He said nothing, but guided her towards the steps.
“Johnny,” she rushed on, “marriage is dull and narrow for me, don’t you see? It’s not love for you but passion. I don’t want you in particular, if it isn’t you, it’ll be someone else and I picked you because—”
“Because,” he said, with a tender sound of laughter.
“Because I love you. I will never love the others, don’t you see? Choose now, Jonathan, it’s now or never. I won’t hang around you.”
“You see, you’re a complete woman, Clara, and I can’t get you involved. You can’t take it, you get too involved, so the best thing is for us to part now.”
Clara said: “One minute—” She waved her arm, helpless.
“Yes,” he said, staring her straight in the face, not unkindly, “we’d better part friends, just as it is, we’d better not meet again.” Seeing how pale she was, he added quickly: “At least not for a year and I’ll be away by then, not for the next two or three years. Then I won’t be bothering you.”
“Good-bye.”
“Don’t take it like that, Clara,” he whispered.
“Good luck.”
“You’re very pale,” he said.
“I’m hot inside, so that compensates,” Clara said, tearing her hand away from his strong grasp and walking hurriedly round the other side of the cloisters.
He saw her shrug her shoulders. “Good-bye,” called Jonathan mildly, after her.
He turned and walked along the corridor to the small lecture-room under the stairs which he was allowed to use, in this off-hour, for his group.
16
A Girl without a Coat and with Smooth Bare Head
Crow did not know that he himself had founded the love cult, but he knew the sensation he produced when he entered a room of these people of his own age, with his casual bright smiles and his stiff walk. “Every entrance is a sexual experience,” he remarked to his friend Cooper, and Cooper not only knew that it was so, but noticed with what coaxing humility, broadcast fragments of flattery, and ingratiating twinkles the remarkable Jonathan exercised his charm. Cooper admired him. He had been too poor and also too bored to try to finish at the university and had left at the beginning of his second year. He still had the unsatisfied hunger for learning and argument of broken students. He admired Jonathan for his success, his amusing peculiarities, and his naïve cynicism, which Cooper put down to inexperience, just as the girls did. Cooper usually came to all of Johnny’s discussion groups and brought with him his young wife, Clara.
“What matters to me,” said Crow, to them both, “is not whether I stir their bowels, but whether I can reach through the bowel to their brains, I want to start a fermentation. I want to see the wheels go round, that is my function, to start trouble, to disturb the sleep of the world.” Thus whatever produced excitement in the young people pleased him; he started discussions on sex purely to start up that want and restlessness. He was the gadfly of desire.
“Without unsatisfied desire,” he said to Cooper, “there is no progress. Man is easy-going, he has nothing but the vapid curiosity of his simian ancestors, he has to be hungry, crossed in love, wounded in his self-esteem, and need patches on his boots before he will make a discovery or go to work. Don’t I know? I work best when someone injures my pride. The insulted and injured? The future inventors——Let ‘em lick them. Down with social improvement. In short, necessity is the mother of invention and hunger invented that which destroys it, bread.”
This windy March evening he expected an outsider at his class, Teresa Hawkins, the girl he coached in Latin.
There were still long cold gleams in the cloudy sky and a gritty biting wind blew over the quadrangle and round the pinnacles of the clock tower. The windows of the classroom, looking towards the Medical School, showed only a black sky of stars and clouds, no light was left. The lights of the classroom burned dimly. Near the window stood his platform and desk. All this he saw coming along the corridor. He looked round at them and smiled waggishly. The eight women were seated in the two front rows and behind were three men, two of Crow’s unfailing guests and a visitor, Everett Keane, a raw little blond man from one of Jonathan’s downtown classes, a poor young man from a dairy farm who was studying and saving to get to the university; Jonathan rubbed his hands. If Miss Hawkins came, he would pit these two rank outsiders against the paddock-fed, high-paced college product and we should see what we should see. If it were not that degrees were asked for, in good jobs, he himself would have backed the University of Life every time.
