LITMIR.BIZ

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They are no doubt self-protective. The whole of a man’s ninety-nine per cent. of obscurer mechanism is daily engaged in organizing his life in accordance with his deepest necessity. Each person boasts some notable invention of personal application only.

      “So there I am fixed with my bourgeoise in my skin, dans ma peau. What is the next step?—The body is the main thing.—But I think I have made a discovery. In sex I am romantic and arriéré. It would be healthier for all sex to be so. But that is another matter. Well, I cannot see myself attracted by an exceptional woman—‘spiritual’ woman—‘noble soul,’ or even a particularly refined and witty animal.—I do not understand attraction for such beings.—Their existence appears to me quite natural and proper, but, not being as fine as men; not being as fine as pictures or poems; not being as fine as housewives or classical Mothers of Men; they appear to me to occupy an unfortunate position on this earth. No man properly demarcated as I am will have much to do with them. They are very beautiful to look at. But they are unfortunately alive, and usually cats. If you married one of them, out of pity, you would have to support the eternal grin of a Gioconda fixed complacently on you at all hours of the day, the pretensions of a piece of canvas that had sold for thirty thousand pounds. You could not put your foot through the canvas without being hanged. You would not be able to sell it yourself for that figure, and so get some little compensation. Tout au plus, if the sentimental grin would not otherwise come off, you could break its jaw, perhaps.”

      Butcher flung his head up, and laughed affectedly.

      “Ha ha!”—he went again.

      “Very good!—Very good!—I know who you’re thinking of,” he said.

      “Do you? Oh, the ‘Gioconda smile,’ you mean?—Yes.—In that instance, the man had only his silly sentimental self to blame. He has paid the biggest price given in our time for a living masterpiece. Sentimentalizing about masterpieces and sentimental prices will soon have seen their day, I expect. New masterpieces in painting will then appear again, perhaps, where the live ones leagued with the old dead ones disappear.—Really, the more one considers it, the more creditable and excellent my self-organization appears. I have a great deal to congratulate myself upon.”

      Butcher blinked and pulled himself together with a grave dissatisfied expression.

      “But will you carry it into effect to the extent?—Will you?—Would marriage be the ideal termination?”—Butcher had a way of tearing up and beginning all over again on a new breath.

      “That is what Hobson asked.—No, I don’t think marriage has anything to do with it. That is another question altogether.”

      “I thought your remarks about the housewife suggested⸺”

      “No.—My relation to the idea of the housewife is platonic. I am attracted to the housewife as I might be attracted to the milliner. But just as I should not necessarily employ the latter to make hats—I should have some other use for her—so my connexion with the other need not imply a ménage. But my present difficulty centres round that question:

      “What am I to do with Fräulein Lunken?”

      Butcher drew himself up, and hiccuped solemnly and slowly.

      He did not reply.

      “Once again, is marriage out of the question?” Tarr asked.

      “You know yourself best. I don’t think you ought to marry.”

      “Why, am I⸺?”

      “No. You wouldn’t stop with her. So why marry?”

      He hiccuped again, and blinked.

      Tarr gazed at his oracle with curiosity.—With eyes glassily bloodshot, it discharged its wisdom on gusts of air. Butcher was always surly about women, or rather men’s tenderness for them. He was a vindictive enemy of the sex. He stood, a patient constable, forbidding Tarr respectfully a certain road. He spoke with authority and shortness, and hiccuped to convey the absolute and assured quality of his refusal.

      “Well, in that case,” Tarr said, “I must make a move. I have treated Bertha very badly.”

      Butcher smothered a hiccup.—He ordered another drink.

      “Yes, I owe my girl anything I can give her. It is hardly my fault. With the training you get in England, how can you be expected to realize anything? The University of Humour that prevails everywhere in England as the national institution for developing youth, provides you with nothing but a first-rate means of evading reality. The whole of English training—the great fundamental spirit of the country—is a system of deadening feeling, a prescription for Stoicism. Many of the results are excellent. It saves us from gush in many cases; it is an excellent armour in times of crisis or misfortune. The English soldier gets his special cachet from it. But for the sake of this wonderful panacea—English humour—we sacrifice much. It would be better to face our Imagination and our nerves without this soporific. Once this armature breaks down, the man underneath is found in many cases to have become softened by it. He is subject to shock, oversensitiveness, and many ailments not met with in the more frank and direct races. Their superficial sensitiveness allows of a harder core.—To set against this, of course, you have the immense reserves of delicacy, touchiness, sympathy, that this envelope of cynicism has accumulated. It has served English art marvellously. But it is probably more useful for art than for practical affairs. And the artist could always look after himself. Anyhow, the time seems to have arrived in my life, as I consider it has arrived in the life of the country, to discard this husk and armour. Life must be met on other terms than those of fun and sport.”

      Butcher guffawed provocatively. Tarr joined him. They both quaffed their beer.

      “You’re a terrible fellow,” said Butcher. “If you had your way, you’d leave us stark naked. We should all be standing on our little island in the savage state of the Ancient Britons—figuratively.” He hiccuped.

      “Yes, figuratively. But in reality the country would be armed better than it ever had been before. And by the sacrifice of these famous ‘national characteristics’ we cling to sentimentally, and which are merely the accident of a time, we should lay a soil and foundation of unspecific force, on which new and realler ‘national flavours’ would very soon sprout.”

      “I quite agree,” Butcher jerked out energetically.

      He ordered another lager.

      “I agree with what you say. If we don’t give up dreaming, we shall get spanked. I have given up my gypsies. That was very public-spirited of me?” He looked coaxingly.

      “If every one would give up their gypsies, their jokes, and their gentlemen—‘Gentlemen’ are worse than gypsies. It would do perhaps if they reduced them considerably, as you have your Gitanos.—I’m going to swear off humour for a year. I am going to gaze on even you inhumanly. All my mock matrimonial difficulties come from humour. I am going to gaze on Bertha inhumanly, and not humorously. Humour paralyses the sense for reality and wraps people in a phlegmatic and hysterical dream-world, full of the delicious swirls of the switchback, the drunkenness of the merry-go-round—screaming leaps from idea to idea. My little weapon for bringing my man to earth—shot-gun or what not—gave me good sport, too, and was of the best workmanship. I carried it slung jauntily for some time at my side—you may have noticed it. But I am in the tedious position of the man who hits the bull’s-eye every time. Had I not been disproportionately occupied with her absurdities, I should not have allowed this charming girl to engage herself to me.

      “My first practical step now will be to take this question of ‘engaging’ myself or not into my own hands. I shall disengage myself on the spot.”

      “So long as you don’t engage yourself again next minute, and so on. If I felt that the time was not quite ripe, I’d leave it in Fräulein Lunken’s hands a little longer. I expect she does it better than you would.”

      Butcher filled his pipe, then

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