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Tono-Bungay
“No!” said my uncle, removing his cigar; “as far as I can find out it’s really grain, – spoilt grain… I’ve been going into that.”
“Well, there you are!” said Ewart. “Say it’s spoilt grain. It carried out my case just as well. Your modern commerce is no more buying and selling than sculpture. It’s mercy – it’s salvation. It’s rescue work! It takes all sorts of fallen commodities by the hand and raises them. Cana isn’t in it. You turn water – into Tono-Bungay.”
“Tono-Bungay’s all right,” said my uncle, suddenly grave. “We aren’t talking of Tono-Bungay.”
“Your nephew, sir, is hard; he wants everything to go to a sort of predestinated end; he’s a Calvinist of Commerce. Offer him a dustbin full of stuff; he calls it refuse – passes by on the other side. Now YOU, sir you’d make cinders respect themselves.”
My uncle regarded him dubiously for a moment. But there was a touch of appreciation in his eye.
“Might make ‘em into a sort of sanitary brick,” he reflected over his cigar end.
“Or a friable biscuit. Why NOT? You might advertise: ‘Why are Birds so Bright? Because they digest their food perfectly! Why do they digest their food so perfectly? Because they have a gizzard! Why hasn’t man a gizzard? Because he can buy Ponderevo’s Asphalt Triturating, Friable Biscuit – Which is Better.’”
He delivered the last words in a shout, with his hairy hand flourished in the air…
“Damn clever fellow,” said my uncle, after he had one. “I know a man when I see one. He’d do. But drunk, I should say. But that only makes some chap brighter. If he WANTS to do that poster, he can. Zzzz. That ideer of his about the horseradish. There’s something in that, George. I’m going to think over that…”
I may say at once that my poster project came to nothing in the end, though Ewart devoted an interesting week to the matter. He let his unfortunate disposition to irony run away with him. He produced a picture of two beavers with a subtle likeness, he said, to myself and my uncle – the likeness to my uncle certainly wasn’t half bad – and they were bottling rows and rows of Tono-Bungay, with the legend “Modern commerce.” It certainly wouldn’t have sold a case, though he urged it on me one cheerful evening on the ground that it would “arouse curiosity.” In addition he produced a quite shocking study of my uncle, excessively and needlessly nude, but, so far as I was able to judge, an admirable likeness, engaged in feats of strength of a Gargantuan type before an audience of deboshed and shattered ladies. The legend, “Health, Beauty, Strength,” below, gave a needed point to his parody. This he hung up in the studio over the oil shop, with a flap of brown paper; by way of a curtain over it to accentuate its libellous offence.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
MARION
I
As I look back on those days in which we built up the great Tono-Bungay property out of human hope and credit for bottles and rent and printing, I see my life as it were arranged in two parallel columns of unequal width, a wider, more diffused, eventful and various one which continually broadens out, the business side of my life, and a narrow, darker and darkling one shot ever and again with a gleam of happiness, my home-life with Marion. For, of course, I married Marion.
I didn’t, as a matter of fact, marry her until a year after Tono-Bungay was thoroughly afloat, and then only after conflicts and discussions of a quite strenuous sort. By that time I was twenty-four. It seems the next thing to childhood now. We were both in certain directions unusually ignorant and simple; we were temperamentally antagonistic, and we hadn’t – I don’t think we were capable of – an idea in common. She was young and extraordinarily conventional – she seemed never to have an idea of her own but always the idea of her class – and I was young and sceptical, enterprising and passionate; the two links that held us together were the intense appeal her physical beauty had for me, and her appreciation of her importance in my thoughts. There can be no doubt of my passion for her. In her I had discovered woman desired. The nights I have lain awake on account of her, writhing, biting my wrists in a fever of longing! …
I have told how I got myself a silk hat and black coat to please her on Sunday – to the derision of some of my fellow-students who charged to meet me, and how we became engaged. But that was only the beginning of our difference. To her that meant the beginning of a not unpleasant little secrecy, an occasional use of verbal endearments, perhaps even kisses. It was something to go on indefinitely, interfering in no way with her gossiping spells of work at Smithie’s. To me it was a pledge to come together into the utmost intimacy of soul and body so soon as we could contrive it…
I don’t know if it will strike the reader that I am setting out to discuss the queer, unwise love relationship and my bungle of a marriage with excessive solemnity. But to me it seems to reach out to vastly wider issues than our little personal affair. I’ve thought over my life. In these last few years I’ve tried to get at least a little wisdom out of it. And in particular I’ve thought over this part of my life. I’m enormously impressed by the ignorant, unguided way in which we two entangled ourselves with each other. It seems to me the queerest thing in all this network of misunderstandings and misstatements and faulty and ramshackle conventions which makes up our social order as the individual meets it, that we should have come together so accidentally and so blindly. Because we were no more than samples of the common fate. Love is not only the cardinal fact in the individual life, but the most important concern of the community; after all, the way in which the young people of this generation pair off determines the fate of the nation; all the other affairs of the State are subsidiary to that. And we leave it to flushed and blundering youth to stumble on its own significance, with nothing to guide in but shocked looks and sentimental twaddle and base whisperings and cant-smeared examples.
