, whatever it was.
We had begun at the dinner table with itineraries and the usual topographical talk, and she had envied our pedestrian travel. "My husband doesn`t walk," she said. "His heart is weak and he cannot manage the hills."
There was something friendly and adventurous in her manner; she conveyed she liked me, and when presently Willersley drifted off to write letters our talk sank at once to easy confidential undertones. I felt enterprising, and indeed it is easy to be daring with people one has never seen before and may never see again. I said I loved beautiful scenery and all beautiful things, and the pointing note in my voice made her laugh. She told me I had bold eyes, and so far as I can remember I said she made them bold. "Blue they are," she remarked, smiling archly. "I like blue eyes." Then I think we compared ages, and she said she was the Woman of Thirty, "George Moore`s Woman of Thirty."
I had not read George Moore at the time, but I pretended to understand.
That, I think, was our limit that evening. She went to bed, smiling good-night quite prettily down the big staircase, and I and Willersley went out to smoke in the garden. My head was full of her, and I found it necessary to talk about her. So I made her a problem in sociology. "Who the deuce are these people?" I said, "and how do they get a living? They seem to have plenty of money. He strikes me as being--Willersley, what is a drysalter? I think he`s a retired drysalter."
Willersley theorised while I thought of the woman and that provocative quality of dash she had displayed. The next day at lunch she and I met like old friends. A huge mass of private thinking during the interval had been added to our effect upon one another. We talked for a time of insignificant things.
"What do you do," she asked rather quickly, "after lunch? Take a siesta?"
"Sometimes," I said, and hung for a moment eye to eye.
We hadn`t a doubt of each other, but my heart was beating like a steamer propeller when it lifts out of the water.
"Do you get a view from your room?" she asked after a pause.
"It`s on the third floor, Number seventeen, near the staircase. My friend`s next door."
She began to talk of books. She was interested in Christian Science, she said, and spoke of a book. I forget altogether what that book was called, though I remember to this day with the utmost exactness the purplish magenta of its cover. She said she would lend it to me and hesitated.
Willersley wanted to go for an expedition across the lake that afternoon, but I refused. He made some other proposals that I rejected abruptly. "I shall write in my room," I said.
"Why not write down here?"
"I shall write in my room," I snarled like a thwarted animal, and he looked at me curiously. "Very well," he said; "then I`ll make some notes and think about that order of ours out under the magnolias."
I hovered about the lounge for a time buying postcards and feverishly restless, watching the movements of the other people. Finally I went up to my room and sat down by the windows, staring out. There came a little tap at the unlocked door and in an instant, like the go of a taut bowstring, I was up and had it open.
"Here is that book," she said, and we hesitated.
"COME IN!" I whispered, trembling from head to foot.
"You`re just a boy," she said in a low tone.
I did not feel a bit like a lover, I felt like a burglar with the safe-door nearly opened. "Come in," I said almost impatiently, for anyone might be in the passage, and I gripped her wrist and drew her towards me.
"What do you mean?" she answered with a faint smile on her lips, and awkward and yielding.
I shut the door behind her, still holding her with one hand, then turned upon her--she was laughing nervously--and without a word drew her to me and kissed her. And I remember that as I kissed her she made a little noise almost like the purring miaow with which a cat will greet one and her face, close to mine, became solemn and tender.
She was suddenly a different being from the discontented wife who had tapped a moment since on my door, a woman transfigured. . . .
That evening I came down to dinner a monster of pride, for behold! I was a man. I felt myself the most wonderful and unprecedented of adventurers. It was hard to believe that any one in the world before had done as much. My mistress and I met smiling, we carried things off admirably, and it seemed to me that Willersley was the dullest old dog in the world. I wanted to give him advice. I wanted to give him derisive pokes. After dinner and coffee in the lounge I was too excited and hilarious to go to bed, I made him come with me down to the cafe under the arches by the pier, and there drank beer and talked extravagant nonsense about everything under the sun, in order not to talk about the happenings of the afternoon. All the time something shouted within me: "I am a man! I am a man!" . . .
"What shall we do to-morrow?" said he.
"I`m for loafing," I said. "Let`s row in the morning and spend to- morrow afternoon just as we did to-day."
"They say the church behind the town is worth seeing."
"We`ll go up about sunset; that`s the best time for it. We can start about five."
We heard music, and went further along the arcade to discover a place where girls in operatic Swiss peasant costume were singing and dancing on a creaking, protesting little stage. I eyed their generous display of pink neck and arm with the seasoned eye of a man who has lived in the world. Life was perfectly simple and easy, I felt, if one took it the right way.
