He was one who would have passed by the Sphinx without seeing it. He
did not believe in the necessity for sphinxes, or in their reality, for
that matter--they did not exist for him. Indeed, he was one to whom
the Sphinx would not have been visible. He might have eyed it and
noted a certain bulk of grotesque stone, but nothing more significant.
He was sex-blind, and, so, peculiarly limited by the fact that he could
not appreciate women. If he had been pressed for a theory or
metaphysic of womanhood he would have been unable to formulate any.
Their presence he admitted, perforce: their utility was quite apparent
to him on the surface, but, subterraneously, he doubted both their
existence and their utility. He might have said perplexedly--Why
cannot they do whatever they have to do without being always in the
way? He might have said--Hang it, they are everywhere and what good
are they doing? They bothered him, they destroyed his ease when he was
near them, and they spoke a language which he did not understand and
did not want to understand. But as his limitations did not press on
him neither did they trouble him. He was not sexually deficient, and
he did not dislike women; he simply ignored them, and was only really
at home with men. All the crudities which we enumerate as masculine
delighted him--simple things, for, in the gender of abstract ideas,
vice is feminine, brutality is masculine, the female being older,
vastly older than the male, much more competent in every way, stronger,
even in her physique, than he, and, having little baggage of mental or
ethical preoccupations to delay her progress, she is still the guardian
of evolution, requiring little more from man than to be stroked and
petted for a while.
He could be brutal at times. He liked to get drunk at seasonable
periods. He would cheerfully break a head or a window, and would
bandage the one damage or pay for the other with equal skill and
pleasure. He liked to tramp rugged miles swinging his arms and
whistling as he went, and he could sit for hours by the side of a ditch
thinking thoughts without words--an easy and a pleasant way of
thinking, and one which may lead to something in the long run.
Even his mother was an abstraction to him. He was kind to her so far
as doing things went, but he looked over her, or round her, and marched
away and forgot her.
Sex-blindness carries with it many other darknesses. We do not know
what masculine thing is projected by the feminine consciousness, and
civilisation, even life itself, must stand at a halt until that has
been discovered or created, but art is the female projected by the
male: science is the male projected by the male--as yet a poor thing,
and to remain so until it has become art; that is, has become
fertilised and so more psychological than mechanical. The small part
of science which came to his notice (inventions, machinery, etc.) was
easily and delightedly comprehended by him. He could do intricate
things with a knife and a piece of string, or a hammer and a saw: but a
picture, a poem, a statue, a piece of music--these left him as
uninterested as they found him: more so, in truth, for they left him
bored and dejected.
His mother came to dislike him, and there were many causes and many
justifications for her dislike. She was an orderly, busy, competent
woman, the counterpart of endless millions of her sex, who liked to
understand what she saw or felt, and who had no happiness in reading
riddles. To her he was at times an enigma, and at times again a
simpleton. In both aspects he displeased and embarrassed her. One has
one's sense of property, and in him she could not put her finger on
anything that was hers. We demand continuity, logic in other words,
but between her son and herself there was a gulf fixed, spanned by no
bridge whatever; there was complete isolation; no boat plied between
them at all. All the kindly human things which she loved were
unintelligible to him, and his coarse pleasures or blunt evasions
distressed and bewildered her. When she spoke to him he gaped or
yawned; and yet she did not speak on weighty matters, just the
necessary small-change of existence--somebody's cold, somebody's dress,
somebody's marriage or death. When she addressed him on sterner
subjects, the ground, the weather, the crops, he looked at her as if
she were a baby, he listened with stubborn resentment, and strode away
a confessed boor. There was no contact anywhere between them, and he
was a slow exasperation to her.--What can we do with that which is ours
and not ours? either we own a thing or we do not, and, whichever way it
goes, there is some end to it; but certain enigmas are illegitimate and
are so hounded from decent cogitation.
She could do nothing but dismiss him, and she could not even do that,
for there he was at the required periods, always primed with the wrong
reply to any question, the wrong aspiration, the wrong conjecture; a
perpetual trampler on mental corns, a person for whom one could do
nothing but apologise.
They lived on a small farm and almost the entire work of the place was
done by him. His younger brother assisted, but that assistance could
have easily been done without. If the cattle were sick he cured them
almost by instinct. If the horse was lame or wanted a new shoe he knew
precisely what to do in both events. When the time came for ploughing
he gripped the handles and drove a furrow which was as straight and as
economical as any furrow in the world. He could dig all day long and
be happy; he gathered in the harvest as another would gather in a
bride; and, in the intervals between these occupations, he fled to the
nearest publichouse and wallowed among his kind.
He did not fly away to drink; he fled to be among men.--Then he
awakened. His tongue worked with the best of them, and adequately too.
He could speak weightily on many things--boxing, wrestling, hunting,
fishing, the seasons, the weather, and the chances of this and the
other man's crops. He had deep knowledge about brands of tobacco and
the peculiar virtues of many different liquors. He knew birds and
beetles and worms; how a weazel would behave in extraordinary
circumstances; how to train every breed of horse and dog. He recited
goats from the cradle to the grave, could tell the name of any tree
from its leaf; knew how a bull could be coerced, a cow cut up, and what
plasters were good for a broken head. Sometimes, and often enough, the
talk would chance on women, and then he laughed as heartily as any one
else, but he was always relieved when the conversation trailed to more
interesting things.
