by Frank Harris
"Have you ever done it to yourself?" I asked. She nodded with bright dancing eyes. "Often, but I prefer you to touch me." For the first time I heard the truth from a girl and her courage charmed me. I could not help laying her on the sofa, and turning up her clothes: how lovely her limbs were, and how perfect her sex. She was really exquisite, and I took an almost insane pleasure in studying her beauties, and parting the lips of her sex kisses: in a few moments she was all trembling and gasping. She put her hand on my head to stop me.
When I lifted her up, she kissed me. "You dear," she said with a strange earnestness, "I want you always. You'll stay with us, won't you?" I kissed her for her sweetness.
When Jeanne came out of the cabinet, we all went into the dining-room, and afterwards Lisette went up to her room after kissing me, and I went to bed with Jeanne, who let me excite her for half an hour; and then mounting me milked me with such artistry that in two minutes she brought me to spasms of sensation, such as I had never experienced before with any other woman.
Jeanne was the most perfect mistress I had met up to that tune, and in sheer power of giving pleasure hardly to be surpassed by any of western race.
An unforgettable evening, one of the few evenings in my life when I reached both the intensest pang of pleasure with the even higher aesthetic delight of toying with beautiful limbs and awakening new desires in a lovely body and frank honest spirit.
Next day I left Jeanne a letter, thanking her and explaining as well as I could the desire in me to complete my work, and enclosing five thousand francs for her and Lisette, all I could spare. Then I took the train and was in my home in Kensington Gore before nightfall. I had won, but that was about all I could say, and I wasn't proud of myself. For months the temptation was in my flesh, more poignant than at first, till suddenly I heard from the comic actor of the Palais Royale, Monsieur Galipaux, I believe, that Jeanne had left Paris and gone to live in Algiers. "We all miss her," he added.
Since then I've neither seen nor heard of her or Lisette, but she taught me what astonishing quality as lovers some French women possess.
Often since when I've met mad, unreasoning jealousy, the memory of Jeanne has recurred to me. She taught me that a woman can love and delight in giving the most extreme pleasure, and yet be without jealousy of the aesthetic, lighter loves of man. The faithfulness of heart and soul and the spiritual companionship is everything to such a few, rare women.
CHAPTER XXIV
The foretaste of death from 1920 onward
I have decided at one jump to pass over more than a quarter of a century, leaving my maturity to be described later, and so come at once to old age, for there are things to be said that I wish to transcribe with the exact fidelity of a diary.
I had often heard of sixty-three as being "the grand climacteric" of a man's life, but what that really meant I had no idea till I had well passed that age.
Alphonse Daudet has written somewhere that every man of forty has tried at some time or another to have a woman and failed (fit faux coup). He even went so far as to assert that the man who denied this, was boasting, or rather lying.
I can honestly say that I had no such experience up to sixty. I had become long before, as I shall tell, a mediocre performer in the lists of love, but had never been shamed by failure. Like the proverbial Scot, I had no lack of vigor, but I too "was nae sae frequent" as I had been. Desire seemed nearly as keen in me at sixty as at forty, but more and more, as I shall relate, it ramped in me at sight of the nudities of girlhood.
I remember one summer afternoon in New York, it seems to me just when short dresses began to come in. A girl of fourteen or fifteen, as I came into the room, hastily sat up on a sofa, while pulling down her dress that had rucked up well above her knees. She was exquisitely made, beautiful limbs in black silk showing a margin of thighs shining like alabaster. I can still feel how my mouth parched at the sight of her bare thighs and how difficult it was for me to speak of ordinary things as if unconcerned. She was still half asleep and I hope I got complete control of my voice before she had smoothed down the bobbed unruly hair that set off her flaming cheeks and angry confused glances.
