‘I forget nothing,’ said Mr. Falx. ‘But I think tyrants are too high a price to pay.’
Mrs. Aldwinkle sighed and resumed her climbing. ‘What a queer fellow Calamy is, don’t you think?’ she said, addressing herself to Miss Thriplow. Mrs. Aldwinkle, who liked discussing other people’s characters and who prided herself on her perspicacity and her psychological intuition, found almost everybody ‘queer,’ even, when she thought it worth while discussing her, little Irene. She liked to think that every one she knew was tremendously complicated; had strange and improbable motives for his simplest actions, was moved by huge, dark passions; cultivated secret vices; in a word, was larger than life and a good deal more interesting. ‘What did you think of him, Mary?’
‘Very intelligent,’ thought Miss Thriplow.
‘Oh, of course, of course,’ Mrs. Aldwinkle agreed almost impatiently; that wasn’t anything much to talk about. ‘But one hears odd stories of his amorous tastes, you know.’ The party halted at the door of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s room. ‘Perhaps that was one of the reasons,’ she went on mysteriously, ‘why he went travelling all that time—right away from civilization. . . .’ On such a theme a conversation might surely be almost indefinitely protracted; the moment for uttering the final, fatal good-night had not yet come.
Downstairs in the great saloon the three men were sitting over their red wine. Mr. Cardan had already twice refilled his glass. Calamy was within sight of the bottom of his first tumbler; young Lord Hovenden’s was still more than half full. He was not a very accomplished drinker and was afraid of being sick if he swallowed too much of this young and generous brew.
‘Bored, you’re just bored. That’s all it is,’ Mr. Cardan was saying. He looked at Calamy over the top of his glass and took another sip, as though to his health. ‘You haven’t met any one of late who took your fancy; that’s all. Unless, of course, it’s a case of catarrh in the bile ducts.’
‘It’s neither,’ said Calamy, smiling.
‘Or perhaps it’s the first great climacteric. You don’t happen to be thirty-five, I suppose? Five times seven—a most formidable age. Though not quite so serious as sixty-three. That’s the grand climacteric.’ Mr. Cardan shook his head. ‘Thank the Lord, I got past it without dying, or joining the Church of Rome, or getting married. Thank the Lord; but you?’
‘I’m thirty-three,’ said Calamy.
‘A most harmless time of life. Then it’s just boredom. You’ll meet some little ravishment and all the zest will return.’
Young Lord Hovenden laughed in a very ventriloquial, man-of-the-worldly fashion.
Calamy shook his head. ‘But I don’t really want it to return, he said. ‘I don’t want to succumb to any more little ravishments. It’s too stupid; it’s too childish. I used to think that there was something rather admirable and enviable about being an homme à bonnes fortunes. Don Juan has an honoured place in literature; it’s thought only natural that a Casanova should complacently boast of his successes. I accepted the current view, and when I was lucky in love—and I’ve always been only too deplorably fortunate—I used to think the more highly of myself.’
‘We have all thought the same,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘The weakness is a pardonable one.’
Lord Hovenden nodded and took a sip of wine to show that he entirely agreed with the last speaker.
‘Pardonable, no doubt,’ said Calamy. ‘But when one comes to think it over, not very reasonable. For, after all, there’s nothing really to be very proud of, there’s nothing very much to boast about. Consider first of all the other heroes who have had the same sort of successes—more notable, very probably, and more numerous than one’s own. Consider them. What do you see? Rows of insolent grooms and pugilists; leather-faced ruffians and disgusting old satyrs; louts with curly hair and no brains, and cunning little pimps like weasels; soft-palmed young epicenes and hairy gladiators—a vast army composed of the most odious specimens of humanity. Is one to be proud of belonging to their numbers?’
‘Why not?’ asked Mr. Cardan. ‘One should always thank God for whatever native talents one possesses. If your talent happens to lie in the direction of higher mathematics, praise God; and if in the direction of seduction, praise God just the same. And thanking God, when one comes to examine the process a little closely, is very much the same as boasting or being proud. I see no harm in boasting a little of one’s Casanovesque capacities. You young men are always so damned intolerant. You won’t allow any one to go to heaven, or hell, or nowhere, whichever the case may be, by any road except the one you happen to approve of. . . . You should take a leaf out of the Indians’ book. The Indians calculate that there are eighty-four thousand different types of human beings, each with its own way of getting through life. They probably underestimate.’