His mother died and left the farm to the younger instead of the elder
son; an unusual thing to do, but she did detest him. She knew her
younger son very well. He was foreign to her in nothing. His temper
ran parallel with her own, his tastes were hers, his ideas had been
largely derived from her, she could track them at any time and make or
demolish him. He would go to a dance or a picnic and be as exhilarated
as she was, and would discuss the matter afterwards. He could speak
with some cogency on the shape of this and that female person, the hat
of such an one, the disagreeableness of tea at this house and the
goodness of it at the other. He could even listen to one speaking
without going to sleep at the fourth word. In all he was a decent,
quiet lad who would become a father the exact replica of his own, and
whose daughters would resemble his mother as closely as two peas
resemble their green ancestors.--So she left him the farm.
Of course, there was no attempt to turn the elder brother out. Indeed,
for some years the two men worked quietly together and prospered and
were contented; then, as was inevitable, the younger brother got
married, and the elder had to look out for a new place to live in, and
to work in--things had become difficult.
It is very easy to say that in such and such circumstances a man should
do this and that well-pondered thing, but the courts of logic have as
yet the most circumscribed jurisdiction. Just as statistics can prove
anything and be quite wrong, so reason can sit in its padded chair
issuing pronouncements which are seldom within measurable distance of
any reality. Everything is true only in relation to its centre of
thought. Some people think with their heads--their subsequent actions
are as logical and unpleasant as are those of the other sort who think
only with their blood, and this latter has its irrefutable logic also.
He thought in this subterranean fashion, and if he had thought in the
other the issue would not have been any different.
Still, it was not an easy problem for him, or for any person lacking
initiative--a sexual characteristic. He might have emigrated, but his
roots were deeply struck in his own place, so the idea never occurred
to him; furthermore, our thoughts are often no deeper than our pockets,
and one wants money to move anywhere. For any other life than that of
farming he had no training and small desire. He had no money and he
was a farmer's son. Without money he could not get a farm; being a
farmer's son he could not sink to the degradation of a day labourer;
logically he could sink, actually he could not without endangering his
own centres and verities--so he also got married.
He married a farm of about ten acres, and the sun began to shine on him
once more; but only for a few days. Suddenly the sun went away from
the heavens; the moon disappeared from the silent night; the silent
night itself fled afar, leaving in its stead a noisy, dirty blackness
through which one slept or yawned as one could. There was the farm, of
course, one could go there and work; but the freshness went out of the
very ground; the crops lost their sweetness and candour; the horses and
cows disowned him; the goats ceased to be his friends--It was all up
with him. He did not whistle any longer. He did not swing his
shoulders as he walked, and, although he continued to smoke, he did not
look for a particular green bank whereon he could sit quietly flooded
with those slow thoughts that had no words.
For he discovered that he had not married a farm at all. He had
married a woman--a thin-jawed, elderly slattern, whose sole beauty was
her farm. How her jaws worked! The processions and congregations of
words that fell and dribbled and slid out of them! Those jaws were
never quiet, and in spite of all he did not say anything. There was
not anything to say, but much to do from which he shivered away in
terror. He looked at her sometimes through the muscles of his arms,
through his big, strong hands, through fogs and fumes and singular,
quiet tumults that raged within him. She lessoned him on the things he
knew so well, and she was always wrong. She lectured him on those
things which she did know, but the unending disquisition, the perpetual
repetition, the foolish, empty emphasis, the dragging weightiness of
her tongue made him repudiate her knowledge and hate it as much as he
did her.
Sometimes, looking at her, he would rub his eyes and yawn with fatigue
and wonder--there she was! A something enwrapped about with
petticoats. Veritably alive. Active as an insect! Palpable to the
touch! And what was she doing to him? Why did she do it? Why didn't
she go away? Why didn't she die? What sense was there in the making
of such a creature that clothed itself like a bolster, without any
freedom or entertainment or shapeliness?
Her eyes were fixed on him and they always seemed to be angry; and her
tongue was uttering rubbish about horses, rubbish about cows, rubbish
about hay and oats. Nor was this the sum of his weariness. It was not
alone that he was married; he was multitudinously, egregiously married.
He had married a whole family, and what a family--
Her mother lived with her, her eldest sister lived with her, her
youngest sister lived with her--and these were all swathed about with
petticoats and shawls. They had no movement. Their feet were like
those of no creature he had ever observed. One could hear the
flip-flap of their slippers all over the place, and at all hours. They
were down-at-heel, draggle-tailed, and futile. There was no
workmanship about them. They were as unfinished, as unsightly as a
puddle on a road. They insulted his eyesight, his hearing, and his
energy. They had lank hair that slapped about them like wet seaweed,
and they were all talking, talking, talking.
The mother was of an incredible age. She was senile with age. Her
cracked cackle never ceased for an instant. She talked to the dog and
the cat; she talked to the walls of the room; she spoke out through the
window to the weather; she shut her eyes in a corner and harangued the
circumambient darkness. The eldest sister was as silent as a deep
ditch and as ugly. She slid here and there with her head on one side
like an inquisitive hen watching one curiously, and was always doing
nothing with an air of futile employment. The youngest was a
semi-lunatic who prattled and prattled without ceasing, and was always
catching one's sleeve, and laughing at one's face.--And everywhere
those flopping, wriggling petticoats were appearing and disappearing.
One saw slack hair whisking by the corner of one's eye. Mysteriously,
urgently, they were coming and going and coming again, and never, never
being silent.
More and more he went running to the public-house. But it was no
longer to be among men, it was to get drunk. One might imagine him
sitting there thinking those slow thoughts without words. One might
predict that the day would come when he would realise very suddenly,
very clearly all that he had been thinking about, and, when this
urgent, terrible thought had been translated into its own terms of
action, he would be quietly hanged by the neck until he was as dead as
he had been before he was alive.