Love and the Soul Maker

An excerpt from the beginning:

LOVE AND THE SOUL MAKER

IF somebody would only write a book about it!" said Valda McNath, "a believable book!"

We were sitting on the steps in front of Valda's bungalow in the clear obscure of twilight, watching the flat welter of the water far out on the Sound, and a blundering moth came and stirred the sweet white spikes of the phlox. Valda had been crying.

"The trouble with books about it," she said, "is that they are too scientific, or tales made out to fit a special case. It wants just a human book; true and human." Valda sighed. She hadn't found anything in the books to fit the special case she had made of her life, and the chief reason why I happened to be sitting there at that moment was to see her through the most unbearable of its bitternesses.

Valda is one of those women with an insatiable sort of appetite for goodness and no very clear notion of what it consists in; few men understand what that hunger is in women . . . like the opium-eater's for his drug. In her youth she had accepted the criterion of her church and made her marriage on a basis of non-smoking, church-going habits as a surface index of godliness, with a young man who turned out to have fallen into these commendable behaviours chiefly for the want of spring and vitality to become anything else. After a dozen years or so Valda had left him somewhere at the back of beyond, simply because she couldn't stand him, and come up to the city sick with the hunger of what still shaped to her mind as righteousness. And she was so right, too; so sincere in her efforts to square her life with what might conceivably be the purpose of the Powers, that she couldn't just accept the leading of her appetites. She had to take her satisfactions cribbed and crammed into the frame of what for the time being, bore the name of goodness on its face. She read the publications of the Fabian Society and fell in love with a Social Reactionist.

He was a man with a mission to encourage the higher civic obligations, and wholly without a sense of humour. He and Valda made between them a high ground which somehow carried them sheer over the heads of Valda's husband and some ties of the Reactionist's, on which they breathed for a time, at least Valda breathed, rarefied, heavenly airs. But she had no sooner established herself there with all her baggage of passions and affections, and poor Valda carried an excess of that kind of baggage, when the Reactionist discovered that he had made a mistake in the quality of his attachment. What had begun as a self-justifying passion had died down to friendliness and, of course, a really profound respect. The Reactionist told me himself how profound it was. It appeared he would have done anything for Valda except refrain from telling her—a little the most dastardly admission a man can make to a woman—that he had pillaged her most sacred treasury in the interest of a cheap, transient indulgence. If he had involved Valda's capital of dollars to that extent, he wouldn't have thought of anything but holding on to the situation until she could have got out of it with credit; in the event of a total loss he would probably have made it up to her without saying anything. But it never occurred to him that the same obligation held him to an investment of passions and affections. He wasn't a bad man, he was just—mannish. What I suspected was that Valda's disposition to sink the personal issue in the interest of the passion that had sprung up between them, charged, electric, wonderful, had rather damped his male propensity for wanting to see himself always as the mover of the game.

He would have had their love spun out from his dextrous handling, a glimmering, gossamer entanglement; but it was a child to Valda that in the intervals when they were apart, nursed at her imagination, grew beyond recognition. And the Reactionist had retired before it into a wobbly little pinnacle of a situation that, since he no longer loved Valda, he couldn't do her the disrespect to pretend that he had any obligation beyond his own susceptibilities; and I had plucked Valda away in time, I hoped, to keep her from seeing the pit of cold egotism into which he immediately toppled.

That was how I came to be sitting there with Valda on an evening shot through with glimmers of the day's warm lights and odours, talking about sex behaviours.

"If there could only be a true book about it!" she insisted. "You could write it. But I suppose you'd be afraid of being misunderstood."

All at once I discovered, with the sense of finding myself in possession of a new aptitude—like that one in dreams in which you just tuck up your feet and go sailing through the air—that I wasn't afraid even of being misunderstood. I don't know if it is one of the things that belongs with having turned forty,...