THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

required me to pursue, and I had a vivid impression of having just

been down in the dust with a very wiry and active and dirty little

antagonist of disagreeable odour and incredible and incalculable

unscrupulousness, kneeling on me and gripping my arm and neck. I

wanted of course to be even with him, but also I doubted if catching

him would necessarily involve that. They kicked my cap into the

ditch at the end of the field, and made off compactly along a cinder

lane while I turned aside to recover my dishonoured headdress. As I

knocked the dust out of that and out of my jacket, and brushed my

knees and readjusted my very crumpled collar, I tried to focus this

startling occurrence in my mind.

I had vague ideas of going to a policeman or of complaining at a

police station, but some boyish instinct against informing prevented

that. No doubt I entertained ideas of vindictive pursuit and

murderous reprisals. And I was acutely enraged whenever I thought

of my knife. The thing indeed rankled in my mind for weeks and

weeks, and altered all the flavour of my world for me. It was the

first time I glimpsed the simple brute violence that lurks and peeps

beneath our civilisation. A certain kindly complacency of attitude

towards the palpably lower classes was qualified for ever

4

But the other experience was still more cardinal. It was the first

clear intimation of a new motif in life, the sex motif, that was to

rise and increase and accumulate power and enrichment and interweave

with and at last dominate all my life.

It was when I was nearly fifteen this happened. It is inseparably

co

never met the girl I loved by daylight, and I have forgotten her

name. It was some insignificant name.

Yet the peculiar quality of the adventure keeps it shining darkly

like some deep coloured gem in the common setting of my memories.

It came as something new and strange, something that did not join on

to anything else in my life or co

beliefs or habits; it was a wonder, a mystery, a discovery about

myself, a discovery about the whole world. Only in after years did

sexual feeling lose that isolation and spread itself out to

illuminate and pervade and at last possess the whole broad vision of

life.

It was in that phase of an urban youth's development, the phase of

the cheap cigarette, that this thing happened. One evening I came

by chance on a number of young people promenading by the light of a

row of shops towards Beckington, and, with all the glory of a

glowing cigarette between my lips, I joined their strolling number.

These twilight parades of young people, youngsters chiefly of the

lower middle-class, are one of the odd social developments of the

great suburban growths-unkindly critics, blind to the i

meanings of things, call them, I believe, Monkeys' Parades-the shop

apprentices, the young work girls, the boy clerks and so forth,

stirred by mysterious intimations, spend their first-earned money

upon collars and ties, chiffon hats, smart lace collars, walking-

sticks, sunshades or cigarettes, and come valiantly into the vague

transfiguring mingling of gaslight and evening, to walk up and down,

to eye meaningly, even to accost and make friends. It is a queer

instinctive revolt from the narrow limited friendless homes in which

so many find themselves, a going out towards something, romance if

you will, beauty, that has suddenly become a need-a need that

hitherto has lain dormant and unsuspected. They promenade.

Vulgar!-it is as vulgar as the spirit that calls the moth abroad in

the evening and lights the body of the glow-worm in the night. I

made my way through the throng, a little contemptuously as became a

public schoolboy, my hands in my pockets-none of your cheap canes

for me!-and very careful of the lie of my cigarette upon my lips.

And two girls passed me, one a little taller than the other, with

dim warm-tinted faces under clouds of dark hair and with dark eyes

like pools reflecting stars.

I half turned, and the shorter one glanced back at me over her

shoulder-I could draw you now the pose of her cheek and neck and

shoulder-and instantly I was as passionately in love with the girl

as I have ever been before or since, as any man ever was with any

woman. I turned about and followed them, I flung away my cigarette

ostentatiously and lifted my school cap and spoke to them.

The girl answered shyly with her dark eyes on my face. What I said

and what she said I ca

something absolutely vapid. It really did not matter; the thing was

we had met. I felt as I think a new-hatched moth must feel when

suddenly its urgent headlong searching brings it in tremulous

amazement upon its mate.

We met, covered from each other, with all the nets of civilisation

keeping us apart. We walked side by side.

It led to scarcely more than that. I think we met four or five

times altogether, and always with her nearly silent elder sister on

the other side of her. We walked on the last two occasions arm in

arm, furtively caressing each other's hands, we went away from the

glare of the shops into the quiet roads of villadom, and there we

whispered instead of talking and looked closely into one another's

warm and shaded face. "Dear," I whispered very daringly, and she

answered, "Dear!" We had a vague sense that we wanted more of that

quality of intimacy and more. We wanted each other as one wants

beautiful music again or to breathe again the scent of flowers.

And that is all there was between us. The events are nothing, the