Connie always had a foreboding of the hopelessness of her affair with
Mick, as people called him. Yet other men seemed to mean nothing to
her. She was attached to Clifford. He wanted a good deal of her life
and she gave it to him. But she wanted a good deal from the life of
a man, and this Clifford did not give her; could not. There were
occasional spasms of Michaelis. But, as she knew by foreboding, that
would come to an end, Mick _couldn't_ keep anything up. It was part of
his very being that he must break off any connection, and be loose,
isolated, absolutely lone dog again. It was his major necessity, even
though he always said: She turned me down!
The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down
to pretty few in most personal experience. There's lots of good fish
in the sea ... maybe ... but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or
herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely
to find very few good fish in the sea.
Clifford was making strides into fame, and even money. People came
to see him. Connie nearly always had somebody at Wragby. But if they
weren't mackerel they were herring, with an occasional cat-fish, or
conger-eel.
There were a few regular men, constants; men who had been at Cambridge
with Clifford. There was Tommy Dukes, who had remained in the army, and
was a Brigadier-General. "The army leaves me time to think, and saves
me from having to face the battle of life," he said.
There was Charles May, an Irishman, who wrote scientifically about
stars. There was Hammond, another writer. All were about the same age
as Clifford; the young intellectuals of the day. They all believed in
the life of the mind. What you did apart from that was your private
affair, and didn't much matter. No one thinks of enquiring of another
person at what hour he retires to the privy. It isn't interesting to
anyone but the person concerned.
And so with most of the matters of ordinary life ... how you make your
money, or whether you love your wife, or if you have "affairs." All
these matters concern only the person concerned, and, like going to the
privy, have no interest for anyone else.
"The whole point about the sexual problem," said Hammond, who was a
tall thin fellow with a wife and two children, but much more closely
connected with a typewriter, "is that there is no point to it. Strictly
there is no problem. We don't want to follow a man into the W. C., so
why should we want to follow him into bed with a woman? And therein
lies the problem. If we took no more notice of the one thing than the
other, there'd be no problem. It's all utterly senseless and pointless;
a matter of misplaced curiosity."
"Quite, Hammond, quite! But if someone starts making love to Julia, you
begin to simmer; and if he goes on, you are soon at boiling point."...
Julia was Hammond's wife.
"Why, exactly! So I should be if he began to urinate in a corner of my
drawing-room. There's a place for all these things."
"You mean you wouldn't mind if he made love to Julia in some discreet
alcove?"
Charlie May was slightly satirical, for he had flirted a very little
with Julia, and Hammond had cut up very roughly.
"Of course I should mind. Sex is a private thing between me and Julia;
and of course I should mind anyone else trying to mix in."
"As a matter of fact," said the lean and freckled Tommy Dukes, who
looked much more Irish than May, who was pale and rather fat: "As a
matter of fact, Hammond, you have a strong property instinct, and a
strong will to self-assertion, and you want success. Since I've been in
the army definitely, I've got out of the way of the world, and now I
see how inordinately strong the craving for self-assertion and success
is in men. It is enormously over-developed. All our individuality has
run that way. And of course men like you think you'll get through
better with a woman's backing. That's why you're so jealous. That's
what sex is to you ... a vital little dynamo between you and Julia, to
bring success. If you began to be unsuccessful you'd begin to flirt,
like Charlie, who isn't successful. Married people like you and Julia
have labels on you, like travellers' trunks. Julia is labelled _Mrs.
Arnold. B. Hammond_ ... just like a trunk on the railway that belongs
to somebody. And you are labelled Arnold. B. Hammond, _C/o Mrs. Arnold.
B. Hammond_. Oh, you're quite right, you're quite right! The life of
the mind needs a comfortable house and decent cooking. You're quite
right. It even needs posterity. But it all hinges on the instinct for
success. That is the pivot on which all things turn."
