‘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 overdeveloped. 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 time-server. 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 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