Page:The art of kissing (IA artofkissing987wood).djvu/60

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THE ART OF KISSING

archists, including Louis Lingg, were arrested for the protest bomb, flung upon unarmed strikers in answer to the wild charge of the police. Lingg had his sweetheart bring the materials for a final bomb to him in the jail. Some of these materials she smuggled in orange skins, disguised as fruits; some she may have given him in the midst of a kiss. The stern young anarchist—he was only twenty at the time—made four bombs, for the four leaders to use in taking their own lives, to show to the public at large that, if they held the lives of others cheap in their fanatic devotion to an ideal, they held their own lives more cheaply yet. Three of these bombs were discovered: somehow Lingg retained the fourth. He was not willing to injure his jailer, and sent the man, by a pretended excuse, to the far corner of the jail corridor. Then, taking the bomb in his own mouth, he closed his teeth upon it, and so died.

The Kiss and Love.—The tactile, touch, or lip kiss originated from the mother's kiss of her infant, an outgrowth of maternal licking of her young. It grew slowly to express affection between the sexes. A second meaning grew up—to express subjection: somehow affection was alchemized into subjection. Usually one of the parties to a love relationship takes an attitude of subjection to the other—an attitude theoretically far from ideal, but humanly comfortable. For an expression of utter humility, to man or the god man imagined, appropriate gestures were few: bowing the head to the ground or kissing with head