Hammond looked rather piqued. He was rather proud of the integrity of
his mind, and of his _not_ being a timeserver. None the less, he did
want success.
"It's quite true, you can't live without cash," said May. "You've got
to have a certain amount of it to be able to live and get along ...
even to be free to _think_ you must have a certain amount of money, or
your stomach stops you. But it seems to me you might leave the labels
off sex. We're free to talk to anybody; so why shouldn't we be free to
make love to any woman who inclines us that way?"
"There speaks the lascivious Celt," said Clifford.
"Lascivious! well, why not? I can't see I do a woman any more harm by
sleeping with her than by dancing with her ... or even talking to her
about the weather. It's just an interchange of sensations instead of
ideas, so why not?"
"Be as promiscuous as the rabbits!" said Hammond.
"Why not? What's wrong with rabbits? Are they any worse than a
neurotic, revolutionary humanity, full of nervous hate?"
"But we're not rabbits, even so," said Hammond.
"Precisely! I have my mind: I have certain calculations to make in
certain astronomical matters that concern me almost more than life or
death. Sometimes indigestion interferes with me. Hunger would interfere
with me disastrously. In the same way starved sex interferes with me.
What then?"
"I should have thought sexual indigestion from surfeit would have
interfered with you more seriously," said Hammond satirically.
"Not it! I don't over-eat myself, and I don't over-fuck myself. One has
a choice about eating too much. But you would absolutely starve me."
"Not at all! You can marry."
"How do you know I can? It may not suit the process of my mind.
Marriage might ... and would ... stultify my mental processes. I'm not
properly pivoted that way ... and so must I be chained in a kennel like
a monk? All rot and funk, my boy. I must live and do my calculations. I
need women sometimes. I refuse to make a mountain of it, and I refuse
anybody's moral condemnation or prohibition. I'd be ashamed to see a
woman walking round with my name-label on her, address and railway
station, like a wardrobe trunk."
These two men had not forgiven each other about the Julia flirtation.
"It's an amusing idea, Charlie," said Dukes, "that sex is just another
form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them. I suppose
it's quite true. I suppose we might exchange as many sensations and
emotions with women as we do ideas about the weather, and so on. Sex
might be a sort of normal, physical conversation between a man and a
woman. You don't talk to a woman unless you have ideas in common: that
is you don't talk with any interest. And in the same way, unless you
had some emotion or sympathy in common with a woman you wouldn't sleep
with her. But if you had...."
"If you _have_ the proper sort of emotion or sympathy with a woman,
you _ought_ to sleep with her," said May. "It's the only decent thing,
to go to bed with her. Just as, when you are interested talking to
someone, the only decent thing is to have the talk out. You don't
prudishly put your tongue between your teeth and bite it. You just say
out your say. And the same the other way."
"No," said Hammond. "It's wrong. You, for example, May, you squander
half your force with women. You'll never really do what you should do,
with a fine mind such as yours. Too much of you goes the other way."
"Maybe it does ... and too little of you goes that way, Hammond, my
boy, married or not. You can keep the purity and integrity of your
mind, but it's going damned dry. Your pure mind is going as dry as
fiddlesticks, from what I see of it. You're simply talking it down."
Tommy Dukes burst into a laugh.
"Go it you two minds!" he said. "Look at me.... I don't do any high
and pure mental work, nothing but jot down a few ideas. And yet I
neither marry, or run after women. I think Charlie's quite right; if
he wants to run after the women, he's quite free not to run too often.
But I wouldn't prohibit him from running. As for Hammond, he's got a
property instinct, so naturally the straight road and the narrow gate
are right for him. You'll see he'll be an English Man of Letters before
he's done, A. B. C. from top to toe. Then there's me. I'm nothing. Just
a squib. And what about you, Clifford? Do you think sex is a dynamo to
help a man on to success in the world?"
Clifford rarely talked much at these times. He never held forth; his
ideas were really not vital enough for it, he was too confused and
emotional. Now he blushed and looked uncomfortable.
