ou're wrong. Only love brings it back--and wine. If I drink a bottle
of Burgundy I feel myself restored at the middle--right here! I feel
the energy back again. And if I can fall in love--But it's becoming so
damned hard--"
"What, to fall in love?" asked Lilly.
"Yes."
"Then why not leave off trying! What do you want to poke yourself and
prod yourself into love, for?"
"Because I'm DEAD without it. I'm dead. I'm dying."
"Only because you force yourself. If you drop working yourself up--"
"I shall die. I only live when I can fall in love. Otherwise I'm dying
by inches. Why, man, you don't know what it was like. I used to get
the most grand feelings--like a great rush of force, or light--a great
rush--right here, as I've said, at the solar plexus. And it would come
any time--anywhere--no matter where I was. And then I was all right.
"All right for what?--for making love?"
"Yes, man, I was."
"And now you aren't?--Oh, well, leave love alone, as any twopenny doctor
would tell you."
"No, you're off it there. It's nothing technical. Technically I can make
love as much as you like. It's nothing a doctor has any say in. It's
what I feel inside me. I feel the life going. I know it's going. I never
get those inrushes now, unless I drink a jolly lot, or if I possibly
could fall in love. Technically, I'm potent all right--oh, yes!"
"You should leave yourself and your inrushes alone."
"But you can't. It's a sort of ache."
"Then you should stiffen your backbone. It's your backbone that matters.
You shouldn't want to abandon yourself. You shouldn't want to fling
yourself all loose into a woman's lap. You should stand by yourself and
learn to be by yourself. Why don't you be more like the Japanese you
talk about? Quiet, aloof little devils. They don't bother about being
loved. They keep themselves taut in their own selves--there, at the
bottom of the spine--the devil's own power they've got there."
Jim mused a bit.
"Think they have?" he laughed. It seemed comic to him.
"Sure! Look at them. Why can't you gather yourself there?"
"At the tail?"
"Yes. Hold yourself firm there."
Jim broke into a cackle of a laugh, and rose. The two went through
the dark woods back to the cottage. Jim staggered and stumbled like a
drunken man: or worse, like a man with locomotor ataxia: as if he had no
power in his lower limbs.
"Walk there--!" said Lilly, finding him the smoothest bit of the
dark path. But Jim stumb
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