Calamy laughed. ‘I only speak for my type,’ he said.
‘And Hovenden and I for ours,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘Don’t we, Hovenden?’
‘Oh yes. Yes, of course,’ Lord Hovenden answered; and for some reason he blushed.
‘Proceed,’ said Mr. Cardan, refilling his glass.
‘Well then,’ Calamy went on, ‘belonging to the species I do belong to, I can’t take much satisfaction in these successes. The more so when I consider their nature. For either you’re in love with the woman or you aren’t; either you’re carried away by your inflamed imagination (for, after all, the person you’re really violently in love with is always your own invention and the wildest of fancies) or by your senses and your intellectual curiosity. If you aren’t in love, it’s a mere experiment in applied physiology, with a few psychological investigations thrown in to make it a little more interesting. But if you are, it means that you become enslaved, involved, dependent on another human being in a way that’s positively disgraceful, and the more disgraceful the more there is in you to be enslaved and involved.’
‘It wasn’t Browning’s opinion,’ said Mr. Cardan.
‘The woman yonder, there’s no use in life
But just to obtain her.’
‘Browning was a fool,’ said Calamy.
But Lord Hovenden was silently of opinion that Browning was quite right. He thought of Irene’s face, looking out of the little window in the copper bell.
‘Browning belonged to another species,’ Mr. Cardan corrected.
‘A foolish species, I insist,’ said Calamy.
‘Well, to tell the truth,’ Mr. Cardan admitted, closing his winking eye a little further, ‘I secretly agree with you about that. I’m not really as entirely tolerant as I should like to be.’
Calamy was frowning pensively over his own affairs, and without discussing the greater or less degree of Mr. Cardan’s tolerance he went on. ‘The question is, at the end of it all: what’s the way out? what’s to be done about it? For it’s obvious, as you say, that the little ravishments will turn up again. And appetite grows with fasting. And philosophy, which knows very well how to deal with past and future temptations, always seems to break down before the present, the immediate ones.’
‘Happily,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘For, when all is said, is there a better indoor sport? Be frank with me; is there?’
‘Possibly not,’ said Calamy, while young Lord Hovenden smiled at Mr. Cardan’s last remark, but unenthusiastically, in a rather painful indecision between amusement and horror. ‘But the point is, aren’t there better occupations for a man of sense than indoor sports, even the best of indoor sports?’
‘No,’ said Mr. Cardan, with decision.
‘For you, perhaps, there mayn’t be. But it seems to me,’ Calamy went on, ‘that I’m beginning to have had enough of sports, whether indoor or out-of-door. I’d like to find some more serious occupation.’
‘But that’s easier said than done.’ Mr. Cardan shook his head. ‘For members of our species it’s precious hard to find any occupation that seems entirely serious. Eh?’
Calamy laughed, rather mournfully. ‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘But at the same time the sports begin to seem rather an outrage on one’s human dignity. Rather immoral, I would say, if the word weren’t so absurd.’
‘Not at all absurd, I assure you, when used as you use it.’ Mr. Cardan twinkled more and more genially over the top of his glass. ‘As long as you don’t talk about moral laws and all that sort of thing there’s no absurdity. For, it’s obvious, there are no moral laws. There are social customs on the one hand, and there are individuals with their individual feelings and moral reactions on the other. What’s immoral in one man may not matter in another. Almost nothing, for example, is immoral for me. Positively, you know, I can do anything and yet remain respectable in my own eyes, and in the eyes of others not merely wonderfully decent, but even noble.
Ah, what avail the loaded dice?
Ah, what the tubs of wine?
What every weakness, every vice?
Tom Cardan, all were thine.
I won’t bore you with the rest of this epitaph which I composed for myself some little time ago. Suffice to say that I point out in the two subsequent stanzas that these things availed absolutely nothing and that, malgré tout, I remained the honest, sober, pure and high-minded man that every one always instinctively recognizes me to be.’ Mr. Cardan emptied his glass and reached out once more for the fiasco.
‘You’re fortunate,’ said Calamy. ‘It’s not all of us whose personalities