"Well!" he said, "being myself _hors de combat_, I don't see I've
anything to say on the matter."
"Not at all," said Dukes; "the top of you's by no means _hors de
combat_. You've got the life of the mind sound and intact. So let us
hear your ideas."
"Well," stammered Clifford, "even then I don't suppose I have much
idea ... I suppose marry-and-have-done-with-it would pretty well stand
for what I think. Though of course between a man and woman who care for
one another, it is a great thing."
"What sort of great thing?" said Tommy.
"Oh ... it perfects the intimacy," said Clifford, uneasy as a woman in
such talk.
"Well, Charlie and I believe that sex is a sort of communication like
speech. Let any woman start a sex conversation with me, and it's
natural for me to go to bed with her to finish it, all in due season.
Unfortunately no woman makes any particular start with me, so I go to
bed by myself; and am none the worse for it.... I hope so anyway, for
how should I know? Anyhow I've no starry calculations to be interfered
with, and no immortal works to write. I'm merely a fellow skulking in
the army...."
Silence fell. The four men smoked. And Connie sat there and put another
stitch in her sewing.... Yes, she sat there! She had to sit mum.
She had to be quiet as a mouse, not to interfere with the immensely
important speculations of these highly-mental gentlemen. But she had
to be there. They didn't get on so well without her; their ideas
didn't flow so freely. Clifford was much more edgy and nervous, he got
cold feet much quicker in Connie's absence, and the talk didn't run.
Tommy Dukes came off best; he was a little inspired by her presence.
Hammond she didn't really like; he seemed so selfish in a mental way.
And Charles May, though she liked something about him, seemed a little
distasteful and messy, in spite of his stars.
How many evenings had Connie sat and listened to the manifestations of
these four men! these, and one or two others. That they never seemed
to get anywhere didn't trouble her deeply. She liked to hear what they
had to say, especially when Tommy was there. It was fun. Instead of men
kissing you, and touching you with their bodies, they revealed their
minds to you. It was great fun! But what cold minds!
And also it was a little irritating. She had more respect for
Michaelis, on whose name they all poured such withering contempt, as
a little mongrel arriviste, and uneducated bounder of the worst sort.
Mongrel and bounder or not, he jumped to his own conclusions. He didn't
merely walk round them with millions of words, in the parade of the
life of the mind.
Connie quite liked the life of the mind, and got a great thrill out
of it. But she did think it overdid itself a little. She loved being
there, amidst the tobacco smoke of those famous evenings of the
cronies, as she called them privately to herself. She was infinitely
amused, and proud too, that even their talking they could not do
without her silent presence. She had an immense respect for thought ...
and these men, at least, tried to think honestly. But somehow there was
a cat, and it wouldn't jump. They all alike talked at something, though
what it was, for the life of her she couldn't say. It was something
that Mick didn't clear, either.
But then Mick wasn't trying to do anything, but just get through his
life, and put as much across other people as they tried to put across
him. He was really anti-social, which was what Clifford and his cronies
had against him. Clifford and his cronies were not anti-social; they
were more or less bent on saving mankind, or on instructing it, to say
the least.
There was a gorgeous talk on Sunday evening, when the conversation
drifted again to love.
"Blest be the tie that binds
Our hearts in kindred something-or-other"--
said Tommy Dukes. "I'd like to know what the tie is.... The tie that
binds _us_ just now is mental friction on one another. And, apart
from that, there's damned little tie between us. We bust apart, and
say spiteful things about one another, like all the other damned
intellectuals in the world. Damned everybodies, as far as that goes,
for they all do it. Else we bust apart, and cover up the spiteful
things we feel against one another by saying false sugaries. It's a
curious thing that the mental life seems to flourish with its roots
in spite, ineffable and fathomless spite. Always has been so! Look at
Socrates, in Plato, and his bunch round him! The sheer spite of it all,
just sheer joy in pulling somebody else to bits.... Protagoras, or
whoever it was! And Alcibiades, and all the other little disciple dogs
joining in the fray! I must say it makes one prefer Buddha, quietly
sitting under a bo-tree, or Jesus, telling his disciples little Sunday
stories, peacefully, and without any mental fireworks. No, there's
something wrong with the mental life, radically. It's rooted in spite
and envy, envy and spite. Ye shall know the tree by its fruit."
