‘It’s propter in this case all right. Thanks to the books and the ideas, I never learnt how to deal with real situations, with solid people and things. Personal relationships—I’ve never been able to manage them effectively. Only ideas. With ideas I’m at home. With the idea of personal relationships, for example. People think I’m an excellent psychologist. And I suppose I am. Spectatorially. But I’m a bad experiencer. I’ve lived most of my life posthumously, if you see what I mean; in reflections and conversations after the fact. As though my existence were a novel or a textbook of psychology or a biography, like any of the others on the library shelves. An awful situation. That was why I’ve always liked the bitches so much, always been so grateful to them—because they were the only women I ever contrived to have a non-posthumous, contemporary, concrete relation with. The only ones.’ He smoked for a moment in silence.
‘But why the only ones?’ I asked.
‘Why?’ repeated Tilney. ‘But isn’t it rather obvious? For the shy man, that is to say the man who doesn’t know how to deal with real situations and people, bitches are the only possible lovers, because they’re the only women who are prepared to come to meet him, the only ones who’ll make the advances he doesn’t know how to make.’
I nodded. ‘Shy men have cause to be drawn to bitches: I see that. But why should the bitches be drawn to the shy men? What’s their inducement to make those convenient advances? That’s what I don’t see.’
‘Oh, of course they don’t make them unless the shy man’s attractive,’ Tilney answered. ‘But in my case the bitches always were attracted. Always. And, quite frankly, they were right. I was tolerably picturesque, I had that professional Irish charm, I could talk, I was several hundred times more intelligent than any of the young men they were likely to know. And then, I fancy, my very shyness was an asset. You see, it didn’t really look like shyness. It exteriorized itself as a kind of god-like impersonality and remoteness—most exciting for such women. I had the charm in their eyes of Mount Everest or the North Pole—something difficult and unconquered that aroused the record-breaking instincts in them.
And at the same time my shy remoteness made me seem somehow superior; and, as you know, few pleasures can be compared with the sport of dragging down superiority and proving that it’s no better than oneself. My air of disinterested remoteness has always had a succès fou with the bitches. They all adore me because I’m so “different”. “But you’re different, Edmund, you’re different,” ’ he fluted in falsetto. ‘The bitches! Under their sentimentalities, their one desire, of course, was to reduce me as quickly as possible to the most ignoble un-difference. . . .’
‘And were they successful?’ I asked.
‘Oh, always. Naturally. It’s not because a man’s shy and bookish that he isn’t a porco di prim’ ordine. Indeed, the more shyly bookish, the more likely he is to be secretly porkish. Or if not a porco, at least an asino, an oca, a vitello. It’s the rule, as I said just now; the law of nature. There’s no escaping.’
I laughed. ‘I wonder which of the animals I am?’
Tilney shook his head. ‘I’m not a zoologist. At least,’ he added, ‘not when I’m talking to the specimen under discussion. Ask your own conscience.’
‘And Chawdron?’ I wanted to hear more about Chawdron. ‘Did Chawdron grunt, or bray, or moo?’
‘A little of each. And if earwigs made a noise . . . No, not earwigs. Worse than that. Chawdron was an extreme case; and the extreme cases are right outside the animal kingdom.’
‘What are they, then? Vegetables?’
‘No, no. Worse than vegetables. They’re spiritual. Angels, that’s what they are: putrefied angels. It’s only in the earlier stages of the degeneration that they bleat and bray. After that they twang the harp and flap their wings. Pigs’ wings, of course. They’re Angels in pigs’ clothing. Hearts of hog-wash. Did I ever tell you about Chawdron and Charlotte Salmon?’
‘The ’cellist?’
He nodded. ‘What a woman!’
‘And her playing! So clotted, so sagging, so greasy . . .’ I fumbled for the apt description.
‘So terribly Jewish, in a word,’ said Tilney. ‘That retching emotionalism, that, sea-sickish spirituality—purely Hebraic. If only there were a few more Aryans in the world of music! The tears come into my eyes whenever I see a blonde beast at the piano. But that’s by the way. I was going to tell you about Charlotte. You know her, of course?’
‘Do I not!’