I have tried to indicate something of my own sexual development in the preceding chapter. Nobody was ever frank and decent with me in this relation; nobody, no book, ever came and said to me thus and thus is the world made, and so and so is necessary. Everything came obscurely, indefinitely, perplexingly; and all I knew of law or convention in the matter had the form of threatenings and prohibitions. Except through the furtive, shameful talk of my coevals at Goudhurst and Wimblehurst, I was not even warned against quite horrible dangers. My ideas were made partly of instinct, partly of a romantic imagination, partly woven out of a medley of scraps of suggestion that came to me haphazard. I had read widely and confusedly “Vathek,” Shelley, Tom Paine, Plutarch, Carlyle, Haeckel, William Morris, the Bible, the Freethinker, the Clarion, “The Woman Who Did,” – I mention the ingredients that come first to mind. All sorts of ideas were jumbled up in me and never a lucid explanation. But it was evident to me that the world regarded Shelley, for example, as a very heroic as well as beautiful person; and that to defy convention and succumb magnificently to passion was the proper thing to do to gain the respect and affection of all decent people.
And the make-up of Marion’s mind in the matter was an equally irrational affair. Her training had been one, not simply of silences, but suppressions. An enormous force of suggestion had so shaped her that the intense natural fastidiousness of girlhood had developed into an absolute perversion of instinct. For all that is cardinal in this essential business of life she had one inseparable epithet – “horrid.” Without any such training she would have been a shy lover, but now she was an impossible one. For the rest she had derived, I suppose, partly from the sort of fiction she got from the Public Library, and partly from the workroom talk at Smithie’s. So far as the former origin went, she had an idea of love as a state of worship and service on the part of the man and of condescension on the part of the woman. There was nothing “horrid” about it in any fiction she had read. The man gave presents, did services, sought to be in every way delightful. The woman “went out” with him, smiled at him, was kissed by him in decorous secrecy, and if he chanced to offend, denied her countenance and presence. Usually she did something “for his good” to him, made him go to church, made him give up smoking or gambling, smartened him up. Quite at the end of the story came a marriage, and after that the interest ceased.
That was the tenor of Marion’s fiction; but I think the work-table conversation at Smithie’s did something to modify that. At Smithie’s it was recognised, I think, that a “fellow” was a possession to be desired; that it was better to be engaged to a fellow than not; that fellows had to be kept – they might be mislaid, they might even be stolen. There was a case of stealing at Smithie’s, and many tears.
Smithie I met before we were married, and afterwards she became a frequent visitor to our house at Ealing. She was a thin, bright-eyed, hawk-nosed girl of thirtyodd, with prominent teeth, a high-pitched, eager voice and a disposition to be urgently smart in her dress. Her hats were startling and various, but invariably disconcerting, and she talked in a rapid, nervous flow that was hilarious rather than witty, and broken by little screams of “Oh, my dear!” and “you never did!” She was the first woman I ever met who used scent. Poor old Smithie! What a harmless, kindly soul she really was, and how heartily I detested her! Out of the profits on the Persian robes she supported a sister’s family of three children, she “helped” a worthless brother, and overflowed in help even to her workgirls, but that didn’t weigh with me in those youthfully-narrow times. It was one of the intense minor irritations of my married life that Smithie’s whirlwind chatter seemed to me to have far more influence with Marion than anything I had to say. Before all things I coveted her grip upon Marion’s inaccessible mind.
In the workroom at Smithie’s, I gathered, they always spoke of me demurely as “A Certain Person.” I was rumoured to be dreadfully “clever,” and there were doubts – not altogether without justification – of the sweetness of my temper.