He hailed the men, said respectably: “Good evening, Keane!” and went to the girls, handing an essay back to one, taking his own essay from another and handing this to a third, chatting pleasantly with them, chuckling, talking about some past or coming Saturday outing. There were Miss Alice Haviland, a large-faced poor and dowdy woman; Elaine, a gentle blonde, in a blue dress; Joyce, a swarthy, impatient friend of Miss Haviland’s, who criticized him bitterly; “little Redtop”, the seventeen-year-old who was already engaged, but a playmate of Johnny’s, and several others.
As he turned to go to the little platform, there were steps in the corridor. He looked and saw Clara Endor there, her hair wind-blown. She must have gone quite a distance before she turned back. He nodded brightly to her and plunged into his notes, while she settled herself at the far end of the second seat. They were glancing at her and she spoke to them, all old classmates, in a constrained manner. They knew her trouble. At a new sound, he saw a form standing near the outer door, a girl without a coat and with smooth bare head. It was his protégée, Teresa Hawkins. He smiled.
“Come along in!”
She advanced, and hesitated in the door while she looked at the class, then came towards his desk. He kept smiling at her. There was something strange about her, though it was perhaps only her wind-blown hair. Her eyes were reddened, her cheeks rough and pale; her short straight blond hair had just been combed back, leaving the forehead naked, her pale mouth was parted in a timid smile; grey eyes shifted uneasily over high cheek-bones. She was too plain, dressed too poorly, and looked older than he had thought. But her timidity pleased him. He came to stand beside her as he introduced her, and Miss Haviland, smiling, beckoned with a finger, pointed with a finger to the bench beside her and said audibly: “There!” with a quick coy flirt of her head. Crow said: “Thank you, Miss Haviland,” and returned to his desk.
“We want to get at the truth,” he said self-deprecatingly, “and in a subject like this, so wrapped up in fear and sham, and social tradition and perhaps even race-memory, we have to begin at the roots and then dig, dig in.” He put on his glasses and at once became sharp.
“All our habits are the vestiges of outmoded social customs which remain with us as prejudice. Prejudice is as strong as law, it causes people to commit suicide and to imprison others. In the beginning, we had marriage by capture, and today the woman still believes that she must be coy and retreat in order herself to capture the attentions of the male. The male, on the other hand, retaining much older animal habits”—this was a signal for a general smile—“is curiously moved to show off and brag in front of the female, with sundry grunts and his best suit of clothes, even if he does not want her!”
The women stirred. A faint complacency came into his face. He went on and on in this strain. It was a disordered, impertinent paper; but no one seemed to notice that and to himself it seemed the pure fluid of thought; it was reason arraigning hypocrisy. He had a collection of ideas like the above, injected with eccentric legal, eugenic, and medical fancies with a few facts about the sexual act (still unknown to at least some members of his audience) and which was constructed on the plan of those wild religious books of visionaries and secretaries which have a crumb of everything and appeal to one great need. For sixteen pages, written out in his clerkly hand, now beginning to loosen a bit, he discussed love. Miss Haviland clicked her tongue now and then with a tchk, tchk, looking at him with a faint motherly s
mile and biting her lips, and Clara started when he said that perhaps the brothel was not a bad idea; while one of the men gave an ironical cheer. He went on coolly.
“What, in fact, is wrong with masturbation? What is wrong with homosexuality? Nothing, perhaps. We won’t know until we calmly inquire.” He looked at them with a laugh. “Let us mop up all the debris of our accepted beliefs!”
