by Frank Harris
But no resolve did me any good. Behind my anger, my love moaned crying,
"Have I been so careless of you, my darling, that you wanted another affection? What have I failed to do? Love's service all planned and perfect, but not marriage, and Laura's as proud as Lucifer. Marry her tomorrow and she'll be faithful; it's not fair to the girl, this life as a kept mistress." Almost I yielded, but the thought of her mother came between us. I'd have to invite her, be polite at least to her; impossible, and again I saw the man's arm drawn away from Laura's waist! I thought I should go mad.
I got up and rang the bell. Bridget, my servant, came in, and when she brought me the whisky and soda she said, "You don't look well, Sir."
"I don't feel well, Bridget," I said. "I've not eaten."
"Oh, we can get you dinner at once, Sir; there's cold grouse in the larder," and soon I dined while Bridget waited on me. She had lovely Irish eyes and was kindness itself. As she stood by me after helping me to something, I put my arm around her, and nothing loath, our eyes and then our lips met. Soon I found she cared for me and this spontaneous affection did me good, took the unholy rage and bitterness out of me and brought me back to quiet thoughts and sanity. To cut a long story short, I consoled myself with Bridget's affection and fresh prettiness, and the fears of madness all left me not to return for many a day.
Yet next day I was ruthless. Laura had a perfect explanation. "He was a Scot; her mother had invited him to dinner and had then gone up to her room for something and left them together and-"
I smiled. "Don't sit so close together on the sofa next time," I said, "or you'll never see me again. I mean it absolutely: you must make your choice." Laura got furiously angry: what did I suspect; it was a public room: couldn't she sit with a friend? She had manifestly no idea of the storm of rage and hatred she had called to life in me. But conscious of a worse fault in myself, I was willing to forgive and if possible to forget; and I only record the fact in its naked brutality because it's true that I was really frightened of myself, frightened that I should never regain control and so snatched at the nearest way to sanity. But it led me further astray than I had imagined.
What held me to Laura so absolutely?
First of all, of course, there was the immediate attraction of good looks, but I had seen just as beautiful girls who did not attract me deeply. It was Laura's fine intelligence that pleased me so intimately, and especially the fact that her knowledge of languages gave her a cosmopolitan ideal and so allowed her to see the little peculiarities of the people surrounding us in a humorous light. Yet in spite of her amused disdain of English snobbishness and English reverence for mere conventions, she yet regarded the better class of English as the best people in the world, just as I did.
All these threads of attraction and sympathy combined to form a bond which was enormously strengthened by a single strand: she had one of the loveliest figures I've ever seen. I could stand admiring her nudity and studying it by the hour: gradually my passionate admiration took away her shamefacedness and she would strip for me, always, however, treating my adoration as childish. "You must know my figure," she said once, "much better than I know it myself."
"Naturally," I replied, but even now in old age I am at a complete loss and utterly unable to express wherein the infinite attraction consisted.
This love of plastic beauty goes naturally with that adoration of virginity which led me to stray a hundred times in my life and is now as inexplicable to me as it was fifty years ago. Even now a well-made girl's legs of fourteen make the pulses beat in my forehead and bring water into my mouth. After Mrs. Mayhew when I was seventeen, no mature woman who had been enjoyed ever attracted me physically with this intensity. It was the young and untried and with the years the unripe that drew me irresistibly; and once at least a little later I gave myself to the pursuit for months in an orgy of lust.
But that's a story for my next volume and is intended to show what wealth can do. Now I can only say that Laura had won me body and mind and soul.
For the soul was the chiefest factor in the deathless fascination and it often humbled me. There's a sonnet, entitled White Heather, of an almost unknown poet of this time, one Ronald Macfie, that gives partial expression to this idolatry of love. Here is the sextet:
O Queen! and I answer the wind in gentle wise, Saying that I have chosen as embassy This passionless heather, thinking it may devise Some white, soft suppliant way towards my plea To tell how earth is hallowed by thine eyes, How life grows holier in loving thee.
