Confessions of Aleister Crowley

492 She was making quite a lot of money by now so he pestered her day and night, whenever he could spare a moment from the German prostitute with whom he was now living, having been thrown out by my eccentric friend. He had queer ideas, had the eminent mongrel. The cost of a double room being slightly less than that of two single, he effected a prudent economy by putting this girl in the same bed with his wife when he was out of town. During this time I was often away in Washington, thus missing a good deal of the fun. In June, I came back proposing to spend the summer in a cottage by Lake Pasquaney. Ratan Devi was one of those women whose chief pleasure is to show her power over men. She tried it on me, but a bath brick would have done quite as well. Convinced after many desperate efforts that I would not run after her or even walk her way, she began to understand true love, to recognize me as her master and quit playing the {774} fool. She did not divine that my Gibraltar firmness was calculated policy. I really loved her and knew that the only hope of making her love me was to kill the vanity which prevented her from being true to herself, and giving her whole heart. Before I left for New Hampshire, we had a farewell meeting. She was now too far advanced in gestation to appear in public, so her husband had persuaded her to go to England for the confinement, and also to make various necessary arrangements with regard to the future. He had now cunningly pretended to give way about the divorce, admitting my right to my child and its mother. His real motive was very different. She was a particularly bad sailor. During a previous pregnancy, she had been obliged to break the journey to save her life. She was in fact on the brink of death when they carried her ashore and she lay for weeks so ill that a breath of wind might have blown her away. It was, at least, not a bad bet that the Atlantic voyage would end in the same or even more fortunate way. I still refused to put pressure upon her. I said, "Here's my address. You're welcome whenever you like to come, and I love you and will serve you with every ounce of my strength." I went off. In a few days she joined me. The peace and beauty and solitude renewed the rapture of our love. I had given my word to do nothing to hold her and after a few days she decided to go to England; her children needed her. It was her peculiar perversity to be at one time the artist absolute; at another the mother and no more, and the trouble was that whenever common sense wanted her to be the one, she invariably assumed the personality of the other. So now, just because I represented art, music and love, her troll tugged at her to be maternal. Off she went. The Eurasian's calculations were not far wrong. The voyage caused a miscarriage and she lay between life and death for over six weeks. Needless to say, the moment the mischief was done, she repented bitterly. When she returned to America, I was in New Orleans. She implored me to come back to her. She wrote once, and often twice, every day, each averaging a dozen pages. There were also telegrams. I replied with immovable firmness. "You insisted on going away, with the result of killing our baby. I love you and I'll take you back, but on this condition; that you make a clean break with the past." Her unhappy temperament kept her at war with herself. She wanted to have her cake and eat it as well. She wouldn't burn her bridges. I maintained firm correctness and it all came to nothing. My heart is still not wholly healed, but I relieved myself of part of my pain by using the whole story, exact in every detail, as the background of my Simon Iff yarn "Not good enough" (The International, January 1918). I made one change. Koomaraswamy, Haranzada Swami; Haranzada being the Hindustani word for {775} "bastard". The publication of this tale came as a slight shock to the self-complacency of the scoundrel.