Possessed | Page 8

to what is beautiful and spiritual, but their souls can be coarsened, their love can be killed. They can be driven--they have been driven for centuries (through fear of men) into lies and deceits and sensuality or pretence of sensuality.
The great tragedy of the world is sensuality, and it may exist between man and wife just as much as between a man and a paid woman. I don't know whether the Bible condemns sensuality between man and wife, but it ought to. I remember a story by Tolstoy in which the great moralist strips off our mask of hypocrisy and shows the hideous evil that results when a man and a woman degrade the holy sacrament of marriage. That is not love, but a perversion of love. How can God bless a union in which the wife is expected to conduct herself like a wanton or lose her husband? And she loses him anyway, for sensuality in a man inevitably leads him to promiscuousness. I know this to my sorrow!
Perhaps I am morbid. Perhaps I see life too clearly, know it too well. I do not want to be cynical or bitter. Oh, if only those old days of faith and trust could come back to me! When I think of what I was before I married Julian I see that I was almost like a child in my ignorance of the animal side of man's nature....
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Friday.
Dr. Owen thinks my trouble is shell shock, but he is mistaken. I have taken care of too many shell shock cases not to recognize the symptoms. Can I ever forget that darling soldier boy from Maryland who mistook me for his mother? "They're coming! They're coming!" he screamed one night; you could hear him all over the hospital. Then he jumped out of bed like a wild man--it took two orderlies and an engineer to get him back under the covers. I can see his poor wasted face when the little doctor came to give him a hypodermic. There he lay panting, groaning: "Oh those guns! Oh those guns! They break my ears!" Then he sprang up again, his eyes starting out of his head: "Look out, there! On the ammunition cart! Look out, Bill! Oh my God, they've got Bill--my pal! Blown him to hell! Oh, oh, oh!" and he put his head down and sobbed like a woman. That is shell shock. I have nothing like that. I know what I am doing.
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There was a storm today with great crashing waves, then everything grew calm under a golden sunset. I take this as a good omen. I feel happier already. The infinite peace of Nature is quieting my soul. I love the sea. I can almost say my prayers to the sea.
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Saturday.
The swimming master pays me extravagant compliments every morning when I splash about in the pool. I know my body is beautiful. Thank God, I have never imprisoned it in corsets.
I love the exercises I do in my room every morning. They bring back the play spirit of my childhood. When I get out of bed I slip into a loose garment, then I lie on the floor and stretch my spine along the carpet--it's wonderful how this exhilarates one. After that I take deep breaths at the open window, raising and lowering my arms--up as I draw my breath in, down as I throw it out. Then I lie down again and lift my legs straight up, the right, the left, then both together. I do this twenty times, resting between changes and taking deep breaths.
I sit cross-legged on the floor with my feet on a red and gold cushion and rotate my waist like an oriental dancer. I stand on my head and hands and curve my body to right and left in graceful flexings. I do this no matter how cold it is. I do not feel the cold, for I am all aglow with health and strength. Then, before my bath, I do dumb-bell exercises in front of the mirror.
I remember dining with my husband one night in a pink lace peignoir--we had been married about three years--and during the dessert, I excused myself and went into my bedroom and, posing before a cheval glass, I let the peignoir slip off my shoulders, and stood there like a piece of polished marble, rejoicing in my youth and loveliness!
How I hated my husband that night! He had taught me to drink. He had made me sensual. He had not yet assumed the coarse, red-faced brutish aspect that he wore later, but he had a coarse, red-faced brutish soul. Alas! his body was still fine enough to tempt me. And his mind was devilishly clever enough