"It was then, while living with my dear friend Kate, whom I sometimes
helped in the work she did out, that I met my first, my last, my truest
lover and friend, Terry. We met just at the right moment. I was filled
with rebellion at the powers that were crushing me, breaking me, without
realising why, or how, or what I might make of myself, when he came
along and taught me in his own quiet and gentle convincing way how cruel
and unjust is this scheme of things, and pointed out to me the cruelty
and tyranny of my parents and of all society. He showed me that marriage
such as I had contemplated was a bad form of prostitution, and he told
me why. Of course, I did not grasp all the things he told me at once,
but I listened and felt comforted; I began to feel that perhaps I might
amount to something, might have some life of my own, and that my
rebellion was perhaps justifiable. I began to understand why work was so
objectionable to me and why I rebelled against the authority of my
parents. My conceptions of freedom were crude, but I began to feel that
my revolt was just, and was based upon the terrible injustice whereby
the many must toil so that the few may live in splendour. I will not
weary you with all the details of the things I learned at that time from
Terry. To you it might seem very raw and crude, and you no doubt have
read some of the pamphlets written by socialists and anarchists dealing
with the labour question in all of its aspects. But to me these ideas
were quite new and they seemed grand and noble.
"And Terry revealed to me, too, almost at once, the great inspiring fact
that there is such a thing as beauty of thought--that there is poetry
and art and literature. This, too, of course, came little by little, but
do you wonder I loved a man who showed me a new world and who taught me
I was not bad? He put good books into my hands, and to my grateful joy I
found I liked these books better than the trash I had hitherto read.
"I felt so much better, after seeing so much of Terry, that I decided to
go to work again. Terry was against this. 'Try it,' he said, 'But I
assure you you don't need to work. I have tried doing without work for
many years, it is much easier than it seems.' Nevertheless I got a job
in a bicycle factory, but I only stayed a few days. It seemed like a
stale existence to me! And besides, I was in love and wanted to be with
Terry all the time. 'By God,' I said to him that night, 'you are right!
I'll never work again.'
"My friend Gertrude, the girl with whom I had intended to go in the last
reckless experiment, came to Terry's flat to see me, and get me to go
with her. I had thought, after I gave up work, that Terry might offer me
marriage, but he told me quite frankly that it was against his
principles to marry anybody. I was a little hurt and astonished at this,
but as I was very much in love and was already beginning to imbibe his
ideas, it did not matter so very much to me.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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