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 desire alone. 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 I am 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.”