"I don't think we're altogether so spiteful," protested Clifford.
"My dear Clifford, think of the way we talk each other over, all of us.
I'm rather worse than anybody else, myself. Because I infinitely prefer
the spontaneous spite to the concocted sugaries; now they _are_ poison;
when I begin saying what a fine fellow Clifford is, etc, etc, then poor
Clifford is to be pitied. For God's sake, all of you, say spiteful
things about me, then I shall know I mean something to you. Don't say
sugaries, or I'm done."
"Oh, but I do think we honestly like one another," said Hammond.
"I tell you we must ... we say such spiteful things to one another,
about one another, behind our backs! I'm the worst."
"And I do think you confuse the mental life with the critical activity.
I agree with you, Socrates gave the critical activity a grand start,
but he did more than that," said Charlie May, rather magisterially. The
cronies had such a curious pomposity under their assumed modesty. It
was all so _ex cathedra_, and it all pretended to be so humble.
Dukes refused to be drawn about Socrates.
"That's quite true, criticism and knowledge are not the same thing,"
said Hammond.
"They aren't, of course," chimed in Berry, a brown, shy young man, who
had called to see Dukes, and was staying the night.
They all looked at him as if the ass had spoken.
"I wasn't talking about knowledge.... I was talking about the mental
life," laughed Dukes. "Real knowledge comes out of the whole corpus of
the consciousness; out of your belly and your penis as much as out of
your brain and mind. The mind can only analyse and rationalise. Set the
mind and the reason to cock it over the rest, and all they can do is to
criticise, and make a deadness. I say _all_ they can do. It is vastly
important. My God, the world needs criticising today ... criticising to
death. Therefore let's live the mental life, and glory in our spite,
and strip the rotten old show. But, mind you, it's like this; while you
_live_ your life, you are in some way an organic whole with all life.
But once you start the mental life you pluck the apple. You've severed
the connection between the apple and the tree: the organic connection.
And if you've got nothing in your life _but_ the mental life, then
you yourself are a plucked apple ... you've fallen off the tree. And
then it is a logical necessity to be spiteful, just as it's a natural
necessity for a plucked apple to go bad."
Clifford made big eyes: it was all stuff to him. Connie secretly
laughed to herself.
"Well then, we're all plucked apples," said Hammond, rather acidly and
petulantly.
"So let's make cider of ourselves," said Charlie.
"But what do you think of Bolshevism?" put in the brown Berry, as if
everything had led up to it.
"Bravo!" roared Charlie. "What do you think of Bolshevism?"
"Come on! Let's make hay of Bolshevism!" said Dukes.
"I'm afraid Bolshevism is a large question," said Hammond, shaking his
head seriously.
"Bolshevism, it seems to me," said Charlie, "is just a superlative
hatred of the thing they call the bourgeois; and what the bourgeois is,
isn't quite defined. It is Capitalism, among other things. Feelings and
emotions are also so decidedly bourgeois that you have to invent a man
without them.
"Then the individual, especially the _personal_ man, is bourgeois: so
he must be suppressed. You must submerge yourselves in the greater
thing, the Soviet-social thing. Even an organism is bourgeois: so the
ideal must be mechanical. The only thing that is a unit, non-organic,
composed of many different, yet equally essential parts, is the
machine. Each man a machine-part, and the driving power of the machine,
hate ... hate of the bourgeois. That, to me, is Bolshevism."
