When at last he drew away from her, he said, in a bitter, almost sneering little voice:
‘You couldn’t go off at the same time as a man, could you? You’d have to bring yourself off! You’d have to run the show!’
This little speech, at the moment, was one of the shocks of her life. Because that passive sort of giving himself was so obviously his only real mode of intercourse.
‘What do you mean?’ she said.
‘You know what I mean. You keep on for hours after I’ve gone off … and I have to hang on with my teeth till you bring yourself off by your own exertions.’
She was stunned by this unexpected piece of brutality, at the moment when she was glowing with a sort of pleasure beyond words, and a sort of love for him. Because, after all, like so many modern men, he was finished almost before he had begun. And that forced the woman to be active.
‘But you want me to go on, to get my own satisfaction?’ she said.
He laughed grimly: ‘I want it!’ he said. ‘That’s good! I want to hang on with my teeth clenched, while you go for me!’
‘But don’t you?’ she insisted.
He avoided the question. ‘All the darned women are like that,’ he said. ‘Either they don’t go off at all, as if they were dead in there … or else they wait till a chap’s really done, and then they start in to bring themselves off, and a chap’s got to hang on. I never had a woman yet who went off just at the same moment as I did.’
Connie only half heard this piece of novel, masculine information. She was only stunned by his feeling against her … his incomprehensible brutality. She felt so innocent.
‘But you want me to have my satisfaction too, don’t you?’ she repeated.
‘Oh, all right! I’m quite willing. But I’m darned if hanging on waiting for a woman to go off is much of a game for a man…’
This speech was one of the crucial blows of Connie’s life. It killed something in her. She had not been so very keen on Michaelis; till he started it, she did not want him. It was as if she never positively wanted him. But once he had started her, it seemed only natural for her to come to her own crisis with him. Almost she had loved him for it … almost that night she loved him, and wanted to marry him.
Perhaps instinctively he knew it, and that was why he had to bring down the whole show with a smash; the house of cards. Her whole sexual feeling for him, or for any man, collapsed that night. Her life fell apart from his as completely as if he had never existed.
And she went through the days drearily. There was nothing now but this empty treadmill of what Clifford called the integrated life, the long living together of two people, who are in the habit of being in the same house with one another.
Nothingness! To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the one end of living. All the many busy and important little things that make up the grand sum-total of nothingness!
‘Why don’t men and women really like one another nowadays?’ Connie asked Tommy Dukes, who was more or less her oracle.
‘Oh, but they do! I don’t think since the human species was invented, there has ever been a time when men and women have liked one another as much as they do today. Genuine liking! Take myself. I really like women better than men; they are braver, one can be more frank with them.’
Connie pondered this.
‘Ah, yes, but you never have anything to do with them!’ she said.
‘I? What am I doing but talking perfectly sincerely to a woman at this moment?’
‘Yes, talking…’
‘And what more could I do if you were a man, than talk perfectly sincerely to you?’
‘Nothing perhaps. But a woman…’
‘A woman wants you to like her and talk to her, and at the same time love her and desire her; and it seems to me the two things are mutually exclusive.’
‘But they shouldn’t be!’
‘No doubt water ought not to be so wet as it is; it overdoes it in wetness. But there it is! I like women and talk to them, and therefore I don’t love them and desire them. The two things don’t happen at the same time in me.’
‘I think they ought to.’
‘All right. The fact that things ought to be something else than what they are, is not my department.’
Connie considered this. ‘It isn’t true,’ she said. ‘Men can love women and talk to them. I don’t see how they can love them without talking, and being friendly and intimate. How can they?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I don’t know. What’s the use of my generalizing? I only know my own case. I like women, but I don’t desire them. I like talking to them; but talking to them, though it makes me intimate in one direction, sets me poles apart from them as far as kissing is concerned. So there you are! But don’t take me as a general example, probably I’m just a special case: one of the men who like women, but don’t love women, and even hate them if they force me into a pretence of love, or an entangled appearance.’
‘But doesn’t it make you sad?’
‘Why should it? Not a bit! I look at Charlie May, and the rest of the men who have affairs … No, I don’t envy them a bit! If fate sent me a woman I wanted, well and good. Since I don’t know any woman I want, and never see one … why, I presume I’m cold, and really like some women very much.’
‘Do you like me?’
‘Very much! And you see there’s no question of kissing between us, is there?’
‘None at all!’ said Connie. ‘But oughtn’t there to be?’
‘Why, in God’s name? I like Clifford, but what would you say if I went and kissed him?’
‘But isn’t there a difference?’
‘Where does it lie, as far as we’re concerned? We’re all intelligent human beings, and the male and female business is in abeyance. Just in abeyance. How would you like me to start acting up like a continental male at this moment, and parading the sex thing?’
‘I should hate it.’
‘Well then! I tell you, if I’m really a male thing at all, I never run across the female of my species. And I don’t miss her, I just like women. Who’s going to force me into loving or pretending to love them, working up the sex game?’
‘No, I’m not. But isn’t something wrong?’
‘You may feel it, I don’t.’
‘Yes, I feel something is wrong between men and women. A woman has no glamour for a man any more.’
‘Has a man for a woman?’
She pondered the other side of the question.
‘Not much,’ she said truthfully.
‘Then let’s leave it all alone, and just be decent and simple, like proper human beings with one another. Be damned to the artificial sex-compulsion! I refuse it!’