The Passionate Friends
friendship and still more here, in this central business of love,
accident rules it seems to me almost altogether. What personalities you
will encounter in life, and have for a chief interest in life, is nearly
as much a matter of chance as the drift of a grain of pollen in the
pine forest. And once the light hazard has blown it has blown, never to
drive again. In other schoolrooms and nurseries, in slum living-rooms
perhaps or workhouse wards or palaces, round the other side of the
earth, in Canada or Russia or China, other little creatures are trying
their small limbs, clutching at things about them with infantile hands,
who someday will come into your life with a power and magic monstrous
and irrational and irresistible. They will break the limits of your
concentrating self, call you out to the service of beauty and the
service of the race, sound you to your highest and your lowest, give you
your chance to be godlike or filthy, divine or utterly ignoble, react
together with you upon the very core and essence of your being. These
unknowns are the substance of your fate. You will in extreme intimacy
love them, hate them, serve them, struggle with them, and in that
interaction the vital force in you and the substance of your days will
be spent.
And who they may chance to be and their peculiar quality and effect is
haphazard, utterly beyond designing.
Law and custom conspire with the natural circumstances of man to
exaggerate every consequence of this accumulating accident, and make it
definite and fatal....
I find it quite impossible now to recall the steps and stages by which
this power of sex invaded my life. It seems to me now that it began very
much as a gale begins, in catspaws upon the water and little rustlings
among the leaves, and then stillness and then a distant soughing again
and a pause, and then a wider and longer disturbance and so more and
more, with a gathering continuity, until at last the stars were hidden,
the heavens were hidden; all the heights and depths of life were
obscured by stormy impulses and passionate desires. I suppose that
quite at the first there were simple curiosities; no doubt they were
vivid at the time but they have left scarcely a trace; there were vague
first intimations of a peculiar excitement. I do remember more
distinctly phases when there was a going-out from myself towards these
things, these interests, and then a reaction of shame and concealment.
And these memories were mixed up with others not sexual at all, and
particularly with the perception of beauty in things inanimate, with
lights seen at twilight and the tender mysteriousness of the dusk and
the confused disturbing scents of flowers in the evening and the
enigmatical serene animation of stars in the summer sky....
I think perhaps that my boyhood was exceptionally free from vulgarizing
influences in this direction. There were few novels in my father's house
and I neither saw nor read any plays until I was near manhood, so that I
thought naturally about love and not rather artificially round and about
love as so many imaginative young people are trained to do. I fell in
love once or twice while I was still quite a boy. These earliest
experiences rarely got beyond a sort of dumb awe, a vague, vast,
ineffectual desire for self-immolation. For a time I remember I
worshipped Lady Ladislaw with all my being. Then I talked to a girl in a
train--I forget upon what journey--but I remember very vividly her quick
color and a certain roguish smile. I spread my adoration at her feet,
fresh and frank. I wanted to write to her. Indeed I wanted to devote all
my being to her. I begged hard, but there was someone called Auntie who
had to be considered, an Atropos for that thread of romance.
Then there was a photograph in my father's study of the Delphic Sibyl
from the Sistine Chapel, that for a time held my heart, and--Yes, there
was a girl in a tobacconist's shop in the Harbury High Street. Drawn by
an irresistible impulse I used to go and buy cigarettes--and sometimes
converse about the weather. But afterwards in solitude I would meditate
tremendous conversations and encounters with her. The cigarettes
increased the natural melancholy of my state and led to a reproof from
old Henson. Almost always I suppose there is that girl in the
tobacconist's shop....
I believe if I made an effort I could disinter some dozens of such
memories, more and more faded until the marginal ones would be
featureless and all but altogether effaced. As I look back at it now I
am struck by an absurd image; it is as if a fish nibbled at this bait
and then at that.
Given but the slightest aid from accidental circumstances and any of
those slight attractions might have become a power to deflect all my
life.
The day of decision arrived when, the Lady Mary Christian came smiling
out of the sunshine to me into the pavilion at Burnmore. With that the
phase of stirrings and intimations was over for ever in my life. All
those other impressions went then to the dusty lumber room from which I
now so slightingly disinter them.
§ 5
We five had all been playmates together. There were Lord Maxton, who was
killed at Paardeberg while I was in Ladysmith, he was my senior by
nearly a year, Philip, who is now Earl Ladislaw and who was about
eighteen months younger than I, Mary, my contemporary within eight days,
and Guy, whom we regarded as a baby and who was called, apparently on
account of some early linguistic efforts, "Brugglesmith." He did his
best to avenge his juniority as time passed on by an enormous length of
limb. I had more imagination than Maxton and was a good deal better
read, so that Mary and I dominated most of the games of Indians and
warfare and exploration in which we passed our long days together. When
the Christians were at Burnmore, and they usually spent three or four
months in the year there, I had a kind of standing invitation to be with
them. Sometimes there would also be two Christian cousins to swell our
party, and sometimes there would be a raid of the Fawney children with a
detestable governess who was perpetually vociferating reproaches, but
these latter were absent-minded, lax young persons, and we did not
greatly love them.