"Absolutely!" said Tommy, "But also, it seems to me a perfect
description of the whole of the industrial ideal. It's the
factory-owner's ideal in a nut-shell; except that he would deny that
the driving power was hate. Hate it is, all the same: hate of life
itself. Just look at these Midlands, if it isn't plainly written up ...
but it's all part of the life of the mind, it's a logical development."
"I deny that Bolshevism is logical, it rejects the major part of the
premisses," said Hammond.
"My dear man, it allows the material premiss; so does the pure mind ...
exclusively."
"At least Bolshevism has got down to rock bottom," said Charlie.
"Rock bottom! The bottom that has no bottom! The Bolshevists will have
the finest army in the world in a very short time, with the finest
mechanical equipment."
"But this thing can't go on ... this hate business. There must be a
reaction...." said Hammond.
"Well, we've been waiting for years ... we wait longer. Hate's a
growing thing like anything else. It's the inevitable outcome of
forcing ideas on to life, forcing one's deepest instincts; our deepest
feelings we force according to certain ideas. We drive ourselves with a
formula, like a machine. The logical mind pretends to rule the roost,
and the roost turns into pure hate. We're all Bolshevists, only we are
hypocrites. The Russians are Bolshevists without hypocrisy."
"But there are many other ways," said Hammond, "than the Soviet way.
The Bolshevists aren't really intelligent."
"Of course not. But sometimes it's intelligent to be half-witted:
if you want to make your end. Personally, I consider Bolshevism
half-witted; but so do I consider our social life in the west
half-witted. So I even consider our far-famed mental life half-witted.
We're all as cold as cretins, we're all as passionless as idiots. We're
all of us Bolshevists, only we give it another name. We think we're
gods ... men like gods! It's just the same as Bolshevism. One has to
be human, and have a heart and a penis if one is going to escape being
either a god or a Bolshevist ... for they are the same thing: they're
both too good to be true."
Out of the disapproving silence came Berry's anxious question:
"You do believe in love then, Tommy, don't you?"
"You lovely lad!" said Tommy. "No, my cherub, nine times out of
ten, no! Love's another of those half-witted performances today.
Fellows with swaying waists fucking little jazz girls with small boy
buttocks, like two collar studs! Do you mean that sort of love? Or the
joint-property, make-a-success-of-it, my-husband-my-wife sort of love?
No, my fine fellow, I don't believe in it at all!"
"But you do believe in something?"
"Me? Oh, intellectually I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy
penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say 'shit!' in front
of a lady."
"Well, you've got them all," said Berry.
Tommy Dukes roared with laughter. "You angel boy! If only I had! If
only I had! No; my heart's as numb as a potato, my penis droops and
never lifts its head up, I dare rather cut him clean off than say
'shit!' in front of my mother or my aunt ... they are real ladies, mind
you; and I'm not really intelligent, I'm only a 'mental-lifer.' It
would be wonderful to be intelligent: then one would be alive in all
the parts mentioned and unmentionable. The penis rouses his head and
says: How do you do?--to any really intelligent person. Renoir said he
painted his pictures with his penis ... he did too, lovely pictures! I
wish I did something with mine. God! when one can only talk! Another
torture added to Hades! And Socrates started it."
"There are nice women in the world," said Connie, lifting her head up
and speaking at last.
The men resented it ... she should have pretended to hear nothing. They
hated her admitting she had attended so closely to such talk.
"My God!--'_If they be not nice to me
What care I how nice they be?_'--
"No, it's hopeless! I just simply can't vibrate in unison with a woman.
There's no woman I can really want when I'm faced with her, and I'm not
going to start forcing myself to it.... My God, no! I'll remain as I
am, and lead the mental life. It's the only honest thing I can do. I
can be quite happy _talking_ to women; but it's all pure, hopelessly
pure. Hopelessly pure! What do you say, Hildebrand, my chicken?"
"It's much less complicated if one stays pure," said Berry.
"Yes, life is all too simple!"