"Quite.A study of intolerable tensions, the tensions that make young people write unclean words in secret places.""Yes, we certainly ventilate and sanitate in those matters nowadays.Where nothing is concealed, nothing can explode.""On the whole I came up to adolescence pretty straight and clean," said Sir Richmond."What stands out in my memory now is this idea, of a sort of woman goddess who was very lovely and kind and powerful and wonderful.That ruled my secret imaginations as a boy, but it was very much in my mind as Igrew up."
"The mother complex," said Dr.Martineau as a passing botanist might recognize and name a flower.
Sir Richmond stared at him for a moment.
"It had not the slightest connexion with my mother or any mother or any particular woman at all.Far better to call it the goddess complex.""The connexion is not perhaps immediately visible," said the doctor.
"There was no connexion," said Sir Richmond."The women of my adolescent dreams were stripped and strong and lovely.They were great creatures.They came, it was clearly traceable, from pictures sculpture--and from a definite response in myself to their beauty.My mother had nothing whatever to do with that.The women and girls about me were fussy bunches of clothes that I am sure I never even linked with that dream world of love and worship.""Were you co-educated?"
"No.But I had a couple of sisters, one older, one younger than myself, and there were plenty of girls in my circle.Ithought some of them pretty--but that was a different affair.
I know that I didn't connect them with the idea of the loved and worshipped goddesses at all, because I remember when Ifirst saw the goddess in a real human being and how amazed Iwas at the discovery....I was a boy of twelve or thirteen.My people took me one summer to Dymchurch in Romney Marsh; in those days before the automobile had made the Marsh accessible to the Hythe and Folkestone crowds, it was a little old forgotten silent wind-bitten village crouching under the lee of the great sea wall.At low water there were miles of sand as smooth and shining as the skin of a savage brown woman.Shining and with a texture--the very same.And one day as I was mucking about by myself on the beach, boy fashion,--there were some ribs of a wrecked boat buried in the sand near a groin and I was busy with them--a girl ran out from a tent high up on the beach and across the sands to the water.She was dressed in a tight bathing dress and not in the clumsy skirts and frills that it was the custom to inflict on women in those days.Her hair was tied up in a blue handkerchief.She ran swiftly and gracefully, intent upon the white line of foam ahead.I can still remember how the sunlight touched her round neck and cheek as she went past me.She was the loveliest, most shapely thing I have ever seen--to this day.She lifted up her arms and thrust through the dazzling white and green breakers and plunged into the water and swam; she swam straight out for a long way as it seemed to me, and presently came in and passed me again on her way back to her tent, light and swift and sure.The very prints of her feet on the sand were beautiful.Suddenly I realized that there could be living people in the world as lovely as any goddess....She wasn't in the least out of breath.
"That was my first human love.And I love that girl still.Idoubt sometimes whether I have ever loved anyone else.I kept the thing very secret.I wonder now why I have kept the thing so secret.Until now I have never told a soul about it.Iresorted to all sorts of tortuous devices and excuses to get a chance of seeing her again without betraying what it was Iwas after."
Dr.Martineau retained a simple fondness for a story.
"And did you meet her again?"
"Never.Of course I may have seen her as a dressed-up person and not recognized her.A day or so later I was stabbed to the heart by the discovery that the tent she came out of had been taken away.""She had gone?"
"For ever."
Sir Richmond smiled brightly at the doctor's disappointment.
Section 3
"I was never wholehearted and simple about sexual things,"Sir Richmond resumed presently."Never.I do not think any man is.We are too much plastered-up things, too much the creatures of a tortuous and complicated evolution."Dr.Martineau, under his green umbrella, nodded his conceded agreement.
"This--what shall I call it?--this Dream of Women, grew up in my mind as I grew up--as something independent of and much more important than the reality of Women.It came only very slowly into relation with that.That girl on the Dymchurch beach was one of the first links, but she ceased very speedily to be real--she joined the women of dreamland at last altogether.She became a sort of legendary incarnation.
I thought of these dream women not only as something beautiful but as something exceedingly kind and helpful.The girls and women I met belonged to a different creation...."Sir Richmond stopped abruptly and rowed a few long strokes.
Dr.Martineau sought information.
"I suppose," he said, "there was a sensuous element in these dreamings?""Certainly.A very strong one.It didn't dominate but it was a very powerful undertow.""Was there any tendency in all this imaginative stuff to concentrate? To group itself about a single figure, the sort of thing that Victorians would have called an ideal?""Not a bit of it," said Sir Richmond with conviction."There was always a tremendous lot of variety in my mind.In fact the thing I liked least in the real world was the way it was obsessed by the idea of pairing off with one particular set and final person.I liked to dream of a blonde goddess in her own Venusberg one day, and the next I would be off over the mountains with an armed Brunhild.""You had little thought of children?"
"As a young man?"
"Yes."
