Nature would have understood. Men
do these things in time of stress, and I was in great stress. I loved
a woman for the first time in my life--and I was a man nearly forty. I
wanted her with every quivering nerve in me. And she was gone. Lost in
the vast expanse of Europe with a parcel of performing cats. Gone out of
my life loving me as I loved her, all on account of this Hell-invented
principle. Ye gods! If the fierce, pure, deep, abiding love of a man for
a woman is not a reality, what in this world of shadows is anything but
vapour? I grasped it tight, hugged it to my bosom--and now she was gone,
and in my ears rang the derisive laughter of the enemy.
Where would it end? What would happen next? Nothing was too
outrageously, maniacally impossible. I walked up Sloane Street, a
street for which impeccable respectability, security of life and person,
comfortable, modern, twentieth-century, prosperous smugness has no
superior in all the smug cities of the earth, and I was prepared to
encounter with a smile of recognition anything that the whirling brains
of Bedlam had ever conceived.
Pages:
441
442
443
444
445
446
447
448
449
450
451
452
453
454
455
456
457
458
459
460
461
462
463
464
465