Chapter 6
‘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!’
Connie knew he was right, really. Yet it left her feeling so forlorn, so forlorn and stray. Like a chip on a dreary pond, she felt. What was the point, of her or anything?
It was her youth which rebelled. These men seemed so old and cold. Everything seemed old and cold. And Michaelis let one down so; he was no good. The men didn’t want one; they just didn’t really want a woman, even Michaelis didn’t.
And the bounders who pretended they did, and started working the sex game, they were worse than ever.
It was just dismal, and one had to put up with it. It was quite true, men had no real glamour for a woman: if you could fool yourself into thinking they had, even as she had fooled herself over Michaelis, that was the best you could do. Meanwhile you just lived on and there was nothing to it. She understood perfectly well why people had cocktail parties, and jazzed, and Charlestoned till they were ready to drop. You had to take it out some way or other, your youth, or it ate you up. But what a ghastly thing, this youth! You felt as old as Methuselah, and yet the thing fizzed somehow, and didn’t let you be comfortable. A mean sort of life! And no prospect! She almost wished she had gone off with Mick, and made her life one long cocktail party, and jazz evening. Anyhow that was better than just mooning yourself into the grave.
On one of her bad days she went out alone to walk in the wood, ponderously, heeding nothing, not even noticing where she was. The report of a gun not far off startled and angered her.
Then, as she went, she heard voices, and recoiled. People! She didn’t want people. But her quick ear caught another sound, and she roused; it was a child sobbing. At once she attended; someone was ill-treating a child. She strode swinging down the wet drive, her sullen resentment uppermost. She felt just prepared to make a scene.
Turning the corner, she saw two figures in the drive beyond her: the keeper, and a little girl in a purple coat and moleskin cap, crying.
‘Ah, shut it up, tha false little bitch!’ came the man’s angry voice, and the child sobbed louder.
Constance strode nearer, with blazing eyes. The man turned and looked at her, saluting coolly, but he was pale with anger.
‘What’s the matter? Why is she crying?’ demanded Constance, peremptory but a little breathless.
A faint smile like a sneer came on the man’s face. ‘Nay, yo mun ax ‘er,’ he replied callously, in broad vernacular.
Connie felt as if he had hit her in the face, and she changed colour. Then she gathered her defiance, and looked at him, her dark blue eyes blazing rather vaguely.
‘I asked you,‘ she panted.
He gave a queer little bow, lifting his hat. ‘You did, your Ladyship,’ he said; then, with a return to the vernacular: ‘but I canna tell yer.’ And he became a soldier, inscrutable, only pale with annoyance.
Connie turned to the child, a ruddy, black-haired thing of nine or ten. ‘What is it, dear? Tell me why you’re crying!’ she said, with the conventionalized sweetness suitable. More violent sobs, self-conscious. Still more sweetness on Connie’s part.
‘There, there, don’t you cry! Tell me what they’ve done to you!’… an intense tenderness of tone. At the same time she felt in the pocket of her knitted jacket, and