asked. «At first a good deal,» she replied, «but soon the pleasure overpowered the smart and I would not even forget the pain. I love you so. I am not even afraid of consequences with you: I trust you absolutely and love to trust you and run whatever risks you wish.» «You darling!» I cried, «I don't believe there will be any consequences; but I want you to go to the basin and use this syringe. I'll tell you why afterwards.» At once she went over to the basin. «I feel funny, weak,» she said, «as if I were-I can't describe it-shaky on my legs. I'm glad now I don't wear drawers in summer, they'd get wet.» Her ablutions completed and the sheet withdrawn and done up in paper, I shot back the bolt and we began our talk. I found her intelligent and kindly but ignorant and ill-read; still she was not prejudiced and was eager to know all about babies and how they were made. I told her what I had told Mrs. Mayhew and something more: how my seed was composed of tens of thousands of tadpole-shaped animalcule. Already in her vagina and womb these infinitely little things had a race: they could move nearly an inch in an hour and the strongest and quickest got up first to where her egg was waiting in the middle of her womb. My little tadpole, the first to arrive, thrust his head into her egg and thus having accomplished his work of impregnation, perished, love and death being twins. The curious thing was that this indescribably small tadpole should be able to transmit all the qualities of all his progenitors in certain proportions; no such miracle was ever imagined by any religious teacher. More curious still, the living foetus in the womb passes in nine months through all the chief changes that the human race has gone through in countless aeons of time in its progress from the tadpole to the man. Till the fifth month the foetus is practically a four-legged animal. I told her that it was accepted today that the weeks occupied in the womb in any metamorphosis correspond exactly to the ages it occupied in reality. Thus it was upright, a two-legged animal, ape and then man in the womb for the last three months, and this corresponded nearly to one-third of man's whole existence on this earth. Kate listened, enthralled, I thought, till she asked me suddenly: «But what makes one child a boy and another a girl?»
«The nearest we've come to a law on the matter,» I said, «is contained in the so-called law of contraries: that is, if the man is stronger than the woman, the children will be mostly girls; if the woman is greatly younger or stronger, the progeny will be chiefly boys. This bears out the old English proverb: «Any weakling can make a boy, but it takes a man to make a girl.» Kate laughed and just then a knock came to the door. «Come in!» I cried, and then colored maid came in with a note. «A lady's just been and left it,» said Jenny. I saw it was from Mrs. Mayhew, so I crammed it into my pocket, saying regretfully: «I must answer it soon.» Kate excused herself and after a long, long kiss went to prepare supper, while I read Mrs.
Mayhew's note, which was short, if not exactly sweet: 'Eight days and no Frank, and no news; you cannot want to kill me: come today if possible. Lorna.» I replied at once, saying I would come on the morrow, that I was so busy I didn't know where to turn, but would be with her sure on the morrow and I signed «Your Frank.» That afternoon at five o'clock Smith came and I helped to arrange his books and make him comfy.
Chapter XI. At the Age of Eighteen
Venus toute entitre a sa proie attachie
I meant to write nothing but the truth in these pages, yet now I'm conscious that my memory has played a trick on me. It is in an artist what painters call foreshortening: events, that is, which took months to happen, it crushes together into days, passing, so to speak, from mountain top to mountain top of feeling, and so the effect of passion is heightened by the partial elimination of time. I can do nothing more than warn my readers that in reality some of the love-passages I shall describe were separated by weeks and sometimes by months, that the nuggets of gold were occasional «finds» in a desert. After all, it cannot matter to my «gentle readers,» and my good readers will have already divined the fact, that when you crush eighteen years into nine chapters, you must leave out all sorts of minor happenings while recording chiefly the important-fortunately these carry the message. It was with my knowledge as with my passions. Day after day I worked feverishly: whenever I met a passage such as the building of the bridge in Caesar, I refused to burden my memory with the dozens of new words because I thought, and still think, Latin comparatively unimportant: the nearest to a great man the Latins ever produced being Tacitus or Lucretius. No sensible person would take the trouble to master a language in order to gain acquaintance with the second-rate. But new words in Greek were precious to me like new words in English, and I used to memorize every passage studded with them, save choruses like that of the birds in Aristophanes, where he names birds unfamiliar to me in life.