He then read the results of the famous questionnaire which he had sent out secretly to graduates, asking them about their sexual lives, at what age they first felt desire, how many children they had and the like; for, he explained, “Higher education, the prolongation of the childhood of the race, is destroying or distorting that impulse which reproduces the race. Youths who are able to procreate at fourteen or fifteen, and who must wait to establish themselves in a society which rejects bastard children, do not have offspring till they are twenty-seven or -eight, or even later. Women who could be mothers at seventeen are forced to compete with men in the professions and usually deprived of motherhood altogether, since the conservative male’s objection to a bluestocking in the home is well known.” He smiled again at the miserable women whose sufferings he had tabulated. “The worst is,” he continued, “that college graduates have less children than workers; that is, the elect of the race, elect through long struggle for survival, the strongest and best, with good bodies and minds, are going towards the vanishing point, while the voting majority is becoming increasingly that of the second-rate and the misfits.”
Forestalling objections, he said that he came from the slums, though none of them did and he knew what was there, he had never there seen real honesty, real idealism, real ability. He gritted his teeth and said grudgingly: “Because of them I am what I am, just a shock-worker of grind. The slums starved me and gave me base ideas. Your idealism, your fine emotions, your aesthetics are not for me, because there are basic ideas I must accept to get on in your society. I was poor. I might want to deviate. They are not buying me. Aesthetics are for well-known families of talent.” He looked ironically at Clara. She was unable to endure it, and dropped her head. He went on stubbornly.
“Especially is this sexual selection, by some need of nature, away from brains though not physical perfection, in the case of women. We, every man jack of us, prefer the beautiful woman to the drudge in books. What can a student of mathematics do for us and our children? It is for our firesides we want our women and so the sexual selection amongst the mothers of the race has had only one tendency, to divide brains from beauty, a scission which is not inevitable, but which hangs heavily over the fate of learned women and tends to force them into spinsterhood. The marriage rate among the graduates of Girton, Barnard——” and he went on to show these dreary figures, deducing that such women “failed in their biological purpose”. He attacked the university too.
“The university system is wrong itself, stealing from us our youth and strength to get their degrees, to learn their subjects, to follow their professions.”
“What do you want to do, Savonarola?” shouted Miss Haviland’s wire-haired friend.
He grinned, delighted at the stir. Only a moment of silence and he went on: “Science must now take a hand; women must not imitate men’s civilization which had only a bread-winning purpose, but must be selected for motherhood and impregnated by the state, from phials containing the seed of elect males, brilliant in body and mind. Women would not then have to capture young men, to marry them, and man could study in peace; arts, sciences, letters, all the work of men, would go ahead by leaps and bounds. As to women, if any of them showed exceptional ability, they would not suffer their present handicaps, but if suitable, would become the mothers of brilliant men.” He gave them the motto “Two races with different needs”.
He warned them against miscegenation, against marrying Japanese, Chinese, Bantus, or Malays, not only because they weaken the breed, “mongrels are always weaker than true strains”, but because white women could never know what was going on in the brains of those men of other ancient races. There was a physical difference in the constitution of the brain. Homo pekinensis, their ancestors, differed materially from the Cro-Magnon race. He knew an Australian woman who had married a Japanese gentleman and had never been happy; in the end, she left him. To us, they were unreliable; they considered deeds proper which were repugnant to us and perhaps we did not act to coincide with their views of honour. For instance, we laughed at ancestor-worship, Mikado-worship, yet that was almost an instinct with the Asiatic races.
“But the Mikado has just been reimposed by main force,” shouted the wire-haired girl, angrily. A discussion arose to which Jonathan listened patiently. He managed to finish his paper, but their attention was scattered and all kinds of issues arose. The wire-haired girl said: “There’s so much to say against your paper, Mr Crow, that it’s a waste of time to criticize it at all.” Miss Haviland said: “For shame, Joyce!” Clara got up and defended him. One of the men started to discuss schools in the workshop, factory, and field. His statistics and inquiries, experiments on monkeys, and reports of Galton went by the board. Crow began to feel that he had started again that magnificent fret.