Laura often found words that affected me like these verses. After enjoying her one golden afternoon and kissing her from mouth to knees, she suddenly took my head in her hands and said to me with a sort of childish gravity, "Set tutto il mio ben."
I've had better bedfellows, mistresses more given to the art of love and far more proficient in arousing maddening sensations, but my instinct on the whole was justified: I loved Laura better than anyone I knew up to that time or for many a year afterwards; esteemed her, too, as more intelligent; and I still think her figure the most beautiful I've ever seen.
It was her mutism that was the barrier between us always, but at long last the heart-talk had to take place. One day she asked me, "If you got a letter reflecting on me, should you mind?"
"What sort of letter?" I asked, and after much probing she confessed it might be a letter of hers that showed "affection-for some one else!"
"Passion, you mean?" I asked.
"Not passion," she replied.
"You may as well tell me everything," I urged, "because the letter, however outspoken, will only confirm my suspicions. I know you were in love with that American and you gave yourself to him. I saw you together."
"No, no!" she cried. "Never as I have to you, never!"
My jealous rage wouldn't take it. "Nonsense!" I cried. "I saw him in the Savoy once put his hand on your bare neck; that's what kept me away from you after the year was up."
Her eyes grew large. "At the Savoy?" she cried. "Mother was with me."
"Yes," I went on pitilessly, "but he was with you often when your mother wasn't there. Why can't you tell the truth? That's the thing that separates us: I can forgive, but you can't be honest! Why not say at once he had you dozens of times. I know more than that."
"Sometimes I think you hate me," she said in a low voice, mournfully. "It's not true: I've never given myself to sex-pleasures as I have with you- never, Frank. You must know that, dear!"
But I was inexorable: I would get the whole truth at last. "Why, you got in the family way with him," I cried, "and he gave you or you took medicine and brought about a miscarriage."
"Oh, oh!" she cried, covering her face with her hands. "You could think that.
You're wicked, wicked; that's not love," and she flamed upright before me,
"nor the truth." I smiled.
"It isn't the truth," she persisted. "I never had a miscarriage as you say.
Disgusting!"
"Call it what you will," I cried. "Your blotched lips showed me you had womb-trouble and inflammation, and as soon as I touched your sex, I knew you were no longer a virgin; but my love was strong enough to forgive you everything, if only you had trusted me enough to tell me the whole truth.
You never realized how infinitely I love you."
"You call that love?" she cried. "To try to shame me; oh!"
"More than love," I went on. "To know all and forgive everything and blame myself! I should not have left you a year alone without a word in your equivocal position and with your father and mother. I was to blame, bitterly, and I have taken all the blame to myself, but you should have cared enough to tell the truth, Laura!"
"But if I thought something bad about you," she began, "I couldn't bring it out and hurt you with it. I'd put it away back in my mind and forget it and say to myself, "That's not Frank, not my love.' I'd deny it to myself and in a month or so, I shouldn't even think of it, much less speak about it.
"Now I'll tell
you something, Sir, just to show you the difference of our spirits and what I have had to forgive. When we parted you told me you would let me hear in three months how things were going with you, but certainly within the year. Within the three months I saw you going about with other women, while I refused to go anywhere alone with the American my father had introduced to us, and who wanted me, I could see.
"One evening, six months after our parting, and you had sent me no word, he was taking us all to the Cafe Royale, that I had selected on your recommendation, to dinner, when I saw you coming down the upper flight of stairs with a pretty girl. I found out the stairs led to the private rooms. Ah, how it hurt me! I could scarcely eat, or speak, or even think. I was like one trodden on and numb with pain. While I had been denying ordinary courtesies, you were going with young girls to private rooms. Afterwards for days and days I raged when I thought of it, and then you blame me, and say you'll forgive me, if only I will tell all the truth, and you who began it. What have you to tell? And what have I to forgive?
