For Love Alone (62 page)

“Yes,” he said. “Hullo, there!”

She rang off. He waited for her to call back. She had no telephone in her room. But she did not call. “All right, fair lady,” he said aloud, grinning. “O.K., I can stand it. But you can't.”

She did not come on Tuesday or Friday and then he wrote:

H
ULLO
, T
ESS
!

I got home all right from the Rickmansworth expedition. Did you? How is Quick treating you? Expect you on Tuesday night as usual. Fortunate you didn't come this Friday, I had a study circle here, invited them three weeks ago, clean forgot it was your night. All's for the best in this best of possible worlds. Come if you want to, Tuesday, but not if you have other fish to fry.

 

Your friend,

J
ONATHAN
.

 

P.S.—Perhaps we can try that country trick again some time soon with more satisfactory results.

She did not think for a moment of refusing him. She thought: “He needs me, I cannot refuse just because I am sick of it.” When she came he gave her his last essay to convey to Quick for his opinion.

I
t was a foggy day a week later. The lights were on in the City in all the offices and it was already quite dark. Quick felt ill on such days on the mudbanks of the Thames; many things made him uneasy, his dark flat, the silences from Marian, and lately in his office he had curious dizzy moments. The pale girl sat opposite him across the broad polished desk and his anxiety and puzzlement about her, and the way she was fading under his eyes, curdled his heart. He was not himself, he had strange feelings, he sometimes felt as if he were dying.

One afternoon, he took a taxi home about four o'clock. Teresa had to remain in the office to receive telephone calls. It was the day that Teresa had brought in Jonathan's essay. Quick took it with him but didn't unwrap it in the taxi, for his head was swimming and his eyes bad. After sitting down at home for half an hour, however, before a bright fire and after eating a little brought in by Chapman, Quick thought of the essay and brought it over to the divan on which he was lying.

He opened it casually in the middle and read:

What is called heterosexual love is a type of paranoia of greater or less incipiency, induced by obsession with one idea and exactly the same behaviour and reactions may be observed with the application of very different stimulus in other cases of obsession, as with the lunatic, the poet, the inventor and similar one-idea'd individuals. It is well known that some obsessions are, some are not, in the social “thirty-nine articles”; but it is valuable to inquire why this one (love) is not only accepted but is conscientiously induced by parents, educators, artists and even scientists who, so to speak, know better. Why the propaganda? The young man entering on the scene of life and seeing with unprejudiced eyes at once declares: “There is no such thing as love.” Ten years later, we find the same person married, with children, retailing the lies and conventions which as a fresh-visioned youth he rejected. This is the great paradox of every life. I am for the moment (though I will return to him later) neglecting the youth who, for certain reasons, accepts the great socially valuable lie of love. Parenthetically, one may ask if all heterosexual love is not a shame-deviation from natural homosexual love which would seem the more logical—for what have the two sexes in common in our culture?

Quick at once turned to the front page, as he supposed for a moment that some error had occurred, but the cover and the title-page said: “Meliorism, or The Best of Possible Worlds, by Jonathan S. Crow, 1933.”

Well, thought Quick, I have struck a bad passage but I am afraid Miss Hawkins's “brilliant young man” is just another typical example of the “greater or less incipiency of Ph.D.'ism”. Phew! “Love is paranoia!” A fine lover he must be. A rather ordinary example, I should say, of the vacant-minded, empty-hearted young academic
hedonist, for hedonist read egoist. But perhaps I am too quick on the trigger. The English are a freak people. They maunder along and suddenly a flight of genius! I must give the young man a chance. But if I am right how wrong she is! Can she be as bright as I think? Well, I had better begin at the beginning.

He sat up and started at the first page. Once he got up and clasped his head with both hands with an exclamation of horror. Another time he got up and paced about, biting his lip and twiddling his fingers with an angry expression, and the third time he stopped altogether with the pages spread out on his knee and stared into the fire, quite out of countenance. He then recovered himself, put the essay on the table, and pacing about, began a long meditation, dark, musing, and it seemed to himself he was puzzled, he was even baffled.

