Thoughts and physical urges about sex rose to torment him several times a day, and even Dr. Upper’s remedy of the cold towel was ineffective; Francis tried it once or twice, and then decided that it was silly; he did not really want to rebuke his penis for its insistence on being noticed. And noticed not only when his thoughts strayed to the mystery of The Particular, but often when he was thinking of something innocuous like food, or where he had put his tube of Chinese white. Was he wicked? But the wickedness was also thrilling. Was he in some special way afflicted or diseased, that he should be so teased by a part of his body he could not control? There was nobody to ask.
But the demand was frequent, and in an alarming way delicious. Sometimes he provoked it, knowing that he should not, by looking at his small store of movie magazines. These he had bought, from time to time, at a local store called The Beehive, which sold not only movie magazines but false-faces, rings made in the shape of serpents with glittering red-glass eyes, and books which told you how to be a magician or a ventriloquist. The movie magazines showed the screen favourites of the time—Mac Murray, Margarita Fisher, Gladys Walton—in bathing suits that exposed their legs to the knee, or in short skirts with rolled stockings; a picture of Gloria Swanson in some historical epic of a period when people were obviously dead to shame (or enjoyed it) showed one other thighs almost to the hip. Long gazing at this picture was a hot excitement. So much more exciting than the few nudes to be found in Aunt’s books, so often monumental people by Thorwaldsen, or some nineteenth-century artist with a strong hint of Dr. Upper in his attitude toward sex. They were no fun; the movie stars were alive, and exciting. But most exciting of all were the pictures of Julian Eitinge.
Francis had seen this popular female impersonator in The Countess Charming at Grand-père’s theatre. Eitinge was a plump man of unremarkable appearance who could disguise himself as a woman of elegance and charm; the film showed the lacy undergarments, the corset, the wig that made the transformation. With some odds and ends of curtains and bits of silk he concealed in his chest of drawers Francis attempted to do what Eitinge did, and although the result would not have impressed anyone else it satisfied him deeply. He had to know about the human figure: he stuffed enough rags into his top to produce a buzzem something like that of Eitinge. The legs were a great feature of the pictures of movie stars: he disposed his legs in the manner of Gloria Swanson. He had no wig but he wrapped his head in a scarf. The effect in the mirror was gratifying to the point of urgency. What had Eitinge done about The Particular? Francis’s own particular made it plain that disguise must have been extremely difficult.
Bedtime fantasies were partnered by night horrors. In dreams he was set upon by succubi who were nothing like Gloria Swanson or the tantalizing Clarine Seymour; no, in his dreams hags and women horribly like those he had seen in the embalming room tormented and whispered, until he awoke with the hot gush on his thighs that made him leap from his bed, dab at the sheets with a dampened cloth, and do what he could to wash the pants of his pyjamas. Suppose somebody found out? Suppose that Anna Lemenchick, who made the beds, told Victoria Cameron? What would happen? He could not guess, but it would be shame even beyond the rich vocabulary of Dr. Upper to describe. But he could not stop; posturing in the manner of Julian Eitinge was seductive beyond his power of resistance.
What do you make of that, my friend? said the Daimon Maimas.
–You had better tell me what you make of it, said the Lesser Zadkiel. I suppose you were at the root of it all?
–Indeed I was, said the Daimon Maimas, and I took care that nobody found Francis at his games, for he was right in supposing that there would have been a pious uproar. But surely you see what the boy was doing?
–Looking for something that his life denied him, obviously. Trying to cope with a problem for which his life in Blairlogie terms offered no solution and no solace. He seems not to have known any girls except in the most distant fashion, and the screen images were unlike anything he would have met with even if he had known some girls at school.
–Just as well, for it wasn’t any palpable girl he was trying to evoke in front of his mirror, and it certainly wasn’t Julian Eitinge. Of course, he didn’t know it—they never do—but he was looking for The Girl, the girl deep in himself, the feminine ideal that has some sort of existence in every man of any substance, and my Francis was a man of substance. It wasn’t effeminacy, which is what anybody who discovered him would have supposed. It certainly wasn’t homosexuality, for Francis never had more than the usual dash of that. He was groping for the Mystical Marriage, the unity of the masculine and the feminine in himself, without which he would have been useless in his future life as an artist and as a man who understood art. Useless as any sort of man—rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief; not to speak of tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor—who is destined to see more than a few inches beyond the end of his nose. This was the beginning of the search for the Mystical Marriage, which is one of the great quests, and as usual the quest was longer and more important than the eventual discovery.
–Aha! And I suppose the quest is what poor Simon Darcourt, labouring over his biography of Francis, apprehends dimly, but without really knowing what it is.
–We mustn’t be extreme. And we certainly mustn’t underestimate Darcourt. But he wouldn’t think of describing Francis’s quest as a search and a yearning to know the feminine side of his own nature, in order that he might be a complete and spiritually whole man. An idea like that, encountered head-on, is usually rather too much for human beings. They begin to see things they don’t understand, and of course if they don’t understand them, they are sure they must be monsters.
–Like yourself, my dear Maimas?
–Yes, like me. Look at me, Zadkiel; what do you see?
–A handsome figure. Splendid breasts that any Venus might envy, a fine complexion and a glowing eye, and hyacinthine tresses of the deepest black. So far, a woman. But those elegantly narrow hips and sinewy legs; those handsome masculine organs of generation, which move and stir constantly with every change of your attitude and alteration of your thoughts. Hermes and Aphrodite wonderfully united in a single form. A simulacrum of a complete human creature, though of course you could not be what you are—a daimon—if you were not far above humanity as it now exists. Perhaps you are the creature of the future?
–Only as a symbol, brother. If humanity ever took on this form, they would have great trouble in reproducing themselves.
–Let us get on with the quest. As the Angel of Biography, that is what I have to record—indeed have recorded, for what we are watching is a record of the past. But as I have said, I can’t remember everything about all these people. Did he follow the quest through to the discovery, I wonder? Not many of them do.
–No, but every quester has hints and intimations that are very precious and bring sudden light into his life. And of course you’ve noticed that forecast, that strong hint, that we see as we watch Francis, ludicrously garbed as a woman.
–I am being very dense, I fear, said the Angel.
–Loofs behind the boy in his pathetic rags at the picture on the wall—the picture Aunt hung there in the goodness of her modestly wincing, power-greedy heart. Did she know it was a prophecy? Not consciously, but it was a prophecy and also the essence of life as everybody lived it at St. Kilda. The picture of Love Locked Out.
–Is Francis never to find love?
–You are unfolding the story, my dear friend. Please go on.
But it is impossible to go on without taking notice at this point of something with which Francis had nothing whatever to do, but which influenced his future decisively. This was the downfall—temporary only, as we shall see—of Gerald Vincent O’Gorman, who was, as the husband of Mary-Tess, his uncle.