II
Well, these general explanations will enable the reader to understand the distressful times we two had together when presently I began to feel on a footing with Marion and to fumble conversationally for the mind and the wonderful passion I felt, obstinately and stupidity, must be in her. I think she thought me the maddest of sane men; “clever,” in fact, which at Smithie’s was, I suppose, the next thing to insanity, a word intimating incomprehensible and incalculable motives… She could be shocked at anything, she misunderstood everything, and her weapon was a sulky silence that knitted her brows, spoilt her mouth and robbed her face of beauty. “Well, if we can’t agree, I don’t see why you should go on talking,” she used to say. That would always enrage me beyond measure. Or, “I’m afraid I’m not clever enough to understand that.”
Silly little people! I see it all now, but then I was no older than she and I couldn’t see anything but that Marion, for some inexplicable reason, wouldn’t come alive.
We would contrive semi-surreptitious walks on Sunday, and part speechless with the anger of indefinable offences. Poor Marion! The things I tried to put before her, my fermenting ideas about theology, about Socialism, about aesthetics – the very words appalled her, gave her the faint chill of approaching impropriety, the terror of a very present intellectual impossibility. Then by an enormous effort I would suppress myself for a time and continue a talk that made her happy, about Smithie’s brother, about the new girl who had come to the workroom, about the house we would presently live in. But there we differed a little. I wanted to be accessible to St. Paul’s or Cannon Street Station, and she had set her mind quite resolutely upon Eating… It wasn’t by any means quarreling all the time, you understand. She liked me to play the lover “nicely”; she liked the effect of going about – we had lunches, we went to Earl’s Court, to Kew, to theatres and concerts, but not often to concerts, because, though Marion “liked” music, she didn’t like “too much of it,” to picture shows – and there was a nonsensical sort of babytalk I picked up – I forget where now – that became a mighty peacemaker.
Her worst offence for me was an occasional excursion into the Smithie style of dressing, debased West Kensington. For she had no sense at all of her own beauty. She had no comprehension whatever of beauty of the body, and she could slash her beautiful lines to rags with hat-brims and trimmings. Thank Heaven! a natural refinement, a natural timidity, and her extremely slender purse kept her from the real Smithie efflorescence! Poor, simple, beautiful, kindly limited Marion! Now that I am forty-five, I can look back at her with all my old admiration and none of my old bitterness with a new affection and not a scrap of passion, and take her part against the equally stupid, drivingly-energetic, sensuous, intellectual sprawl I used to be. I was a young beast for her to have married – a hound beast. With her it was my business to understand and control – and I exacted fellowship, passion…
We became engaged, as I have told; we broke it off and joined again. We went through a succession of such phases. We had no sort of idea what was wrong with us. Presently we were formally engaged. I had a wonderful interview with her father, in which he was stupendously grave and H – less, wanted to know about my origins and was tolerant (exasperatingly tolerant) because my mother was a servant, and afterwards her mother took to kissing me, and I bought a ring. But the speechless aunt, I gathered, didn’t approve – having doubts of my religiosity. Whenever we were estranged we could keep apart for days; and to begin with, every such separation was a relief. And then I would want her; a restless longing would come upon me. I would think of the flow of her arms, of the soft, gracious bend of her body. I would lie awake or dream of a transfigured Marion of light and fire. It was indeed Dame Nature driving me on to womankind in her stupid, inexorable way; but I thought it was the need of Marion that troubled me. So I always went back to Marion at last and made it up and more or less conceded or ignored whatever thing had parted us, and more and more I urged her to marry me…
In the long run that became a fixed idea. It entangled my will and my pride; I told myself I was not going to be beaten. I hardened to the business. I think, as a matter of fact, my real passion for Marion had waned enormously long before we were married, that she had lived it down by sheer irresponsiveness. When I felt sure of my three hundred a year she stipulated for delay, twelve months’ delay, “to see how things would turn out.” There were times when she seemed simply an antagonist holding out irritatingly against something I had to settle. Moreover, I began to be greatly distracted by the interest and excitement of Tono-Bungay’s success, by the change and movement in things, the going to and fro. I would forget her for days together, and then desire her with an irritating intensity at last, one Saturday afternoon, after a brooding morning, I determined almost savagely that these delays must end.
I went off to the little home at Walham Green, and made Marion come with me to Putney Common. Marion wasn’t at home when I got there and I had to fret for a time and talk to her father, who was just back from his office, he explained, and enjoying himself in his own way in the greenhouse.
“I’m going to ask your daughter to marry me!” I said. “I think we’ve been waiting long enough.”
