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 cannot remember, but I have little doubt it was
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
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