LITMIR.BIZ

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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 around 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 it 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 nor 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 hedgy 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.’

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