THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

thing that matters is the way in which this experience stabbed

through the common stuff of life and left it pierced, with a light,

with a huge new interest shining through the rent.

When I think of it I can recall even now the warm mystery of her

face, her lips a little apart, lips that I never kissed, her soft

shadowed throat, and I feel again the sensuous stir of her

proximity…

Those two girls never told me their surname nor let me approach

their house. They made me leave them at the corner of a road of

small houses near Penge Station. And quite abruptly, without any

intimation, they vanished and came to the meeting place no more,

they vanished as a moth goes out of a window into the night, and

left me possessed of an intolerable want…

The affair pervaded my existence for many weeks. I could not do my

work and I could not rest at home. Night after night I promenaded

up and down that Monkeys' Parade full of an unappeasable desire,

with a thwarted sense of something just begun that ought to have

gone on. I went backwards and forwards on the way to the vanishing

place, and at last explored the forbidden road that had swallowed

them up. But I never saw her again, except that later she came to

me, my symbol of womanhood, in dreams. How my blood was stirred! I

lay awake of nights whispering in the darkness for her. I prayed

for her.

Indeed that girl, who probably forgot the last vestiges of me when

her first real kiss came to her, ruled and haunted me, gave a Queen

to my imagination and a texture to all my desires until I became a

man.

I generalised her at last. I suddenly discovered that poetry was

about her and that she was the key to all that had hitherto seemed

nonsense about love. I took to reading novels, and if the heroine

could not possibly be like her, dusky and warm and starlike, I put

the book aside…

I hesitate and add here one other confession. I want to tell this

thing because it seems to me we are altogether too restrained and

secretive about such matters. The cardinal thing in life sneaks in

to us darkly and shamefully like a thief in the night.

One day during my Cambridge days-it must have been in my first year

before I knew Hatherleigh-I saw in a print-shop window near the

Strand an engraving of a girl that reminded me sharply of Penge and

its dusky encounter. It was just a half length of a bare-

shouldered, bare-breasted Oriental with arms akimbo, smiling

faintly. I looked at it, went my way, then turned back and bought

it. I felt I must have it. The odd thing is that I was more than a

little shamefaced about it. I did not have it framed and hung in my

room open to the criticism of my friends, but I kept it in the

drawer of my writing-table. And I kept that drawer locked for a

year. It speedily merged with and became identified with the dark

girl of Penge. That engraving became in a way my mistress. Often

when I had sported my oak and was supposed to be reading, I was

sitting with it before me.

Obeying some instinct I kept the thing very secret indeed. For a

time nobody suspected what was locked in my drawer nor what was

locked in me. I seemed as sexless as my world required.

5

These things stabbed through my life, intimations of things above

and below and before me. They had an air of being no more than

incidents, interruptions.

The broad substance of my existence at this time was the City

Merchants School. Home was a place where I slept and read, and the

mooning explorations of the south-eastern postal district which

occupied the restless evenings and spare days of my vacations mere

interstices, giving glimpses of enigmatical lights and distant

spaces between the woven threads of a school-boy's career. School

life began for me every morning at Herne Hill, for there I was

joined by three or four other boys and the rest of the way we went

together. Most of the streets and roads we traversed in our

morning's walk from Victoria are still intact, the storms of

rebuilding that have submerged so much of my boyhood's London have

passed and left them, and I have revived the impression of them

again and again in recent years as I have clattered di

hansom or hummed along in a motor cab to some engagement. The main

gate still looks out with the same expression of ancient well-

proportioned kindliness upon St. Margaret's Close. There are

imposing new science laboratories in Chambers Street indeed, but the

old playing fields are unaltered except for the big electric trams

that go droning and spitting blue flashes along the western

boundary. I know Ratten, the new Head, very well, but I have not

been inside the school to see if it has changed at all since I went

up to Cambridge.

I took all they put before us very readily as a boy, for I had a

mind of vigorous appetite, but since I have grown mentally to man's

estate and developed a more and more comprehensive view of our

national process and our national needs, Iam more and more struck

by the oddity of the educational methods pursued, their aimless

disco

suppose if we are to view the public school as anything more than an

institution that has just chanced to happen, we must treat it as

having a definite function towards the general scheme of the nation,

as being in a sense designed to take the crude young male of the

more or less responsible class, to correct his harsh egotisms,