“I don’t approve of long engagements either,” said her father. “But Marion will have her own way about it, anyhow. Seen this new powdered fertiliser?”
I went in to talk to Mrs. Ramboat. “She’ll want time to get her things,” said Mrs. Ramboat…
I and Marion sat down together on a little seat under some trees at the top of Putney Hill, and I came to my point abruptly.
“Look here, Marion,” I said, “are you going to marry me or are you not?”
She smiled at me. “Well,” she said, “we’re engaged – aren’t we?”
“That can’t go on for ever. Will you marry me next week?”
She looked me in the face. “We can’t,” she said.
“You promised to marry me when I had three hundred a year.”
She was silent for a space. “Can’t we go on for a time as we are? We COULD marry on three hundred a year. But it means a very little house. There’s Smithie’s brother. They manage on two hundred and fifty, but that’s very little. She says they have a semi-detached house almost on the road, and hardly a bit of garden. And the wall to next-door is so thin they hear everything. When her baby cries – they rap. And people stand against the railings and talk… Can’t we wait? You’re doing so well.”
An extraordinary bitterness possessed me at this invasion of the stupendous beautiful business of love by sordid necessity. I answered her with immense restraint.
“If,” I said, “we could have a double-fronted, detached house – at Ealing, say – with a square patch of lawn in front and a garden behind – and – and a tiled bathroom.”
“That would be sixty pounds a year at least.”
“Which means five hundred a year… Yes, well, you see, I told my uncle I wanted that, and I’ve got it.”
“Got what?”
“Five hundred pounds a year.”
“Five hundred pounds!”
I burst into laughter that had more than a taste of bitterness.
“Yes,” I said, “really! and NOW what do you think?”
“Yes,” she said, a little flushed; “but be sensible! Do you really mean you’ve got a Rise, all at once, of two hundred a year?”
“To marry on – yes.”
She scrutinised me a moment. “You’ve done this as a surprise!” she said, and laughed at my laughter. She had become radiant, and that made me radiant, too.
“Yes,” I said, “yes,” and laughed no longer bitterly.
She clasped her hands and looked me in the eyes.
She was so pleased that I forgot absolutely my disgust of a moment before. I forgot that she had raised her price two hundred pounds a year and that I had bought her at that.
“Come!” I said, standing up; “let’s go towards the sunset, dear, and talk about it all. Do you know – this is a most beautiful world, an amazingly beautiful world, and when the sunset falls upon you it makes you into shining gold. No, not gold – into golden glass… Into something better that either glass or gold.”…
And for all that evening I wooed her and kept her glad. She made me repeat my assurances over again and still doubted a little.
We furnished that double-fronted house from attic – it ran to an attic – to cellar, and created a garden.
“Do you know Pampas Grass?” said Marion. “I love Pampas Grass… if there is room.”
“You shall have Pampas Grass,” I declared. And there were moments as we went in imagination about that house together, when my whole being cried out to take her in my arms – now. But I refrained. On that aspect of life I touched very lightly in that talk, very lightly because I had had my lessons. She promised to marry me within two months’ time. Shyly, reluctantly, she named a day, and next afternoon, in heat and wrath, we “broke it off” again for the last time. We split upon procedure. I refused flatly to have a normal wedding with wedding cake, in white favours, carriages and the rest of it. It dawned upon me suddenly in conversation with her and her mother, that this was implied. I blurted out my objection forthwith, and this time it wasn’t any ordinary difference of opinion; it was a “row.” I don’t remember a quarter of the things we flung out in that dispute. I remember her mother reiterating in tones of gentle remonstrance: “But, George dear, you must have a cake – to send home.” I think we all reiterated things. I seem to remember a refrain of my own: “A marriage is too sacred a thing, too private a thing, for this display. Her father came in and stood behind me against the wall, and her aunt appeared beside the sideboard and stood with arms, looking from speaker to speaker, a sternly gratified prophetess. It didn’t occur to me then! How painful it was to Marion for these people to witness my rebellion.
“But, George,” said her father, “what sort of marriage do you want? You don’t want to go to one of those there registry offices?”
“That’s exactly what I’d like to do. Marriage is too private a thing – ”
“I shouldn’t feel married,” said Mrs. Ramboat.
“Look here, Marion,” I said; “we are going to be married at a registry office. I don’t believe in all these fripperies and superstitions, and I won’t submit to them. I’ve agreed to all sorts of things to please you.”
“What’s he agreed to?” said her father – unheeded.