Smith, I found, knew all such words in both languages. I asked him one day and he admitted that he had read everything in ancient Greek, following the example of Hermann, the famous German scholar, and he believed he knew almost every word. I did not desire any such pedantic perfection. I make no pretension to scholarship of any sort, and indeed learning of any kind leaves me indifferent, unless it leads to a fuller understanding of beauty, or that widening of the spirit by sympathy that is another name for wisdom. But what I wish to emphasize here is that in the first year with Smith I learned by heart dozens of choruses from the Greek dramatists and the whole of the Apologia and Crito of Plato, having guessed then, and still believe, that the Crito is a model short story, more important than any of even Plato's speculations. Plato and Sophocles! It was worthwhile spending five years of hard labor to enter into their intimacy and make them sister-spirits of one's soul. Didn't Sophocles give me Antigone, the prototype of the new woman for all time, in her sacred rebellion against hindering laws and thwarting conventions, the eternal model of that dauntless assertion of love that is beyond and above sex, the very heart of the divine! And the Socrates of Plato led me to that high place where man becomes God, having learned obedience to law and the cheerful acceptance of death; but even there I needed Antigone, the twin sister of Bazaroff, at least as much, realizing intuitively that my life-work, too, would be chiefly in revolt, and that the punishment Socrates suffered and Antigone dared would almost certainly be mine; for I was fated to meet worse opponents; after all, Creon was only stupid, whereas Sir Thomas Horridge was malevolent to boot, and Woodrow Wilson unspeakable! Again I am outrunning my story by half a century! But in what I have written of Sophocles and Plato the reader will divine, I hope, my intense love and admiration for Smith, who led me, as Vergil led Dante, into the ideal world that surrounds our earth as with illimitable spaces of purple sky, wind-swept and star-sown! If I could tell what Smith's daily companionship now did for me, I would hardly need to write this book; for, like all I have written, some of the best of it belongs as much to him as to me. In his presence for the first year and a half I was merely a sponge, absorbing now this truth, now that, hardly conscious of an original impulse. Yet all the time, too, as will be seen, I was advising him and helping him from my knowledge of life. Our relation was really rather that of a small, practical husband with some wise and infinitely learned Aspasialt I want to say here in contempt of probability that in all our years of intimacy, living together for over three years side by side, I never found a fault in him of character or of sympathy, save the one that drew him to his death.
Now I must leave him for the moment and turn again to Mrs.
May-hew. Of course, I went to her that next afternoon even before three. She met me without a word, so gravely that I did not even kiss her, but began explaining what Smith was to me and how I could not do enough for him who was everything to my mind, as she was (God help me!) to my heart and body; and I kissed her cold lips, while she shook her head sadly. «We have a sixth sense, we women, when we are in love,» she began. «I feel a new influence in you; I scent danger in the air you bring with you: don't ask me to explain: I can't; but my heart is heavy and cold as death. If you leave me, there'll be a catastrophe: the fall from such a height of happiness must be fatal.
If you can feel pleasure away from me, you no longer love me. I feel none except in having you, seeing you, thinking of you – none! Oh, why can't you love like a woman loves! No! like I love: it would be heaven; for you and you alone satisfy the insatiable; you leave me bathed in bliss, sighing with satisfaction, happy as the Queen in Heaven!» «I have much to tell you, new things to say,» I began in haste. «Come upstairs,» I broke in, interrupting myself. «I want to see you as you are now, with the color in your cheeks, the light in your eyes, the vibration in your voice, come!» And she came like a sad sybil. «Who gave you the tact,» she began while we were undressing, «the tact to praise always?» I seized her and stood naked against her, body to body. «What new things have you to tell me?» I asked, lifting her into the bed and getting in beside her, cuddling up to her warmer body. «There's always something new in my love,» she cried, cupping my face with her slim hands and taking my lips with hers. «Oh, how I desired you yesternoon, for I took the letter to your house myself and heard you talking in your room, perhaps with Smith,» she added, sounding my eyes with hers. «I'm longing to believe it; but, when I heard your voice, or imagined I did, I felt the lips of my sex open and shut and then it began to burn and itch intolerably. I was
