I went into my room and closed the door, my heart throbbing heavily, my mouth all parched as in fever. I must cheat time, I said to myself, and so I put on my best suit of pyjamas, a sort of white stuff with threads of gold in it. And then I waited for the summons, but none came. I looked at my watch: it was twenty minutes since we parted; I must give her half an hour at least. "Would she call me?" She had said she would. "Would she yield easily?" Again, as my imagination recalled her wilful, mutinous face and lovely eyes, my heart began to thump! At last the half hour was up; should I go in? Yes, I would, and I walked over to the door and listened-not a sound. I turned the handle; the room was entirely in the dark. I moved quickly to the lights and turned them on: there she was in bed, with only her little face showing and the great eyes.
In a second I was by her side.
"You promised to call me," I said.
"Put out the light!" she begged. Without making any reply I pulled down the clothes and got in beside her. "You'll be good!" she pouted.
"I'll try," was my noncommittal answer, and I slipped my left arm under her and drew her lips to mine. I was thrilled by the slightness and warmth of her, and at first I just took her mouth and held her close to the heat of my body. In a moment or two her lips grew hot and I put my hand down to lift her nightie:
"No, no!" she resisted, pouting. "You promised to be good."
"There's nothing bad in this," I said, persevering, and the next moment I had my hand on her sex. With a sigh she resigned herself and gave her lips. After caressing her for a minute or two her sex opened and I could move her legs apart, so at once I put her hand on my sex. My excitement was so intense that I felt a good deal of pain; but I was past caring for pain. In a moment I was between her legs with my sex caressing her sex; the great eyes closed, but as I sought to enter her she shrank back with a cry of pain: "Oo, oo! It's terrible- please stop; oh, you said you'd be good." Of course I kissed her, smiling, and went back to the caressing. Naturally, in a few minutes I was again trying to enter paradise; but at once the cries of pain began again and the entreaties to stop and be good and I'll love you so. She was so pretty in her entreating that I said: "Let me see, and if I hurt you, I'll stop," and drew down in the bed to look.
The fools are always saying that one sex of a woman is very like another; it is absolutely false; they are as different as mouths and this I was looking at was one of the most lovely I had ever seen. As she lay there before me I could not help exclaiming, "You dear, pocket Venus!" She was so dainty-small, but the damage done was undeniable; there was blood on her sex and a spot of blood on one lovely little round thigh; and at the same moment I noticed that my infernal prepuce had shrunk and now hurt me dreadfully, compressing my sex with a ring of iron. For some obscure reason, half of pity, half of affection for the little beauty, I moved and lay beside her as at first, saying: "I'll do whatever you wish; I love you so much, I hate to hurt you so."
"Oh, you great dear," she cried, and her arms went round my neck and she kissed me of her own accord a hundred tunes. A little later I lifted her upon me, naked body to naked body, and was ravished by the sheer beauty of her.
I must have spent an hour in fondling and caressing her; continually I discovered new beauties in her; time and again I pushed her nightie up to her neck, delighting in the plastic beauty of her figure; but Bessie showed no wish to see me or excite me. Why? Girls are a strange folk, I decided, but I soon found she was as greedy of praise as could be, so I told her what an impression she had made at the ball and how a dozen students had asked me to introduce them, saying she was the queen of the evening. At length she fell asleep in my arms and I must have slept, too, for it was four in the morning before I awoke, turned out the lights and crept to my own room. I had acted unselfishly, spared Bessie: to give her merely pain for my thrill of pleasure would not have been fair, I thought; I was rather pleased with myself.
When I awoke in the morning, I hastened to her, but found she was getting up and did not want to be disturbed; she'd be ready before me, she said, and she wished to see the town and shops before her friends came for her at two o'clock. I followed her wishes, bolted the door between our rooms, took her for a drive, gave her lunch, said "Good-bye" afterwards. When I assured her that nothing had been done, she said that I was a darling, promised to write and kissed me warmly; but I felt a shade of reticence in her, a something of reserve too slight to be defined, and on the train back to Heidelberg I put my fears down to fancy. But though I wrote to her English address I received no answer. Had I lost her through sparing her? What a puzzle women were! Was Virgil right with his spretae injuria formae? the hatred that comes in them if their beauty is not triumphant? Do they forgive anything sooner than selfcontrol?
I was angry with myself and resolved not to be such an unselfish fool next time.
CHAPTER IV
I had long been aware that there was something rotten in the core of our social system. I had seen that while immense fortunes were accumulating, the working classes, the creators of wealth, were steeped in the most abject poverty. (Disraeli) MY LIFE AT GOTTINGEN at first was all work: study from morning till night;
I grudged even the time to bathe and dress myself, and instead of walking a couple of hours a day for exercise, I got into the habit of sprinting a hundred yards or so twice a day, and once at least daily would trot for about half a mile. I thus managed to keep physically fit.
Besides working at German I read philosophy, the Greek thinkers and above all Plato: … The divine One If one reads the Gods aright By their motions as they shine on In an endless trail of Light.
And then the English thinkers, such as Hobbes, Locke and Hume, and the French, especially Pascal and Joubert, and of course the Germans with Kant, the master of modern scepticism, and Schopenhauer, whose ordinary essays show greatness of mind and soul. All these men, I saw, are moments in the growth of human thought, and I turned away from the speculations, feeling that I included most of them in my own development.
One incident of this life may be worth recording: Lotze, the famous philosopher who preached a God immanent in every form of life, remarked once in seminar that the via media of Aristotle was the first and greatest discovery in morals. I disagreed with him, and when he asked me for my reasons, I said that the via media belonged to statics, whereas morals were a part of dynamics. A bottle of wine might do me good and make another man drunk: the moral path was never a straight or middle line between extremes, as Aristotle imagined, but the resultant of two forces, a curve, therefore, always making towards one side or the other. As one's years increase, after thirty or so, the curve should set towards abstinence.
Stirb und Werde!
Denn wenn Du das nicht hast
Bist Du nur ein truber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde.
Lotze made a great fuss about this; asked me, indeed, to lecture to the class on laws of morals, and I talked one afternoon on all the virtues of chastity. It must be remembered that I was years older than the majority of the students.
My student life in the walled town was all in extremes: by turns sterile and fruitful. I learned German thoroughly; wasted a year indeed on Gothic, and Old High German and Middle High German, too, till I knew German as well as I knew English, and the Niebelungenlied better than I knew Chaucer.
Twice I went on public platforms and spoke in great meetings and no one suspected that I was a foreigner-all vanity and waste of tune, as I had to learn later.