Time and again in the street I turned to fix in my memory some young girl's legs, trying to trace the subtle hesitating line of budding hips, seeing all the while the gracious triangle in front outlined by soft down of hair just revealing the full lips of the fica. Even at forty, earlier still, indeed, as I have related, I had come to love small breasts like half-ripe apples and was put off by every appearance of ripe maturity in a woman. But I found from time to time that this woman or that whom I cared for could give me as keen a thrill as any girl of them all, perhaps indeed keener and more prolonged, the pleasure depending chiefly upon mutual passion. But I'm speaking now of desire and not of the delights of passion, and desire became rampant in me only at the sight of slight half-fledged girlhood.
One experience of my manhood may be told here and will go far to make all the unconscious or semi-conscious lusts manifest. While living in Roehampton and editing the Saturday Review, I used to ride nearly every day in Richmond Park. One morning I noticed something move in the high bracken, and riding to the spot, found a keeper kneeling beside a young doe.
"What's the matter?" I asked.
"Matter enough," he replied, holding up the two hind legs of the little creature, showing me that they were both broken.
"Here she is, Sir," he went on. "As pretty as a picture, ain't she? Just over a year or so old, the poor little bitch, and she come in heat this autumn and she must go and pick out the biggest and oldest stag in the park and rub her little bottom against him-Didn't you, you poor little bitch! — and of course he mounted her, Sir; and her two little sticks of legs snapped under his weight and I found her lying broken without ever having had any pleasure; and now I've got to put her out of her pain, Sir; and she's so smooth and pretty! Ain't ye?" And he rubbed his hand caressingly along her silky fur.
"Must you kill her?" I asked, "I'd pay to have her legs set."
"No, no," he replied, "it would take too much time and trouble and there's many of them. Poor little bitch must die," and as he stroked her fine head gently, the doe looked up at him with her big eyes drowned in tears.
"Do you really lose many in that way?" I asked.
"Not so many, Sir," he replied. "If she had got over this season, she'd have been strong enough next year to have borne the biggest. It was just her bad luck," he said, "to have been born in the troop of the oldest and heaviest stag in the park."
"Has age anything to do with the attraction?" I asked.
"Surely it has," replied the keepers. "The old stag is always after these little ones, and young does are always willing. I guess it's animal nature," he added, as if regretfully.
"Animal nature," I said to myself as I rode away, "and human nature as well, I fear," with heavy apprehension or presentiment compressing my heart.
Now to my experience. In the early summer of 1920, having passed my sixtyfifth birthday, I was intent on finishing a book of Portraits before making a long deferred visit to Chicago. Before leaving New York, a girl called on me to know if I could employ her. I had no need of her, yet she was pretty, provocative, even, but for the first time in my life, I was not moved.
As her slight, graceful figure disappeared, suddenly I realized the wretchedness of my condition in an overwhelming, suffocating wave of bitterness. So this was the end; desire was there but not the driving power.
There were ways, I knew, of whipping desire to the standing point, but I didn't care for them. The end of my life had come. God, what a catastrophe! What irremediable, shameful defeat! Then for the first time I began to envy the lot of a woman; after all, she could give herself to the end, on her death bed if she wished, whereas a man went about looking like a man, feeling like a man, but powerless, impotent, disgraced in the very pride and purpose of his manhood.
And then the thought of my work struck me. No new stories had come to me
lately: the shaping spirit of imagination had left me with the virile power.
Better death than such barrenness of outlook, such a dreadful monotonous desert. Suddenly some lines came to me:
Dear as remembered kisses after Death,
Deep as true love and wild with all regret Oh, Death in life, the days that are no more!
As I sat there in the darkening office, tears poured from my eyes. So this is the end!
I crawled home: there, all by myself, I'd be able to plumb the disaster and learn its depth. For the first time in my life, I think, tears were rising in my heart and I was choking with the sense of man's mortality.
Tears, idle tears; I well know what they mean Tears from the depth of some divine despair.
Why "divine"; why not accursed?
Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes When looking at the happy autumn fields And thinking of the days that are no more Oh! Death in life! the days that are no more!