Next day Willersley wanted to go on, but I delayed. Altogether I kept him back four days. Then abruptly my mood changed, and we decided to start early the following morning. I remember, though a little indistinctly, the feeling of my last talk with that woman whose surname, odd as it may seem, either I never learnt or I have forgotten. (Her christian name was Milly.) She was tired and rather low-spirited, and disposed to be sentimental, and for the first time in our intercourse I found myself liking her for the sake of her own personality. There was something kindly and generous appearing behind the veil of naive and uncontrolled sensuality she had worn. There was a curious quality of motherliness in her attitude to me that something in my nature answered and approved. She didn`t pretend to keep it up that she had yielded to my initiative. "I`ve done you no harm," she said a little doubtfully, an odd note for a man`s victim! And, "we`ve had a good time. You have liked me, haven`t you?"
She interested me in her lonely dissatisfied life; she was childless and had no hope of children, and her husband was the only son of a rich meat salesman, very mean, a mighty smoker--"he reeks of it," she said, "always"--and interested in nothing but golf, billiards (which he played very badly), pigeon shooting, convivial Free Masonry and Stock Exchange punting. Mostly they drifted about the Riviera. Her mother had contrived her marriage when she was eighteen. They were the first samples I ever encountered of the great multitude of functionless property owners which encumbers modern civilisation--but at the time I didn`t think much of that aspect of them. . . .
I tell all this business as it happened without comment, because I have no comment to make. It was all strange to me, strange rather than wonderful, and, it may be, some dream of beauty died for ever in those furtive meetings; it happened to me, and I could scarcely have been more irresponsible in the matter or controlled events less if I had been suddenly pushed over a cliff into water. I swam, of course--finding myself in it. Things tested me, and I reacted, as I have told. The bloom of my innocence, if ever there had been such a thing, was gone. And here is the remarkable thing about it; at the time and for some days I was over-weeningly proud; I have never been so proud before or since; I felt I had been promoted to virility; I was unable to conceal my exultation from Willersley. It was a mood of shining shameless ungracious self-approval. As he and I went along in the cool morning sunshine by the rice fields in the throat of the Val Maggia a silence fell between us.
"You know?" I said abruptly,--"about that woman?"
Willersley did not answer for a moment. He looked at me over the corner of his spectacles.
"Things went pretty far?" he asked.
"Oh! all the way!" and I had a twinge of fatuous pride in my unpremeditated achievement.
"She came to your room?"
I nodded.
"I heard her. I heard her whispering. . . . The whispering and rustling and so on. I was in my room yesterday. . . . Any one might have heard you."
I went on with my head in the air.
"You might have been caught, and that would have meant endless trouble. You might have incurred all sorts of consequences. What did you know about her? . . . We have wasted four days in that hot close place. When we found that League of Social Service we were talking about," he said with a determined eye upon me, "chastity will be first among the virtues prescribed."
"I shall form a rival league," I said a little damped. "I`m hanged if I give up a single desire in me until I know why."
He lifted his chin and stared before him through his glasses at nothing. "There are some things," he said, "that a man who means to work--to do great public services--MUST turn his back upon. I`m not discussing the rights or wrongs of this sort of thing. It happens to be the conditions we work under. It will probably always be so. If you want to experiment in that way, if you want even to discuss it,--out you go from political life. You must know that`s so. . . . You`re a strange man, Remington, with a kind of kink in you. You`ve a sort of force. You might happen to do immense things. . . . Only--"
He stopped. He had said all that he had forced himself to say.
"I mean to take myself as I am," I said. "I`m going to get experience for humanity out of all my talents--and bury nothing."
Willersley twisted his face to its humorous expression. "I doubt if sexual proclivities," he said drily, "come within the scope of the parable."
I let that go for a little while. Then I broke out. "Sex!" said I, "is a fundamental thing in life. We went through all this at Trinity. I`m going to look at it, experience it, think about it-- and get it square with the rest of life. Career and Politics must take their chances of that. It`s part of the general English slackness that they won`t look this in the face. Gods! what a muffled time we`re coming out of! Sex means breeding, and breeding is a necessary function in a nation. The Romans broke up upon that. The Americans fade out amidst their successes. Eugenics--"
"THAT wasn`t Eugenics," said Willersley.
"It was a woman," I said after a little interval, feeling oddly that I had failed altogether to answer him, and yet had a strong dumb case against him.
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