It is curious how little I remember of Mary's childhood. All that has
happened between us since lies between that and my present self like
some luminous impenetrable mist. I know we liked each other, that I was
taller than she was and thought her legs unreasonably thin, and that
once when I knelt by accident on a dead stick she had brought into an
Indian camp we had made near the end of the west shrubbery, she flew at
me in a sudden fury, smacked my face, scratched me and had to be
suppressed, and was suppressed with extreme difficulty by the united
manhood of us three elder boys. Then it was I noted first the blazing
blueness of her eyes. She was light and very plucky, so that none of us
cared to climb against her, and she was as difficult to hold as an eel.
But all these traits and characteristics vanished when she was
transformed.
For what seems now a long space of time I had not seen her or any of the
family except Philip; it was certainly a year or more, probably two;
Maxton was at a crammer's and I think the others must have been in
Canada with Lord Ladislaw. Then came some sort of estrangement between
him and his wife, and she returned with Mary and Guy to Burnmore and
stayed there all through the summer.
I was in a state of transition between the infinitely great and the
infinitely little. I had just ceased to be that noble and potent being,
that almost statesmanlike personage, a sixth form boy at Harbury, and I
was going to be an Oxford undergraduate. Philip and I came down together
by the same train from Harbury, I shared the Burnmore dog-cart and
luggage cart, and he dropped me at the rectory. I was a long-limbed
youngster of seventeen, as tall as I am now, and fair, so fair that I
was still boyish-faced while most of my contemporaries and Philip (who
favored his father) were at least smudgy with moustaches. With the
head-master's valediction and the grave elder-brotherliness of old
Henson, and the shrill cheers of a little crowd of juniors still echoing
in my head, I very naturally came home in a mood of exalted gravity, and
I can still remember pacing up and down the oblong lawn behind the
rockery and the fig-tree wall with my father, talking of my outlook with
all the tremendous _savoir faire_ that was natural to my age, and noting
with a secret gratification that our shoulders were now on a level. No
doubt we were discussing Oxford and all that I was to do at Oxford; I
don't remember a word of our speech though I recall the exact tint of
its color and the distinctive feeling of our measured equal paces in the
sunshine....
I must have gone up to Burnmore House the following afternoon. I went up
alone and I was sent out through the little door at the end of the big
gallery into the garden. In those days Lady Ladislaw had made an Indian
pavilion under the tall trees at the east end of the house, and here I
found her with her cousin Helena Christian entertaining a mixture of
people, a carriageful from Hampton End, the two elder Fawneys and a man
in brown who had I think ridden over from Chestoxter Castle. Lady
Ladislaw welcomed me with ample graciousness--as though I was a
personage. "The children" she said were still at tennis, and as she
spoke I saw Guy, grown nearly beyond recognition and then a shining
being in white, very straight and graceful, with a big soft hat and
overshadowed eyes that smiled, come out from the hurried endearments of
the sunflakes under the shadows of the great chestnuts, into the glow of
summer light before the pavilion.
"Steve arrived!" she cried, and waved a welcoming racquet.
I do not remember what I said to her or what else she said or what
anyone said. But I believe I could paint every detail of her effect. I
know that when she came out of the brightness into the shadow of the
pavilion it was like a regal condescension, and I know that she was
wonderfully self-possessed and helpful with her mother's hospitalities,
and that I marvelled I had never before perceived the subtler sweetness
in the cadence of her voice. I seem also to remember a severe internal
struggle for my self-possession, and that I had to recall my exalted
position in the sixth form to save myself from becoming tongue-tied and
abashed and awkward and utterly shamed.
You see she had her hair up and very prettily dressed, and those
aggressive lean legs of hers had vanished, and she was sheathed in
muslin that showed her the most delicately slender and beautiful of
young women. And she seemed so radiantly sure of herself!
After our first greeting I do not think I spoke to her or looked at her
again throughout the meal. I took things that she handed me with an
appearance of supreme indifference, was politely attentive to the elder
Miss Fawney, and engaged with Lady Ladislaw and the horsey little man in
brown in a discussion of the possibility of mechanical vehicles upon the
high road. That was in the early nineties. We were all of opinion that
it was impossible to make a sufficiently light engine for the purpose.
Afterwards Mary confessed to me how she had been looking forward to our
meeting, and how snubbed I had made her feel....
Then a little later than this meeting in the pavilion, though I am not
clear now whether it was the same or some subsequent afternoon, we are
walking in the sunken garden, and great clouds of purple clematis and
some less lavish heliotrope-colored creeper, foam up against the ruddy
stone balustrading. Just in front of us a fountain gushes out of a
grotto of artificial stalagmite and bathes the pedestal of an absurd