I would go home. And then a dreadful incident came back to me. One day, a long time before the World War, Meredith sent me a copy of Richard Feverel, all marked with corrections. In his letter he told me that he was setting himself to correct all his books for a final definitive edition. He wanted to know what I thought of the changes he had made. "I think you will find them all emendations," he wrote, "but be frank with me, please, for you are almost the only man living whose judgment on such a matter would have weight with me. Morley, too, is a judge, but not of creative work, and as you have always professed a certain liking for Richard Feverel, I send that book for your opinion."
Naturally I was touched and sat down to read, feeling sure that the alterations would be all emendations. But the first glances shocked me: he kept preferring the colorless word to the colorful. I went through the job with the utmost care. In some three hundred changes there were three of four I could approve; all the rest were changes for the worse. At once I got my car and drove down to Box Hill.
I came to the little house in the late afternoon and found Meredith had just got back from his donkey drive up the hill. He took me to his working room in the little chalet away from the house and we went at it hammer and tongs.
"You've put water in your ink," I cried, "and spoiled some of the finest pages in English. The courtship in the boat, even, you've worsened. For God's sake, stop and leave well, excellent-well, alone!"
At first he would not accept my opinion, so we went through the changes, one after the other. Hours flew by. "How do you explain the fact," he cried at last,
"that I'm still unconvinced, that in my heart you've not persuaded me?"
I had to speak out; there was nothing else for it.
"You are getting on," I said. "The creative power is leaving you, I fear. Please, please, forgive my brutal frankness!" I cried, for his face suddenly seemed to turn grey. "You know, you must know how I reverence you and every word of this scene; the greatest love idyll in all literature is dear to me. It's greater than Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Don't alter a word, Master, please, not a word! They are all sacred!"
I don't know whether I persuaded him or not; I'm afraid not. As we grow older we grow more obstinate, and he said something once later about finding pleasure in correcting his early work.
But the fact remained fixed in my soul: Meredith had passed the great climacteric; he must have been about sixty-six and he had lost the faculty even of impartial judgment.
Had I lost it too? It seemed probable.
God, the bitterness of this death in life!
The days that are no more!
From that time on, I began to mention my age, make people guess it, women as well as men, but saw no comprehension, even in thoughtful women. If you are not bald and have no grey hairs-the stigmata of senility — you are all right in their opinion, all right! Oh, God!
Yet I soon found that my judgment had not lost its vigor. My virility had decreased, was never prompt to the act as before, but it was still there, and so long as I treasured it, did not spend it, the faculty of judgment was but little changed. My worst fear was groundless: total abstinence was a necessity unless-but that's another story or two.
The want of joy, even the shuddering mistrust of the enfeebled faculties, might be borne without complaint. The general health, however, everyone tells me, begins to suffer: catch a cold and you have rheumatic pains that are slow to cure; eat something that disagrees with you and you are ill not for a few hours, as in maturity, but for days and weeks, don't take exercise enough, or take a little too much, and you suffer like a dog. Nature becomes an importunate creditor who gives you no respite.
I remember years ago visiting Pitt House that stood on the top of Hampstead Heath. I wanted to know why it was called Pitt House: I found that the owner, hearing that Lord Chatham was in bad health, had placed the house at the great statesman's disposal, and ever afterwards it has been known as Pitt House. There the man went who had picked Wolfe and won an empire for Britain after scores of Parliamentary triumphs; there he passed his last days in profound loneliness and black melancholy. Tormented by gout, he used to sit by himself all day long in a little room without even a book, his heavy head upon his hand. He couldn't bear even the presence of his wife, though they had been lovers for many years; he would not even see a servant, but had a hatch cut in the wall so that he could take the meal placed outside on a slide, and, when he chose, push out the platter again and close the hatch against everybody. Think of it: he who had been for long years master of the world, whose rare appearances in the House of Commons had been triumphs, reduced to this condition of despairing solitude! That hatch in the wall was as significant to me as his great speech in defence of the American colonists.
