But whatever the future of monogamous marriage, there will never be any
decay of that agreeable adventurousness which now lies at the bottom of
all transactions between the sexes. Women may emancipate themselves,
they may borrow the whole bag of masculine tricks, and they may cure
themselves of their present desire for the vegetable security of
marriage, but they will never cease to be women, and so long as they
are women they will remain provocative to men. Their chief charm today
lies precisely in the fact that they are dangerous, that they threaten
masculine liberty and autonomy, that their sharp minds present a menace
vastly greater than that of acts of God and the public enemy—and they
will be dangerous for ever. Men fear them, and are fascinated by them.
They know how to show their teeth charmingly; the more enlightened of
them have perfected a superb technique of fascination. It was Nietzsche
who called them the recreation of the warrior—not of the poltroon,
remember, but of the warrior. A profound saying. They have an infinite
capacity for rewarding masculine industry and enterprise with small and
irresistible flatteries; their acute understanding combines with their
capacity for evoking ideas of beauty to make them incomparable
companions when the serious business of the day is done, and the time
has come to expand comfortably in the interstellar ether.
Every man, I daresay, has his own notion of what constitutes perfect
peace and contentment, but all of those notions, despite the
fundamental conflict of the sexes, revolve around women. As for me—and
I hope I may be pardoned, at this late stage in my inquiry, for
intruding my own personality—I reject the two commonest of them:
passion, at least in its more adventurous and melodramatic aspects, is
too exciting and alarming for so indolent a man, and I am too egoistic
to have much desire to be mothered. What, then, remains for me? Let me
try to describe it to you.
It is the close of a busy and vexatious day—say half past five or six
o’clock of a winter afternoon. I have had a cocktail or two, and am
stretched out on a divan in front of a fire, smoking. At the edge of
the divan, close enough for me to reach her with my hand, sits a woman
not too young, but still good-looking and well-dressed—above all, a
woman with a soft, low-pitched, agreeable voice. As I snooze she
talks—of anything, everything, all the things that women talk of:
books, music, the play, men, other women. No politics. No business. No
religion. No metaphysics. Nothing challenging and vexatious—but
remember, she is intelligent; what she says is clearly expressed, and
often picturesquely. I observe the fine sheen of her hair, the pretty
cut of her frock, the glint of her white teeth, the arch of her
eye-brow, the graceful curve of her arm. I listen to the exquisite
murmur of her voice. Gradually I fall asleep—but only for an instant.
At once, observing it, she raises her voice ever so little, and I am
awake. Then to sleep again—slowly and charmingly down that slippery
hill of dreams. And then awake again, and then asleep again, and so on.
I ask you seriously: could anything be more unutterably beautiful? The
sensation of falling asleep is to me the most exquisite in the world. I
delight in it so much that I even look forward to death itself with a
sneaking wonder and desire. Well, here is sleep poetized and made
doubly sweet. Here is sleep set to the finest music in the world. I
match this situation against any that you ran think of. It is not only
enchanting; it is also, in a very true sense, ennobling. In the end,
when the girl grows prettily miffed and throws me out, I return to my
sorrows somehow purged and glorified. I am a better man in my own
sight. I have grazed upon the fields of asphodel. I have been
genuinely, completely and unregrettably happy.