higher spiritual understanding make them eminently desirable.
Yet my virtue was destined to suffer one defeat. One evening, a girl we had met, who was almost completely white, was encouraged by Karl to come nude to my bed. I was tossing about asleep in the night when she came and laid down beside me, or rather on me. The heat of her body had excited me before I even awoke, and before I was fully conscious I was enjoying her. I felt no disappointment when I saw her: I have seen Italian girls with darker skins and coarser features; but I cannot say that she gave me any extraordinary thrill. Yet, she did her best and the game of love to her was the best game in the world. She delighted in teaching me all the Swahili terms for the sex and for sensual pleasures. And when I used them she would scream with enjoyment.
This girl was rather intelligent, and so I asked her about sexual perversions.
She seemed to think there was nothing in them, that naturally all human beings took what pleasure they could get whenever they could get it. There was no shadow of moral law in the matter. She even told me that most of the colored girls didn't know how to kiss until they were taught and were quite astonished at any extension of kissing.
I would have forgotten all about this girl, had she not begged me to take her with me on my expedition. I could not do this, but some bright cloths and beads soon consoled her for my defection, and one day I saw her making up to the big Doctor, which at once chased away any lingering scruples I may have had.
I have been asked to write on sexual perversions; but I have no personal experiences of them, being wholly taken up with the normal desires of the man for the woman; but once in New York I received a letter from a girl in Toronto which bears every mark of truth in its frank lesbianism. I found out afterwards that the explanation of this girl's perversion was to be found in the constant physical pursuit of her, when still a mere child, by her father. I give the letter here textually.
Mother opens the door when I ring the home bell. It is sad and pleasant to greet her. We stand talking for a minute in the hall.
'Is he there?' Mother knows to whom I refer.
'Yes.' She hesitates; then wife-like, pleadingly: 'Be nice to him.'
I promise.
The children greet me hilariously and I wonder what to say to them. Children always embarrass me.
The father obtrudes himself with weighty tenderness:
'Why doesn't my elf come and kiss me?'
He is fatter, greyer, more dissolute. Only eyes and forehead still partly survive the wreck. I grit my teeth and appear to kiss him willingly, angry with myself that I cannot prevent my flesh from suffering at the contact. His breath is unpleasant with the odor of whiskey and cheese. It revives a vivid childhood scene:
Fresh from the woods, fragrance of earth and leaves clinging to her, a mist of poetry in her brain from something she had been writing or reading, I see the child that was me, darting into the house at tea-time.
'Streak-of-lightning! Come and give your dad a kiss!'
The child goes obediently to be kissed, resentful only at having her thoughts disturbed. Cheese and whiskey! She is horribly disgusted. How could anyone with such a breath want to kiss her? Then I see her breaking away, racing into the garden and burying her head in the flowers.
My first distaste for my father was certainly an aesthetic distaste, which soon became disgust.
'Cold as ever!' he complains because I get away from him as soon as I can.
'All brain; no heart whatever.' Mother smiles; she knows me better.
He reaches for his whiskey: 'Have a drink: it'll warm your chilly blood,'
'No, thank you. Not so early in the morning; I haven't eaten yet.'
Mother rescues me with breakfast.
'He's drinking too much,' she remarks unhappily.
I had never blamed him for drinking, like mother continually did. But I could not help despising him for not being strong enough to make it serve him.
There is little but the unhappy in the handful of news mother unfolds to me during breakfast. Most of it hangs about the man of the family.
'He has been more ill than well lately. I can't help thinking he will not live long… and all these children… five of them under fifteen!' Helplessly: 'I don't know what it will mean.'
I do.
I see a scale balancing-mother, children-writing, the poetry, my own life- and my heart is breaking with resentment.
I try to put the black thoughts in chains, since they are far too evilly vigorous to banish. After all, I came here to link hands with love.
I go to the telephone and call Louise's number. No answer. She must be out, although nine-thirty is early for her. There is nothing to do but fill an hour with futile occupations. Later I make another attempt, but still she is not there.
At noon I telephone Louise's number again. This time her husband answers:
'She is spending the holidays at St. Agathe… won't be back till Monday.'
I do not know what I feel, but something terribly more than disappointment.
Streets drabber than ever, and rain drizzling down.
I want to put Montreal behind me at once, but a berth for Sunday night is already reserved and I haven't money to get another. All I can do is to stay.
Defiance begins to possess me. Since I must remain, I'll enjoy it. I go immediately to a telephone and call Marguerite. Before I left Montreal for New York she displayed a great deal of love for me. I had tried to meet it with sympathy; certainly always did respond with pleasure and passion, for she is beautiful, very much the artist (musically), and fascinating.
I recognize her voice at the other end of the wire.
'Marguerite! C'est Sapho qui parle.'
'Oh, ma chere! What happiness. Where are you? I must see you at once! Will you come here?'
The French enthusiasm, the voice vibrating with unmistakable delight, are wine to me. In spite of her insistence that we must meet at once- 'immediatement! immediatement!' she repeats-we finally agree to see each other that evening at a friend's studio.
I go again into the street with a little of the greyness lifted. How mysteriously heartening is pleasure, and the thought of pleasure.
Night, and the indestructible magic of passion in the veins and the mist of a spring evening dimming the lights that are softer than most city lights. The ancient buildings have become more characterful. They are not splendid and blatant like New York's concrete monsters.
I run up the old staircase to the studio. It is early and the hostess is not yet there, but I enter. In Montreal we leave our studios unlocked, or the key in some accessible corner. The familiar studio, full of the pictures I had watched being painted, is another pleasure. Someone had freed incense or sandalwood perfume in the room.
I am stretched on a sofa with a cigarette, trying not to think of Louise, whom I had loved more than once in this place, when someone knocks at the door. I open it and find the woman from the adjoining studio standing there, like a Baccante, with a decanter of red wine in her left hand. She wears a transparent kimono and rather disarranged hair. I am glad enough to see her.
We had been friends once upon a time.
'I saw you come in,' she explained, putting the decanter down on a table. I motion towards it:
'What's that for?'
'Oh! You've forgotten since you lived in that desert across the border!'
It was plain to me that she had not 'forgotten.' She seemed to have been practicing well that very day. She poured wine for both of us, then reclining so that her kimono became very vague about the shoulder, began immediately to tell me, French fashion, about her lover-the latest.
In my last few years in Montreal, everyone seemed to come to me with confessions. I became a sort of repository for the troubles of the artistic tribe, and at one time had locked in my memory the intimate secrets and misdeeds of about one-half of Montreal's quartier-latin. They came to me with everything from confessions of rape-even murder, once-to the tiniest sins of the spirit. Why they trusted me, I do not know. I felt quite at home when Davila, nicknamed 'Devil,' called 'Dev' for handiness, immediately unfolded an intrigue for me.