“I can’t marry at a registry office,” said Marion, sallow-white.
“Very well,” I said. “I’ll marry nowhere else.”
“I can’t marry at a registry office.”
“Very well,” I said, standing up, white and tense and it amazed me, but I was also exultant; “then we won’t marry at all.”
She leant forward over the table, staring blankly. But presently her half-averted face began to haunt me as she had sat at the table, and her arm and the long droop of her shoulder.
III
The next day I did an unexampled thing. I sent a telegram to my uncle, “Bad temper not coming to business,” and set off for Highgate and Ewart. He was actually at work – on a bust of Millie, and seemed very glad for any interruption.
“Ewart, you old Fool,” I said, “knock off and come for a day’s gossip. I’m rotten. There’s a sympathetic sort of lunacy about you. Let’s go to Staines and paddle up to Windsor.”
“Girl?” said Ewart, putting down a chisel.
“Yes.”
That was all I told him of my affair.
“I’ve got no money,” he remarked, to clear up ambiguity in my invitation.
We got a jar of shandy-gaff, some food, and, on Ewart’s suggestion, two Japanese sunshades in Staines; we demanded extra cushions at the boathouse and we spent an enormously soothing day in discourse and meditation, our boat moored in a shady place this side of Windsor. I seem to remember Ewart with a cushion forward, only his heels and sunshade and some black ends of hair showing, a voice and no more, against the shining, smoothly-streaming mirror of the trees and bushes.
“It’s not worth it,” was the burthen of the voice. “You’d better get yourself a Millie, Ponderevo, and then you wouldn’t feel so upset.”
“No,” I said decidedly, “that’s not my way.”
A thread of smoke ascended from Ewart for a while, like smoke from an altar.
“Everything’s a muddle, and you think it isn’t. Nobody knows where we are – because, as a matter of fact we aren’t anywhere. Are women property – or are they fellow-creatures? Or a sort of proprietary goddesses? They’re so obviously fellow-creatures. You believe in the goddess?”
“No,” I said, “that’s not my idea.”
“What is your idea?”
“Well”
“H’m,” said Ewart, in my pause.
“My idea,” I said, “is to meet one person who will belong to me – to whom I shall belong – body and soul. No half-gods! Wait till she comes. If she comes at all… We must come to each other young and pure.”
“There’s no such thing as a pure person or an impure person… Mixed to begin with.”
This was so manifestly true that it silenced me altogether.
“And if you belong to her and she to you, Ponderevo – which end’s the head?”
I made no answer except an impatient “oh!”
For a time we smoked in silence…
“Did I tell you, Ponderevo, of a wonderful discovery I’ve made?” Ewart began presently.
“No,” I said, “what is it?”
“There’s no Mrs. Grundy.”
“No?”
“No! Practically not. I’ve just thought all that business out. She’s merely an instrument, Ponderevo. She’s borne the blame. Grundy’s a man. Grundy unmasked. Rather lean and out of sorts. Early middle age. With bunchy black whiskers and a worried eye. Been good so far, and it’s fretting him! Moods! There’s Grundy in a state of sexual panic, for example, – ‘For God’s sake cover it up! They get together – they get together! It’s too exciting! The most dreadful things are happening!’ Rushing about – long arms going like a windmill. ‘They must be kept apart!’ Starts out for an absolute obliteration of everything absolute separations. One side of the road for men, and the other for women, and a hoarding – without posters between them. Every boy and girl to be sewed up in a sack and sealed, just the head and hands and feet out until twenty-one. Music abolished, calico garments for the lower animals! Sparrows to be suppressed – ab-so-lutely.”
I laughed abruptly.
“Well, that’s Mr. Grundy in one mood – and it puts Mrs. Grundy – She’s a much-maligned person, Ponderevo – a rake at heart – and it puts her in a most painful state of fluster – most painful! She’s an amenable creature. When Grundy tells her things are shocking, she’s shocked – pink and breathless. She goes about trying to conceal her profound sense of guilt behind a haughty expression…
“Grundy, meanwhile, is in a state of complete whirlabout. Long lean knuckly hands pointing and gesticulating! ‘They’re still thinking of things – thinking of things! It’s dreadful. They get it out of books. I can’t imagine where they get it! I must watch! There’re people over there whispering! Nobody ought to whisper! – There’s something suggestive in the mere act! Then, pictures! In the museum – things too dreadful for words. Why can’t we have pure art – with the anatomy all wrong and pure and nice – and pure fiction pure poetry, instead of all this stuff with allusions – allusions?.. Excuse me! There’s something up behind that locked door! The keyhole! In the interests of public morality – yes, Sir, as a pure good man – I insist – I’LL look – it won’t hurt me – I insist on looking my duty – M’m’m – the keyhole!’”