‘Well, it was Charlotte who first revealed to me poor Chawdron’s heart of hog-wash. Mine too, indirectly. It was one evening at old Cryle’s. Chawdron was there, and Charlotte, and myself, and I forget who else. People from all the worlds, anyhow. Cryle, as you know, has a foot in each. He thinks it’s his mission to bring them together. He’s the match-maker between God and Mammon. In this case he must have imagined that he’d really brought off the marriage. Chawdron was Mammon all right; and though you and I would be chary of labelling Charlotte as God, old Cryle, I’m sure, had no doubts. After all, she plays the ’cello; she’s an Artist. What more can you want?’
‘What indeed!’
‘I must say, I admired Charlotte that evening,’ he went on. ‘She knew so exactly the line to take with Chawdron; which was the more surprising as with me she’s never quite pulled it off. She tries the siren on me, very dashing and at the same time extremely mysterious. Her line is to answer my most ordinary remarks with something absolutely incomprehensible, but obviously very significant. If I ask her, for example: “Are you going to the Derby this year?” she’ll smile a really Etruscan smile and answer: “No, I’m too busy watching the boat-race in my own heart.” Well, then, obviously it’s my cue to be terribly intrigued. “Fascinating Sphinx,” I ought to say, “tell me more about your visceral boat-race,” or words to that effect. Whereupon it would almost certainly turn out that I was rowing stroke in the winning boat. But I’m afraid I can’t bring myself to do what’s expected of me. I just say: “What a pity! I was making up a party to go to Epsom”—and hastily walk away. No doubt, if she was less blackly Semitic I’d be passionately interested in her boat-race.
But as it is, her manoeuvre doesn’t come off. She hasn’t yet been able to think of a better one. With Chawdron, however, she discovered the correct strategy from the first moment. No siren, no mystery for him. His heart was too golden and hog-washy for that. Besides, he was fifty. It’s the age when clergymen first begin to be preoccupied with the underclothing of little schoolgirls in trains, the age when eminent archaeologists start taking a really passionate interest in the Scout movement. Under Chawdron’s criminal mask Charlotte detected the pig-like angel, the sentimental Pickwickian child-lover with a taste for the détournement de mineurs. Charlotte’s a practical woman: a child was needed, she immediately became the child. And what a child! I’ve never seen anything like it. Such prattling! Such innocent big eyes! Such merry, merry laughter! Such a wonderfully ingenuous way of saying extremely risqué things without knowing (sweet innocent) what they meant! I looked on and listened—staggered. Horrified too.
The performance was really frightful. Suffer little children . . . But when the little child’s twenty-eight and tough for her age—ah, no; of such is the kingdom of hell. For me, at any rate. But Chawdron was enchanted. Really did seem to imagine he’d got hold of something below the age of consent. I looked at him in amazement. Was it possible he should be taken in? The acting was so bad, so incredibly unconvincing. Sarah Bernhardt at seventy playing L’Aiglon looked more genuinely like a child than our tough little Charlotte.
But Chawdron didn’t see it. This man who had lived by his wits, and not merely lived, but made a gigantic fortune by them:—was it possible that the most brilliant financier of the age should be so fabulously stupid? “Youth’s infectious,” he said to me after dinner, when the women had gone out. And then—you should have seen the smile on his face: beatific, lubrically tender—“She’s like a jolly little kitten, don’t you think?” But what I thought of was the New Guinea Oil Company. How was it possible?
And then suddenly I perceived that it wasn’t merely possible; it was absolutely necessary. Just because he’d made fourteen hundred thousand pounds out of the New Guinea Oil scandal, it was inevitable that he should mistake a jolly little tarantula like Charlotte for a jolly little kitten. Inevitable. Just as it was inevitable that I should be bowled over by every bitch that came my way. Chawdron had spent his life thinking of oil and stock markets and flotations. I’d spent mine reading the Best that has been Thought or Said. Neither of us had had the time or energy to live—completely and intensely live, as a human being ought to, on every plane of existence. So he was taken in by the pseudo-kitten, while I succumbed to the only too genuine bitch. Succumbed, what was worse, with full knowledge. For I was never really taken in. I always knew that the bitches were bitches and not milk-white hinds.
And now I also know why I was captivated by them.
