Section 5
I came up over the little ridge and discovered the bungalow villageI had been seeking, nestling in a crescent lap of dunes. A doorslammed, the two runners had vanished, and I halted staring.
There was a group of three bungalows nearer to me than the others.Into one of these three they had gone, and I was too late to seewhich. All had doors and windows carelessly open, and none showeda light.
This place, upon which I had at last happened, was a fruit of thereaction of artistic-minded and carelessly living people againstthe costly and uncomfortable social stiffness of the more formalseaside resorts of that time. It was, you must understand, the customof the steam-railway companies to sell their carriages after theyhad been obsolete for a sufficient length of years, and some geniushad hit upon the possibility of turning these into little habitablecabins for the summer holiday. The thing had become a fashion witha certain Bohemian-spirited class; they added cabin to cabin, andthese little improvised homes, gaily painted and with broad verandasand supplementary leantos added to their accommodation, made thebrightest contrast conceivable to the dull rigidities of the decorousresorts. Of course there were many discomforts in such camping thathad to be faced cheerfully, and so this broad sandy beach was sacredto high spirits and the young. Art muslin and banjoes, Chineselanterns and frying, are leading "notes," I find, in the impressionof those who once knew such places well. But so far as I wasconcerned this odd settlement of pleasure-squatters was a mysteryas well as a surprise, enhanced rather than mitigated by animaginative suggestion or so I had received from the wooden-leggedman at Shaphambury. I saw the thing as no gathering of lighthearts and gay idleness, but grimly--after the manner of poor menpoisoned by the suppression of all their cravings after joy. To thepoor man, to the grimy workers, beauty and cleanness were absolutelydenied; out of a life of greasy dirt, of muddied desires, theywatched their happier fellows with a bitter envy and foul, tormentingsuspicions. Fancy a world in which the common people held loveto be a sort of beastliness, own sister to being drunk! . . .
There was in the old time always something cruel at the bottom ofthis business of sexual love. At least that is the impression Ihave brought with me across the gulf of the great Change. To succeedin love seemed such triumph as no other success could give,but to fail was as if one was tainted. . . .
I felt no sense of singularity that this thread of savagery shouldrun through these emotions of mine and become now the whole strandof these emotions. I believed, and I think I was right in believing,that the love of all true lovers was a sort of defiance then, thatthey closed a system in each other's arms and mocked the worldwithout. You loved against the world, and these two loved AT me.They had their business with one another, under the threat of awatchful fierceness. A sword, a sharp sword, the keenest edge inlife, lay among their roses.
Whatever may be true of this for others, for me and my imagination,at any rate, it was altogether true. I was never for dalliance, I wasnever a jesting lover. I wanted fiercely; I made love impatiently.Perhaps I had written irrelevant love-letters for that very reason;because with this stark theme I could not play. . .
The thought of Nettie's shining form, of her shrinking bold abandonto her easy conqueror, gave me now a body of rage that was nearlytoo strong for my heart and nerves and the tense powers of my merelyphysical being. I came down among the pale sand-heaps slowly towardthat queer village of careless sensuality, and now within my punybody I was coldly sharpset for pain and death, a darkly gleaminghate, a sword of evil, drawn.