The more he knew about his secretary and her friend Jonathan Crow, the obscurer became the problem. Had he misjudged her? Was it possible? Because he now realized that he had come to respect and admire her, for all her ignorance and simplicity. What were her relations with Crow? Was she a friend, a mistress? How could she so misjudge him? Was it the “necessary blindness” of one sex for the other, merely? But how could an intelligent woman—he thought of all the “intelligent men” he knew who were blinded by a woman. But how could she—with himself before her eyes! Did she really understand what he said to her every day? Was she uncannily clever at pretending to understand? It became capital with him to find out whether she understood him or not. Was he the victim of a fraud, the pretended sympathy of a worker for the person who pays wages on Saturdays? For a moment he wished he were a simple student like Crow, with nothing to offer her, so that he could know if she really appreciated what he said to her. “Why am I taking it this way?” he asked himself. “It's rather a simple situation, a stenographer pretends to admire and understand her employer—” However, he got no farther in this direction. His thoughts suddenly flew off and he thought angrily: “Can I really admire a woman so stupid as to think that
this
is a work of talent?”

After much worrying of this sort, he rang for Chapman to bring in his dinner. Afterwards, he felt more genial and he took up again “Meliorism, or The Best of Possible Worlds”. But now it was worse than before. Of eighty-two typed pages, the first thirty were devoted to rambling remarks about other people's ideas and the rest to sex in one form or another and this presently resolved itself into a discussion of whether academic men ought to marry, of the dying out of the superior type (the university graduate) and of women's brains and the value of women's brains to “the race”. Said Crow:

The white European male has natural superiority: for later records show conclusively, records of actual achievements in life, that neither the Jew, the Chinese, the Japanese nor the woman of talent, these four precocious groups, achieve anything proportionate to their numbers in the school or their early showing. We must conclude that intellectual precocity, like exceptional memory and emotility, by a natural compensation, is unstable, unreproductive and tends to disappear. This is the meaning in Nature of “aurea mediocritas”.

Crow had other figures to show that Negroes, Italians, and Irishmen did worse than other races of Western Europe, in English-speaking schools and this “is conclusive in the United States of America where Negroes have never spoken anything but English and therefore have an equal intellectual chance at school”.

Crow now went on, rather peculiarly, to discuss a system called Basic English—but not for long. Shortly, he was back to the malefemale question and did not fail to quote “Male and female created he them” although a professed atheist; and “the female of the species is more deadly than the male”, although as a republican of the Empire he detested Kipling. He made remarks about a certain female spider which eats her mate and, analogically, the necessary parasitism of
the mother on the father, in the human species, which destroys male intellectual efforts, although, Quick thought, he did not prove that human beings are descended from spiders. He then leapt back to a narrower discussion of why the precocious, in general, fail in later life, especially fail to attain security, respectability, “socially necessary truths”, for, said he, it was so—“results show it”; and he concluded that it was better to be slow in coming to flower and fruit. He did not fail to note, however, that part of woman's ill-success “in life” as he put it, was owed to the deformation of her early training. Those who

yield to it and become members of the charmingly parasitic sorority (true women, that is) show no variation, are selected by the male to bear the next generation; while those who do not yield to it so much, gifted females with an infusion of male brains and maleness, in general (as Terman's tests show), that is, combativeness, aggressiveness, leadership and other male traits, are weeded out and their traits not passed on, because they are not selected by the conservative and possibly jealous male. Nature is a Tory, it may be unfortunate, but it is so. The race does its best, with its unconscious necessary wisdom, to the freak and the crank, the masculine female and the feminine male—we see that they are rejected so we ourselves shun them.