He kicked his legs about extravagantly, and I laughed again.
“That’s Grundy in one mood, Ponderevo. It isn’t Mrs. Grundy. That’s one of the lies we tell about women. They’re too simple. Simple! Woman ARE simple! They take on just what men tell ‘em.”
Ewart meditated for a space. “Just exactly as it’s put to them,” he said, and resumed the moods of Mr. Grundy.
“Then you get old Grundy in another mood. Ever caught him nosing, Ponderevo? Mad with the idea of mysterious, unknown, wicked, delicious things. Things that aren’t respectable. Wow! Things he mustn’t do!.. Any one who knows about these things, knows there’s just as much mystery and deliciousness about Grundy’s forbidden things as there is about eating ham. Jolly nice if it’s a bright morning and you’re well and hungry and having breakfast in the open air. Jolly unattractive if you’re off colour. But Grundy’s covered it all up and hidden it and put mucky shades and covers over it until he’s forgotten it. Begins to fester round it in his mind. Has dreadful struggles – with himself about impure thoughts… Then you set Grundy with hot ears, – curious in undertones. Grundy on the loose, Grundy in a hoarse whisper and with furtive eyes and convulsive movements – making things indecent. Evolving – in dense vapours – indecency!
“Grundy sins. Oh, yes, he’s a hypocrite. Sneaks round a corner and sins ugly. It’s Grundy and his dark corners that make vice, vice! We artists – we have no vices.
“And then he’s frantic with repentance. And wants to be cruel to fallen women and decent harmless sculptors of the simple nude – like me – and so back to his panic again.”
“Mrs. Grundy, I suppose, doesn’t know he sins,” I remarked.
“No? I’m not so sure… But, bless her heart she’s a woman… She’s a woman. Then again you get Grundy with a large greasy smile – like an accident to a butter tub – all over his face, being Liberal Minded – Grundy in his Anti-Puritan moments, ‘trying not to see Harm in it’ – Grundy the friend of innocent pleasure. He makes you sick with the Harm he’s trying not to see in it…
“And that’s why everything’s wrong, Ponderevo. Grundy, damn him! stands in the light, and we young people can’t see. His moods affect us. We catch his gusts of panic, his disease of nosing, his greasiness. We don’t know what we may think, what we may say, he does his silly utmost to prevent our reading and seeing the one thing, the one sort of discussion we find – quite naturally and properly – supremely interesting. So we don’t adolescence; we blunder up to sex. Dare – dare to look – and he may dirt you for ever! The girls are terror-stricken to silence by his significant whiskers, by the bleary something in his eyes.”
Suddenly Ewart, with an almost Jack-in-the-box effect, sat up.
“He’s about us everywhere, Ponderevo,” he said, very solemnly. “Sometimes – sometimes I think he is – in our blood. In MINE.”
He regarded me for my opinion very earnestly, with his pipe in the corner of his mouth.
“You’re the remotest cousin he ever had,” I said.
I reflected. “Look here, Ewart,” I asked, “how would you have things different?”
He wrinkled up his queer face, regarded the wait and made his pipe gurgle for a space, thinking deeply.
“There are complications, I admit. We’ve grown up under the terror of Grundy and that innocent but docile and – yes – formidable lady, his wife. I don’t know how far the complications aren’t a disease, a sort of bleaching under the Grundy shadow… It is possible there are things I have still to learn about women… Man has eaten of the Tree of Knowledge. His innocence is gone. You can’t have your cake and eat it. We’re in for knowledge; let’s have it plain and straight. I should begin, I think, by abolishing the ideas of decency and indecency…”
“Grundy would have fits!” I injected.
“Grundy, Ponderevo, would have cold douches – publicly – if the sight was not too painful – three times a day… But I don’t think, mind you, that I should let the sexes run about together. No. The fact behind the sexes – is sex. It’s no good humbugging. It trails about – even in the best mixed company. Tugs at your ankle. The men get showing off and quarrelling – and the women. Or they’re bored. I suppose the ancestral males have competed for the ancestral females ever since they were both some sort of grubby little reptile. You aren’t going to alter that in a thousand years or so… Never should you have a mixed company, never – except with only one man or only one woman. How would that be?..