It was not a class, as Crow thought, but a group of admirers of himself, sedulously collected, carefully selected; sentimental admirers who heard of the hard row he had to hoe in life and some loving women who would not attack him before the rest. He still fancied that he had got all those girls together as part of his study of Love; first the questionnaire to graduates, then an exploration of the female mind. He thought he was original in this; he had come out with it, what bothered them all. He might some day publish a book that would be quoted, on “Female Psychology”; it might rank with other standard works. He knew that in academic woods, he who pursues a single spoor, however faint and old, will in time run down a post and title and why not the sexual problem? It was a very popular one and adorned with the greatest names. He had lost some of his original modesty, he had begun to rely on his “biological knack” and thought himself something of a sly, clever man. By pursuing his way alone he meant, shouldering away every contentious student, and forgetting the existence of those who despised him (and who would mostly fall by the wayside, anyhow), to beat the men who got on by flights of talent and certainly to get ahead of the few of dazzling brilliance, quite clearly cut off from careers. He thought only, of course, of men without much influence, like himself. The family men, the Rasches, were out of his book. He was not so much jealous of them; they were merely another breed. But amongst the mongrels, the orphaned, he knew how to get on.
The sexual problem was wide. It allowed him to range from genius in by-blows, through sexual differences and the recidivist criminal child, by racial purity, to trial marriage and easy divorce; practically the whole of life.
When the class was over, they stood round for a few moments, rattling over the irritating things he had said. Clara, shaking back her ink-black hair, in her slow, vibrant voice with its rumble of suppressed passion said: “But Jonathan seems to think that men only feel a certain sort of desire, and only wish for momentary pleasure.” Elaine, the fair and reticent, said that men of the most gifted sort, Balzac, John Stuart Mill, Comte, were famous for their loyalty. “What about Shakespeare?” said Miss Haviland. Clara said he only put his brothel scenes in and his bawdy lines because he was forced to by the low taste of his audience; one of the men declared he put them in to drum up business for the entr’acte. The girls thought of Shakespeare as a pleasant, unfortunate English teacher, unfortunate because of Anne Hathaway, invalided because of genius.
“Everyone likes the obscene; that is real life,” said Teresa, the bare-boned girl, unexpectedly, opening her lips for the first time.
“Not a great artist,” stormed Clara.
“Those more than the others, because their violence is more,” said Teresa.
Clara frowned. “I don’t know, I can’t see it that way.”
“He wrote Venus and Adonis against his will?” ask
ed Teresa triumphantly.
“It doesn’t seem possible, I admit,” declared Miss Haviland.
Mr Everett Keane, like a stray cat, suddenly stood up stiffly near them, scolding on the outer edge of the group of three men, little and thin but bristling, his sun-reddened face aflame with anger, his rough yellow hair seeming to shoot sparks. In a rasping farm voice with the most miserable accent in the world, he asked them if that was what interested them, whether Shakespeare liked smut; if they were interested in the family, if they had read Engels. He was somewhat put out when the wire-haired girl, that other stray cat, flung “Yes” back at him in her strong voice. But apart from the wire-haired girl, not one had even heard of Engels and he began to talk about him, wanted to send his copy up to the group for them to read. This astonished and offended them; it amused them also. But distasteful to them, used to the jolly bear-pit of their discussions, was his angry, accusing style and the phrases he threw out at them, in raw, torn pieces, scratched out of the polemics of a poor man’s paper. Miss Haviland smiled in a motherly way; the other girls, after listening with a show of manners, began to turn their backs. They were really impatient with any speaker but Jonathan Crow. Mr Keane ranted. “Whether Shakespeare liked bawds or whether the mind of the Orient is a mystery,” he cried to them in poignant tones, “I wanted to go to the university, and I still do, if you don’t put me off. It isn’t that I’ll get out of the university.”
His violence and power of sudden eloquence moved them for a moment, like a wild wind that had blown in the glass of the windows; dark thoughts, restless desires whirled round them, but when the yellow-haired man walked off by himself, indignant, on his short legs, they all began to laugh, a healthy, happy murmur that trembled through the whole group; this laugh was led by Jonathan Crow who started off with a few words of appreciation of the young man; he had great ambition.
For Love Alone Page 22