James Quick threw down this masterpiece of getting ahead. He walked up and down in the curious way he had when particularly incensed, while his eyes stared furiously ahead and he breathed hard. “I know all,” he cried. “I see all. The stifled bestiality of the monastery, the crackpot egotism of the cracker-barrel sage—can she admire such a man? A genius! She says the footnote sage's a genius. She can bear his company. How can she? What can she be, to tolerate such a contemptible, calculating worm? Females are suspect, Chinese are
suspect, talent is suspect, he alone, he alone—” He advanced staring with angry but melancholy eyes. “What's more, the all-but-perfect creature, Jonathan Crow, finds all others intrude upon his exquisite isolation, mothers are parasitic, working men breed too much—! Oddly enough, oddly enough—ugh! Men of genius can put up with their mother's children—what degeneration. What can Australia be like if it honours such men—what London, if it takes in such men? What kind of beggars in the U.S.A. that he quotes—h'm, what date? Now I'll show her—he's given himself away—now she'll see—but why blame him? The whole of organized scholarship is devoted to promoting themselves. They are busy selling themselves either to the workers, the business men or the governing class. Natural salesmen. To the poor man their line is: Here's a good easy fat job for your sons and daughters, they'll get on, they'll join the governing class; to the middle-class man, here's a bunch of people beyond reproach who will dig up so-called facts to support any of your values; and to the governing body, Christ! there they have the best job of all, of watchdogs, censors and liars—but calm down, excuse him, he's merely a nitwit, perhaps—look!—for instance, in one part of this essay he is merely selling his sex to the other sex on short-term. Part V. Computation of Population. Part VI. Male and Female Differences. Part VII. Women's Failure. Part VIII. Contraceptive Methods. That's complete. Love me and the world is mine, not yours, you bastard. Bastardess. No wonder Miss Hawkins looks like Karenina after the railway accident. Crushed by a one-horse pedant. That could be the explanation! What is he? Every man his own bride? Pederast, whoregoer at Saturday vespers? What do I know of this island anyway? Who knows what goes on in their melancholy heads, says Voltaire! It may be true, his spiel, after all. Eduard Fuchs told me, the polymath of sex—Englishmen and Dutchmen and Swedes did nothing—” He flipped a page and read:

Women are brought up to the hunt, men left the hunt long ago, women cannot be modern till they cease to hunt
men, they must be taught creative trades, arts, crafts and techniques, calculation; the intense emotionalism of their lives will then cease to be an obstacle to their worldliness; their present worldliness will vanish too, and none will regret it: we can do without the St Teresas as well as the legendary libertine, coiling herself like a serpent in the poisonous dew of men's lasciviousness which without her would not exist, sterile Paphian, superfoetation of Pauline sexual fears.

A little later on, he read, however—

The Magdalen, whose love surpassed that of Martha and Mary, showed that the early Christians perceived the conditions of the freedom of women; woman is only free outside of marriage, and it is only when woman is free that man, for whom she is the “white man's burden”, is free too.

Quick bounced up and down the room again, and quoted Jonathan aloud: “Christ gave no hostages to fortune.” Then he rushed on: “Woman is haunted—as no man is haunted—by the fear of
biological
failure. She's desperate! They live contingently! And he knows it, the spider! We are allowed to doubt, they never.”

Quick seized the essay and made a movement as if to throw it in the fire, then said: “By James, line by line, I'll talk it out of her as he's talked it into her. He's discovered women's ultimate control, desperation, the malignant spider, and he's controlling her by that, the discovering bookworm. I don't know entomology. Here he has ‘spiders', that doctor of science and here ‘Leibnitz'. Unread, that Ph.D.”

He flung himself on his divan and looked at the clock—six o'clock. He missed her. He ought to telephone her and get her to come over now and talk to her about this man. He got up and stared at the wall in front of him, thinking of nothing, so it seemed. In two minutes, he felt a slight convulsion, as of fright, walked up and down a few strides, his ideas tossing aimlessly, a deploring look on
his face, his hands clutched behind him. He shrugged his shoulders, stopped and leaned on a table with one hand, turned round, faced the room and got an idea. With this simple idea, he looked over all the objects in the room, he looked out of the window into the alley which he was facing and saw a person go by the window. At once he slightly smiled, his lips moved. He stopped in front of the fire and took a few more casual steps, sucking his underlip with his face lighted up, biting his forefinger, and once more walked up and down with a Sherlock Holmes expression.