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.