Carlyle's bedroom door: no reply; I tried to enter: the door was locked, and unable to get an answer, I went downstairs in a huff and flung out of the house. «I stayed away for a fortnight, but when I went back one evening I was horrified to see how ill Mrs. Carlyle looked, stretched out on the sofa, and as pale as death. 'You're worse?' I asked. «'Much worse and weaker!' she replied.
«'You naughty, obstinate creature!' I cried. 'I'm your friend and your doctor and anything but a fooclass="underline" I'm sure I can cure you in double-quick time, and you prefer to suffer. It's stupid of you and worse.-Come up now at once and think of me only as your doctor,' and I half lifted, half helped her to the door: I supported her up the stairs and at the door of her room she said: «'Give me ten minutes, Doctor, and I'll be ready. I promise you I won't lock the door again.' «With that assurance I waited and in ten minutes knocked and went in. «Mrs. Carlyle was lying on the bed with a woolly-white shawl round her head and face. I thought it absurd affectation in an old married woman, so I resolved on drastic measures: I turned the light full on, then I put my hand under her dress and with one toss threw it right over her head. I pulled her legs apart, dragged her to the edge of the bed and began inserting the speculum in her vulva: I met an obstacle-I looked-and immediately sprang up. 'Why, you're a virgo intacta!' (an untouched virgin), I exclaimed. «She pulled the shawl from her head and said: 'What did you expect?' «'Anything but that,' I cried, 'in a woman married these five and twenty years.' «I soon found out the cause of her trouble and cured it or rather did away with it: that night she rested well and was her old gay, mutinous self when I called next day.
«A little later she told me her story. «'After the marriage,' she said, 'Carlyle was strange and out of sort, very nervous, he seemed, and irritable. When we reached the house, we had supper and about eleven o'clock I said I would go to bed, being rather tired: he nodded and grunted something. I put my hands on his shoulders as I passed him and said, «Dear, do you know that you haven't kissed me once, all day-this day of days!» and I bent down and laid my cheek against his. He kissed me, but said: «You women are always kissing-I'll be up soon!» Forced to be content with that, I went upstairs, undressed and got into bed: he hadn't even kissed me of his own accord, the whole day! «'A little later he came up, undressed and got into bed beside me. I expected him to take me in his arms and kiss and caress me. «'Nothing of the sort, he lay there, jiggling like.' («I guessed what she meant,» said Quain, «the poor devil in a blue funk was frigging himself…») 'I thought for some time,' Mrs. Carlyle went on, 'one moment I wanted to kiss and caress him; the next moment I felt indignant. Suddenly it occurred to me that in all my hopes and imaginings of a first night I had never got near the reality: silent the man lay there jiggling, jiggling. Suddenly I burst out laughing: it was too wretched! too absurd! «'At once he got out of bed with the one scornful word, «Woman!» and went into the next room: he never came back to my bed. «'Yet he's one of the best and noblest men in the world, and if he had been more expansive and told me oftener that he loved me, I could easily have forgiven him any bodily weakness; silence is love's worst enemy, and after all, he never really made me jealous, save for a short time with Lady Ashburnham. I suppose I've been as happy with him as I could have been without anyone, yet-' «That's my story,» said Quain in conclusion, «and I make you a present of it: even in the Elysian Fields I shall be content to be in the Carlyles' company. They were a great pair!» Just one more scene. When I told Carlyle how I had made some twenty-five hundred pounds in the year, and told him besides how a banker offered me almost the certainty of a great fortune if I would buy with him a certain coal-wharf at Tunbridge Wells (it was Hamilton's pet scheme), he was greatly astonished. «I want to know,» I went on, «if you think I'll be able to do good work in literature; if so, I'll do my best. Otherwise I ought to make money and not waste time in making myself another second-rate writer.» «No one can tell you that,» said Carlyle slowly. «You'll be lucky if you reach the knowledge of it yourself before ye die! I thought my Frederick was great work: yet the other day you said I had buried him under the dozen volumes, and you may be right; but have I ever done anything that will live?» «Sure,» I broke in, heartsore at my gibe, «sure.
Your French Revolution must live and the Heroes and Hero Worship, and Latter Day Pamphlets and-and-» «Enough,» he cried; «you're sure?»
«Quite, quite sure,» I repeated. Then he said, «You can be equally sure of your own place; for we can all reach the heights we are able to oversee.»
Afterword.
To the Story of My Life's Story
I had hardly written «Finis» at the end of this book when the faults in it, faults both of omission and commission, rose in swarms and robbed me of my joy in the work.
It will be six or seven years at least before I shall know whether the book is good and life-worthy or not, and yet need drives me to publish it at once. Did not Horace require nine years to judge his work? I, therefore, want the reader to know my intention; I want to give him the key, so to speak, to this chamber of my soul. First of all I wished to destroy, or at least to qualify, the universal opinion that love in youth is all romance and idealism. The masters all paint it crowded with roses of illusion:
Juliet is only fourteen; Romeo, having lost his love, refuses life;
Goethe follows Shakespeare in his Mignon and Marguerite; even the great humorist Heine and the so-called realist Balzac adopt the same convention. Yet to me it is absolutely untrue in regard to the male in boyhood and early youth, say from thirteen to twenty: the sex urge, the lust of the flesh, was so overwhelming in me that I was conscious only of desire. When the rattlesnake's poison bag is full, he strikes at everything that moves, even the blades of grass; the poor brute is blinded and in pain with the overplus. In my youth I was blind, too, through excess of semen. I often say that I was thirty-five years of age before I saw an ugly woman, that is, a woman whom I didn't desire. In early puberty, all women tempted me; and all girls still more poignantly. From twenty to twenty-three, I began to distinguish qualities of the mind and heart and soul; to my amazement, I preferred Kate to Lily, though Lily gave me keener sensations; Rose excited me very little, yet I knew she was of rarer, finer quality than even Sophy, who seemed to me an unequalled bedfellow. From that time on the charm of spirit, heart and soul, drew me with ever-increasing magnetism, overpowering the pleasures of the senses, though plastic beauty exercises as much fascination over me today as it did fifty years ago. I never knew the illusion of love, the rose-mist of passion, till I was twenty-seven, and I was intoxicated with it for years; but that story will be for my second volume.