I had for the most part been able to ignore them; now I wanted to get away, so that I could live my own life, and choose my own companions. My vague notions of sex became precise, became a torture.
When I first read Rabelais and the 'Poems and Ballads,' I was ignorant of my own body; I looked upon the relationship of man and woman as something essentially wicked; my imagination took fire, but I was hardly conscious of any physical reality connected with it. I was irrepressibly timid in the presence of a woman; I hardly ever met young people of my own age; and I had a feeling of the deepest reverence for women, from which I endeavoured to banish the slightest consciousness of sex. I thought it an inexcusable disrespect; and in my feeling towards the one or two much older women who at one time or another had a certain attraction for me, there was nothing, conscious at least, but a purely romantic admiration. At the same time I had a guilty delight in reading books which told me about the sensations of physical love, and I trembled with ecstasy as I read them. Thoughts of them haunted me; I put them out of my head by an effort, I called them back, they ended by never leaving me.
I think it was a little earlier than this that I began to walk in my sleep, and to have nightmares; but it was just then that I suffered most from those obscure terrors of the night. Once, when I was a child, I remember waking up in my nightshirt on the drawing-room sofa, and being wrapped up in a shawl and carried upstairs by my father, and put back into bed. I had come down in my sleep, opened the door, and walked into the room without seeing any one, and laid myself down on the sofa. I did not often dream, but, whenever I dreamed, it was of infinite spirals, up which I had to climb, or of ladders, whose rungs dropped away from me as my feet left them, or of slimy stone stairways into cold pits of darkness, or of the tightening of a snake's coils around me, or of walking with bare feet across a floor curdling with snakes. I awoke, stifling a scream, my hair damp with sweat, out of impossible tasks in which time shrank and swelled in some deadly game with life; something had to be done in a second, and all eternity passed, lingering, while the second poised over me like a drop of water always about to drip: it fell, and I was annihilated into depth under depth of blackness.
Into these dreams of abstract horror there began to come a disturbing element of sex. My books and my thoughts haunted me; I was restless and ignorant, physically innocent, but with a sort of naïve corruption of mind. All the interest which I had never been able to find in the soul, I found in what I only vaguely apprehended of the body. To me it was something remote, evil, mainly inexplicable; but nothing I had ever felt had meant so much to me. I never realised that there was any honesty in sex, that nature was after all natural. I reached stealthily after some stealthy delight of the senses, which I valued the more because it was a forbidden thing. Love I never associated with the senses, it was not even passion that I wanted; it was a conscious, subtle, elaborate sensuality, which I knew not how to procure. And there was an infinite curiosity, which I hardly even dared dream of satisfying; a curiosity which was like a fever. I was scarcely conscious of any external temptations. The ideas in which I had been trained, little as they had seemed consciously to affect me, had given me the equivalent of what I may call virtue, in a form of good taste. I was ashamed of my desires, of my sensations, though I made no serious effort to escape them; but I knew that, even if the opportunity were offered, something, some scruple of physical refinement, some timidity, some unattached sense of fitness, would step in to prevent me from carrying them into practice.
IV.
Every now and then my father used to talk to me seriously, saying that I should have to choose some profession, and make my own living. I always replied that there was nothing I could possibly do, that I hated every profession, that I would rather starve than soil my hands with business, and that so long as I could just go on living as I was then living, I wanted nothing more. I did not want to be a rich man, I was never able to realise money as a tangible thing, I wanted to have just enough to live on, only not at home; in London. My father did not press the matter; I could see that he dreaded my leaving home, and he knew that, for the time, going to London was out of the question.
One summer I went down to a remote part of England to stay with some of my relations. I had seen none of them since I was a child, I knew nothing about them, except that some were farmers, some business people; there was an astronomer, an old sea-captain, and a mad uncle who lived in a cottage by himself on a moor near the sea, and grew marvellous flowers in a vast garden. I stayed with a maiden aunt, who was like a very old and very gaunt little bird; she was deaf, wrinkled, and bent, but her hair was still yellow, her voice a high piping treble, and she ran about with the tireless vivacity of a young girl. She had been pretty, and had all the little vanities of a coquette; she wore bright, semi-fashionable clothes, and conspicuous hats. She had much of the natural gaiety of my mother, who was her elder sister; and she was infinitely considerate to me, turning out one of her little rooms that I might have it for a study. She liked me to play to her, and would sit by the side of the old piano listening eagerly. The mad uncle was her brother, and he would come in sometimes from his cottage, bringing great bundles of flowers. He was very kind and gentle, and he would sometimes tell me of the letters he had been writing to the Prince of Wales on the subject of sewage, and of how the Prince of Wales had acknowledged his communications. He had many theories about sewage; I have heard that some of them were plausible and ingenious; and he was convinced that his theories would some day be accepted, and that he would become famous. I believe his brain had been turned by an unlucky passion for a beautiful girl; he was only in an asylum for a short time; and for the most part lived happily in his cottage among his flowers, developing theories of sewage, and taking sun-baths naked in the garden.
The people of whom I saw most were some cousins: the father kept a shop, and they all helped in the business. They were very kind, and did all they could for me by feeding me plentifully and taking me for long drives in the country, which was very hilly and wooded, and sometimes to the sea, which was not too far off to reach by driving. We had not an idea in common, and I always wondered how it was possible that my aunt, who was my mother's eldest sister, could ever have married my uncle. He was a kind man, and, in his way, intelligent; but he talked incessantly, insistently, and with something unctuous in his voice and manner; he came close to me while he spoke, and tapped my shoulder with his fingers or my leg with his stick. I could not bear him to touch me; sometimes he dropped his h's, and, as I heard them drop, I saw the old man looking fixedly into my face with his large, keen, shifting eyes.
One of the daughters had something inquiring in her mind, a touch of rebellious refinement; she had enough instinct for another kind of life to be at least discontented with her own; with her I could talk. But the others fitted into their environment without a crease or a ruffle. They went to the shop early in the morning, slaved there all day, taught in the Sunday-School on Sundays, said the obvious things to one another all day long, were perfectly content to be where they were, do what they did, think what they thought, and say what they said. Their house reflected them like a mirror. Everything was clean and new, there was plenty of everything; and I used to sit in their drawing-room looking round it in a vain attempt to find a single thing which I could have lived with, in a house of my own.
I went home from the visit gladly, glad to be at home again. We were living then in the Midlands, and I used to spend whole days at Kenilworth, at Warwick, at Coventry; I knew them from Scott's novels, but I had never seen a ruined castle, a city with ancient buildings, and I began to feel that there was something else to be seen in the world besides the things I had dreamed of seeing. I took a boat at Leamington, and rowed up the river as far as the chain underneath Warwick Castle. I do not know why I have always remembered that moment, as if it marked a date to me. It was with a full enjoyment of the contrast that I found them busy preparing for a fête when I got back to Leamington; stringing up the Chinese lanterns to the branches of the trees, and putting out little tables on the grass. At Coventry I loved going through the narrow streets, looking up at the windows which leaned together under their gabled roofs. I saw Lady Godiva borne through the streets, more
