Soupy, soupy, soupy, without a single bean. That heavenly melancholy nostalgic tune the bugler played when they marched along the shell road into the country — over and over … I was again given a bayonet and marched at the side, giving orders. Close up the ranks there!.. Get me a coupla chinquapins, willya, Billy?… Then they were singing. Good-by Dolly, I must leave you … Just tell her that I love her … I wonder what place that was where they had their new camp. I got lost that time coming back from it — the conductor gave us transfers, but we didn’t know what to do with them, when to transfer, and finally got off and walked. We walked miles through the Negro quarters in the dark. Mysterious lights. Noisy slatternly houses. Smells. That might be where the gang we were always fighting came from. Gang fights with stones. Sling shots. Pluffers, pluffing chinaberries. I cut down an elderbush in the park to make one … Sneaky Williams it was who saw me cutting down a young cedar to make a bow and arrow and took me home by my sleeve, my feet barely touching the ground … I thought I was being arrested … Ah, that delicious dense little grove of saplings with a hut in the middle! What was it that made it seem so wonderful? It was dark, gloomy, little leaf-mold paths wound here and there intersecting, twigs snapped. There was something Virgilian — I remember thinking about it four years later when I began reading Virgil. Et vox in faucibus haesit. It must have been the sacred terror. I can remember the time when I hadn’t yet been into it. That day, when, after being ill for two months, I went out for the first time — my mother sat on the bench near it, and I made little houses out of dry twigs in the grass. The only moment at which I can see her — she sits there, absent-minded in the sun, smiling a little, not seeing the path and the cactus bed at which she appears to be looking. The penitentiary walls were behind us — the tall barred windows, behind one of which I saw a man looking down at us. He was moving his arms up along the bars high above his head. And the Sacred Grove was near us, and the red brick vaults, and the table tombs of white stone … Are you watching me, Cynthia? Surely I was harmless enough on that day? Surely you like my mother sitting there with her parasol? And isn’t it nice of me to remember it all so clearly, after a quarter of a century?… O God, that swooning sensation, anguish that contracts the belly and travels slowly down the body … MISERY … This is what it is to be in love. Unmitigated suffering. The most all-poisoning of all illnesses. And nevertheless, it’s the chief motive of all art — we return to our vomit. No, no, that’s not fair. It has beauty!.. Think of the extraordinary way in which it changes, suddenly, the whole coarse texture of the universe! — I remember, when I first fell in love, how I used to want to touch everything with my hands. Stone walls. Bark of trees. Bits of metal. Glass. Woolen clothes. All of them had suddenly become exquisite, all of them responded. And when I met you, Cynthia … But there’s no concealing the suffering it has brought, that frightful and inescapable and unwearying consciousness of the unattainable. The soul aching every moment, every hour, with sharp brief paroxysms of intenser pain: the eyes closing in vain, sleep vainly invited, dreams that concentrate into their fantastic and feverish turmoil all the griefs of the whole life; and the eyes opening again to the blindingly unforgotten sorrow — this is what it is, this is what now returns to me in even greater virulence. The intolerable suffering entailed in trying to remember a half-recalled face! That night at the Northwestern Hotel, when I had one nightmare after another all night long, trying to find her … And then, when I went down to breakfast in the morning, exhausted, and still in a kind of dream, all unsuspecting that she too had slept at the Northwestern, I found her, with her aunt, alone in the breakfast room! What an extraordinary discovery that was! She was lost, and she was found. The light, laughing “Good morning!” The eggs being eaten in English eggcups!.. And it still goes on. Her face escapes me. Why should this be? It isn’t really, of course, that it escapes me any more than any other recollected sense impression. No. Probably less. The trouble is precisely in the fact that one wants too much of it — wants it too often, wears it out with staring, and not only that, but one is also, in a way, trying to revenge one’s self upon it. One seeks to possess it — with a violence not thrust upon one’s ordinary recollections — simply because one has not been able to possess the reality. One