"Time and again, I've thrust the truth away. I've denied it to myself, and as soon as you came to me I was so glad and proud, so heart-glad that I forgot all your wrongs and insults. I pushed them back in my mind and forgot them.
'They are not my Frank!' I used to say. 'He's wonderful, so strong and wise and he has real passion and affection too.' Oh!"
And the lovely eyes filled with tears: "Men don't love as we women do!"
"Forgive me," I cried, touched in spite of myself. "Forgive me," I repeated.
"You were mistaken about the private room, really you were. Till I saw the American caress your bare shoulder I never went to a private room with anyone; indeed, I'm sure I didn't, but I love you for your defence and your half-proud, half-gentle persuasiveness. We won't talk any more about our sins, but you need not be afraid that anything he or anyone else can say will have the smallest effect on me. I love you and I know you, your eyes and sweet soul, and the hard work you've done studying, and your noble loyalty to your mother, and all."
"You darling, darling!" she exclaimed. "Now I believe you love me really, for those are the sort of things that I love about you: your giving money to your sister and her husband, your careless generosity and your wonderful talk. But you're too suspicious, too doubting, you naughty, naughty dear!" And the lovely eyes gave themselves, smiling.
"It's your naughtiness saves you," I responded, "and your wonderful beauty of figure; your little breasts are tiny-perfect, taken with your strong hips and the long limbs and the exquisite triangle with the lips that are red, crimsonred as they should be, and not brown like most, and so sensitive, curling at the edges and pearling with desire."
Suddenly she put her hand over my mouth. "I won't listen," she pouted, wrinkling up her nose-and she looked so adorable that I led her to the sofa and soon got busy kissing, kissing the glowing crimson lips that opened at once to me, and in a minute or two were pearly wet with the white milk of love and ready for my sex.
But in spite of the half-confess ion, the antagonism between us continued, though it was much less than it had been. I could not get her to give herself with passion, or to let herself go frankly to love's ultimate expression, even when I had reduced her to tears and sobbings of exhaustion. "Please not, boy!
Please, no more," was all I could get from her, so that often and often I merely had her and came to please myself and then lay there beside her talking, or threw down the sheets and made her lie on her face so that I could admire the droop of the loins and the strong curve of the bottom. Or else I would pose her sideways so as to bring out the great swell of the hip and the poses would usually end with my burying my head between her legs, trying with lips and tongue and finger and often again with my sex to bring her sensations to ecstasy and if possible to love-speech and love-thanks! Now and again I succeeded, for I had begun to study the tunes in the month when she was most easily excited. But how is it that so few women ever try to give their lover the utmost sum of pleasure?
One of the most difficult things to find out in the majority of women is the time when they are most easily excited and most apt to the sexual act. Some few are courageous enough to tell their lover when they really want him, but usually he has to find the time and season for himself. With rare courage Dr.
Mary Stopes in the book recently condemned in England out of insane, insular stupidity, has indicated two or three days in each monthly period when the woman is likely to be eager in response. Her experience is different from mine with Laura, chiefly I think because she does not bring the season of the year into the question. Yet again and again I have noticed that spring and autumn are the most propitious seasons, and the two best moments in the month I have found to be just before the period and just when the vitality in the woman's seed is departing, about the eighth or ninth day after the monthly flow has ceased. I may of course be mistaken in this. Pioneers seldom find the best road and the spiritual factors in every human being are infinitely more important than the merely animal.
I may give a proof of this. One day Laura asked me, "Have you helped father recently?"
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Well, he was hard up a little while ago and bothered mother, and then he got money and got afloat; and yesterday he wanted to know why we never had you now at the house at dinner or for the evening, and I just guessed. Was it you who helped him?" I nodded. "And you never even told me!" she exclaimed. "Sometimes I adore you. I've never known anyone so generous- and not to speak of it, even to me. You make me proud of you and your love," and she put her hand on mine.