That old age is usually embittered by bad health is true, I think, to most men, but not to me, thank God! I am as well now at nearly seventy as I ever was, better, indeed. I have learned how to keep perfectly well and shut the door in the face of old age and most of its Infirmities. Let me, for the benefit of others, tell the story here briefly.
On my third visit to South Africa in the late nineties, I caught black water fever, was deserted on the Chobe river by all my coolies, who thought the spirits had come to take me because I wandered in my speech and talked nonsense loudly. How I won to the sea and civilization in four months of delirium and starvation I shall tell at length when I come to it in the ordinary course. It's enough here to say that on the ship going back to Europe, the inside of my stomach came away in strips and pieces, and when I reached London I found myself a martyr to chronic Indigestion. I spent two years going from this celebrated doctor to that all over Europe-in vain. One made me live on grapes and another on vegetables and a third on nothing but meat, but I suffered almost continuously and became as thin as a skeleton.
My own doctor in London brought about the first improvement: he told me to give up smoking. I had smoked to excess all my life, but I stopped at once, though I must admit that no habit was ever so difficult to break off. A year later, if I caught the scent of a really good cigar, the water would come into my mouth, though I soon discovered that by giving up smoking all my food tasted better and fine wines developed flavors I had never before imagined.
Had I to live my life again, nothing would induce me to smoke. It is, I think, the worst of all habits, an enemy at once to pleasure and to health. But the indigestion held and made life a misery. Following Schweninger's advice (he had been Bismarck's doctor), I tried fasting for a fortnight at a time and derived some benefit from it, but not much.
One day my little London doctor advised me to try the stomach pump. The word frightened me, but I found it was only a syphon and not a pump. One had to push an india rubber tube down one's throat, pour a quart or so of warm water into the stomach through a funnel, depress the funnel below one's waist, and the water could come out, carrying with it all the impurities and undigested food. The first time I did it with the help of the doctor and the immediate relief cannot be described. From feeling extremely ill,
I was perfectly well in a moment. I had got rid of the peas that the doctor had recommended and I could not help grinning as they came out with the water, proving that his prescription had been bad.
The next day I tried washing out again and soon found that my stomach would not digest bread and butter. No doctor had ever advised me to leave off eating bread and butter, but now the reason was clear. The black water fever had weakened my spleen and so I could not digest starchy things or fats.
In a week the stomach pump gave me a scientific dietary: I loved coffee, but coffee, I found, was poison to me, for it arrested digestion. Of course I left it off and avoided bread and butter, potatoes, etc., and at once my digestion began to do its work properly. For fifteen or twenty years now I have washed out my stomach nine days out of ten before going to bed, for every now and then I take too much butter or coffee or eat some grease-sodden food in a restaurant; and I find it no more unpleasant to wash out my stomach than to wash my teeth, and it gives me perfect sleep and almost perfect health. But some sufferer may ask, "What do you do if you get indigestion after lunch or after breakfast?" I can only reply that if it is at all painful I wash out immediately; but if it is only slight, I take a dose of an alkaline powder of a Dr. Dubois, a French master who has bettered bicarbonate of soda and all such other lenitives with his alcalinophosphate, which gives instantaneous relief. But the remedy, the infallible and blessed remedy for all ills of digestion, is the stomach pump. Thanks to it, and to strictest moderation in eating and drinking, and total abstinence from tobacco, I enjoy almost perfect health! I am certainly better now than I have been since I was thirty. 1 content myself with a couple of cups of tea in the morning; I make a good meal about one o' the clock; and in the evening take nothing but a vegetable soup and on occasion a morsel of meat or sweet. Now I can drink a small cup of coffee, even with cream, after my lunch and feel no ill effects. Almost seventy, I can run a hundred yards within a couple of seconds as fast as I could at twenty, and I do my little sprint every day.