evening it is absurdly easy — I can’t “turn it on” at any moment and luxuriate in it. But the next morning it is gone; and no sleight of mind will give it back to me. I try the chin, the mouth, the profile of the cheek, the eyes — all in vain. The face is a complete blank. Perhaps one trace alone will be discoverable — I can see how, at that particular instant, when she found me staring at her, she looked slowly down, lowering her eyelids, and with what an extraordinary and baffling intensity of expression! There was pain in it, there was annoyance, but there was also, from the dark of her unconsciousness — could I be wrong in thus analyzing it? — a frightful unhappiness and desire, a relaxed and heartbroken desire, desire of the flesh, as old as the world. This alone I can remember, often, when all other aspects of her face have dislimned … Creek, creeky-creek, creeky … The Irish girl moves from her left side to her right. Easy enough to remember her face — because I don’t feel any tension about it … Smith too. Or Silberstein — that massive stone face! Bastile façade! Or Faubion. Ah! a pang. You see that gleaming pang, Cynthia? — I see it, unfaithful one! — No, not unfaithful! Not unfaithful! I swear to God … Is fidelity an affair only of the flesh? No — that’s not what I meant to say. Not at all. It’s very very complicated. It’s absurd, this fetish of fidelity. Absurd and chimerical. It leads to the worst hypocrisy in the world. It involves a lie about the nature of the world, of God, of the human being; a misconception or falsification of the mind and psyche. Ah, psyche from the regions which. I am not faithful — and I am faithful. My feeling for Eunice will never change. Nor my feeling for Helen. Nor my feeling for you. Nor my feeling for Fleshpot Faubion. Why should it be considered an unfaithfulness, a betrayal, to love more than one woman or more than one man? Nothing sillier could be conceived. It’s preposterous. We love constantly, love everywhere. We love in all sorts of degrees and ways. Can any one person or thing or place or belief possess one’s soul utterly? Impossible. It is true that when we “fall in love,” experiencing that intense burning up of the entire being which now and then some unforeseen explosion of the unconscious brings to us, our one desire is to possess and be possessed by the one object. But this is largely, or to some extent, an illusion — it’s an illusion, I mean, to suppose that this will completely satisfy. An illusion, Cynthia! Even had I been destined — had we been destined — had I succeeded — had I not too horribly blundered — had I not lost every brief and paralyzing opportunity and at every such turn shown myself to be a fool and a coward — even so, even had I possessed you as madly as in imagination I have possessed you — you would not wholly have absorbed me. No. There would have been tracts of my soul which would never have owned your sovereignty — Saharas and Gobis of rebellious waste; swarming Yucatans from whose poisonous rank depths derision would be screamed at you and fragrances poured at you in a profusion of insult, flagrant and drunken; Arctics of inenarrable ice; and the sea everywhere, the unvintagable sea, many-laughing. Do you listen, Moonwhite? — I hate you and despise you, lizard! — I am walking in Kensington Gardens, Moonwhite, telling you of these things. The man wades into the Round Pond with a net to catch his toy steam yacht. Nursemaids pullulate. Would it shock you to know that I could love even a nursemaid? Is there anything strange or reprehensible in that? For that matter, I did, once, fall in love (mildly) with a lady’s maid. Her name? Mary Kimberlin. Age? Twenty-four. Where did we meet? In Hyde Park, where she was taking the Pom for a walk … Afterwards she married. I liked her, and I still like her … Did Helen Shafter interfere with my fondness for Eunice? Not in the slightest! — You felt guilty about it, William! You felt guilty, you were furtive, you concealed it, and you were in constant terror that you would be discovered. You never met her without experiencing a sense of wrongdoing, you never returned from a meeting with her to your Eunice without a sense of sin, a sadness, a burden of duplicity, that you found intolerable and crippling. Isn’t that true?… That is true, Cynthia. True. True. Oh, so frightfully true. And yet it ought not to be true … MISERY … I admit the sense of evil which permeates that sort of adventure, the sense of treason and infidelity; but I affirm again that it is a sin against the holy ghost to bring up humans in such a way that they will inevitably feel it. It’s hideously wrong! It’s criminal! It is