Married | Page 6

in the face.
When the swing stopped, the girl slipped off the seat and ran away as if
she were answering a call. Theodore was left alone. He felt the blood
surging in his veins. It seemed to him that his strength was redoubled.
But he could not grasp what had happened. He vaguely conceived
himself as an electrophor whose positive electricity, in discharging, had
combined with the negative. It had happened during a quite ordinary, to
all appearances chaste, contact with a young woman. He had never felt
the same emotion in wrestling, for instance, with his school-fellows in
the play-ground. He had come into contact with the opposite polarity of
the female sex and now he knew what it meant to be a man. For he was
a man, not a precocious boy, kicking over the traces; he was a strong,
hardy, healthy youth.
As he strolled along, up and down the garden paths, new thoughts
formed in his brain. Life looked at him with graver eyes, he felt

conscious of a sense of duty. But he was only fifteen years old. He was
not yet confirmed and many years would have to elapse before he
would be considered an independent member of the community, before
he would be able to earn a living for himself, let alone maintain a wife
and family. He took life seriously, the thought of light adventures never
occurred to him. Women were to him something sacred, his opposite
pole, the supplement and completion of himself. He was mature now,
bodily and mentally, fit to enter the arena of life and fight his way.
What prevented him from doing so? His education, which had taught
him nothing useful; his social position, which stood between him and a
trade he might have learned. The Church, which had not yet received
his vow of loyalty to her priests; the State, which was still waiting for
his oath of allegiance to Bernadotte and Nassau; the School, which had
not yet trained him sufficiently to consider him ripe for the University;
the secret alliance of the upper against the lower classes. A whole
mountain of follies lay on him and his young strength. Now that he
knew himself to be a man, the whole system of education seemed to
him an institution for the mutilation of body and soul. They must both
be mutilated before he could be allowed to enter the harem of the world,
where manhood is considered a danger; he could find no other excuse
for it. And thus he sank back into his former state of immaturity. He
compared himself to a celery plant, tied up and put under a flower-pot
so as to make it as white and soft as possible, unable to put forth green
leaves in the sunshine, flower, and bear seed.
Wrapped in these thoughts he remained in the garden until the clock on
the nearest church tower struck ten. Then he turned towards the house,
for it was bed-time. But the front door was locked. The house-maid, a
petticoat thrown over her nightgown, let him in. A glimpse of her bare
shoulders roused him from his sentimental reveries; he tried to put his
arm round her and kiss her, for at the moment he was conscious of
nothing but her sex. But the maid had already disappeared, shutting the
door with a bang. Overwhelmed with shame he opened his window,
cooled his head in a basin of cold water and lighted his lamp.
When he had got into bed, he took up a volume of Arndt's Spiritual
Voices of the Morning, a book which had belonged to his mother; he

read a chapter of it every evening to be on the safe side, for in the
morning his time was short. The book reminded him of the promise of
chastity given to his mother on her death-bed, and he felt a twinge of
conscience. A fly which had singed its wings on his lamp, and was now
buzzing round the little table by his bedside, turned his thoughts into
another channel; he closed the book and lit a cigarette. He heard his
father take off his boots in the room below, knock out his pipe against
the stove, pour out a glass of water and get ready to go to bed. He
thought how lonely he must be since he had become a widower. In days
gone by he had often heard the subdued voices of his parents through
the thin partition, in intimate conversation on matters on which they
always agreed; but now no voice was audible, nothing but the dead
sounds which a man makes in waiting upon himself, sounds which one
must put side by side, like the figures in a rebus, before one can
understand their