"I'm glad," I said, "but why don't you now and then try to give me pleasure in the act?"
"I do," she said, blushing adorably, "but I don't know how to. I've tried to squeeze you, but you ravish me and I can only let myself go and throb in unison. My feelings are overpowering; every fibre in me thrills to you, you great lover."
"There," I said; "that pleases me as much as my gift pleased you."
"Ah," she sighed; "it's the soul we are caught by, while you naughty men are caught by the body."
"By the body's beauty," I responded, laughing, "and by the soul as well."
In my bedroom at Kensington Gore I had a wonderful copy of the well known Titian in the Louvre of a girl lying on her side. Laura one day for fun stretched herself on the bed and took up the exact same pose. She was infinitely better made, slighter everywhere in the body and with more perfect hips and limbs.
When she got up and was seated on the bed she suddenly put her foot behind her head, discovering the loveliest curves.
To pay her for her exquisite posturing I tried to amuse her by telling her naughty stories I had chanced to hear. One, I remember, made her laugh heartily. It was the story of a solemn English lady engaging a maid. She had asked all sorts of questions and the maid had withstood the interrogatory with perfect propriety. At length the lady asked, "Oh, Mary, have you been confirmed?" Mary hung her head for a moment, then replied in a low voice,
"Yes, Mum, once, but the baby didn't live!" The little play on words had a greater success than far finer stories. Women naturally like best what concerns them most intimately.
CHAPTER XIX
Boulanger; Rochefort; the colonial conference; Jan Hofmeyr; Alfred Deakin; and Cecil Rhodes; t he Cardinals Manning and Newman
It was in 1885 when he was made minister of war by M. Freycinet that General Boulanger began to attract public attention in France. He seemed to grow in importance with every month, and the noteworthy thing was that set-backs which would have ruined other men made him talked about the more, showing that he fulfilled or satisfied in some degree a deep-seated feeling in the mass of his compatriots. In 1888 there was a senatorial election in the Nord, where he had been elected a Deputy a couple of months before; yet his influence in the senatorial election was negligible-"an extinct volcano," he was called-and sensible people pointed out that he had never given any indication of ability. He seemed to be finished,
yet I heard him discussed on all sides in Paris.
The Deputy Laguerre was his strongest supporter in the Chamber, and Madame Laguerre-Marguerite Durand that was-had been a friend of mine years before when she was an actress in the Theatre Francais. I was always proud of having seen her ability from the beginning. I forget now what play she was acting in, but I remember afterwards she insisted on my telling her how she had acted. At that time I used to go to the Francais every night. I shocked her by saying, "You'll never be a great actress; you are too intelligent."
"What do you mean?" she cried. "Surely intelligence is needed in every art?"
"Leave art out of the question," I retorted. "Acting is hardly worthy to be called an art; it is not intelligence that gives fame and popularity to the orator or actor: it's feeling, passion."
"Do you think Sarah Bernhardt has more passion, more feeling than I have?" she asked disdainfully.
"Indeed I don't," I replied, "but she has much less intelligence and she has really an extraordinary organ, her voice. You are supremely occupied with thoughts, ideas, the future of humanity; Sarah cares for none of these things.
They handicap you as an actress; you should be a journalist or a propagandist."
"I daresay you're right," she said thoughtfully. Everyone knows how a few years later Marguerite Durand established the first woman's paper in Paris, and though she employed only girls and women on it, yet brought it to success. She married Laguerre but was never a thoroughgoing partisan of Boulanger, as he was. It was in '88 or '89, I think, that there was a great review of troops on the Champs de Mars, and General Boulanger led the column and was acclaimed by the crowd, who went mad in praise of le brav' General. He was indeed a brave figure on a horse: he had a good head and handsome face with brown beard and long floating moustache; he was broad, too, and strong, and sat his horse like a centaur. In an hour all Paris seemed to be in the streets:
