“But is it your wish to cut human relations out of your life altogether?” he asked, uncertainly.
“Altogether.
I’ve got to be free.
I daren’t let another person get a hold over me.
That’s why I turned out the little sempstress.
She was the most dangerous of the lot.
She was gentle and affectionate.
She had the meekness of the poor who have never dreamt that life can be other than hard.
I could never have loved her, but I knew that her gratitude, her adoration, her desire to please, her innocent cheerfulness, were dangerous.
I could see that she might easily become a habit of which I couldn’t break myself.
Nothing in the world is so insidious as a woman’s flattery; our need for it is so enormous that we become her slave.
I must be as impervious to flattery as I am indifferent to abuse.
There’s nothing that binds one to a woman like the benefits one confers on her.
She would have owed me everything, that girl, I should never have been able to escape from her.”
“But, Simon, you have human passions like the rest of us.
You’re twenty-three.”
“And my sexual desires are urgent?
Less urgent than you imagine.
When you work from twelve to sixteen hours a day and sleep on an average six, when you content yourself with one meal a day, much as it may surprise you, your desires are much attenuated.
Paris is singularly well arranged for the satisfaction of the sexual instinct at moderate expense and with the least possible waste of time, and when I find that my appetite is interfering with my work I have a woman just as when I’m constipated I take a purge.”
Charley’s clear blue eyes twinkled with amusement and a charming smile parting his lips displayed his strong white teeth.
“Aren’t you missing a lot of fun?
You know, one’s young for such a little while.”
“I may be.
I know one can do nothing in the world unless one’s single-minded.
Chesterfield said the last word about sexual congress: the pleasure is momentary, the position is ridiculous, and the expense is damnable.
It may be an instinct that one can’t suppress, but the man’s a pitiful fool who allows it to divert him from his chosen path.
I’m not afraid of it any more.
In a few more years I shall be entirely free from its temptation.”
“Are you sure you can prevent yourself from falling in love one of these days?
Such things do happen, you know, even to the most prudent men.”
Simon gave him a strange, one might even have thought a hostile, look.
“I should tear it out of my heart as I’d wrench out of my mouth a rotten tooth.”
“That’s easier said than done.”
“I know.
Nothing that’s worth doing is done easily, but that’s one of the odd things about man, if his self-preservation is concerned, if he has to do something on which his being depends, he can find in himself the strength to do it.”
Charley was silent.
If anyone else had spoken to him as Simon had done that evening he would have thought it a pose adopted to impress.
Charley had heard during his three years at Cambridge enough extravagant talk to be able, with his common sense and quiet humour, to attach no more importance to it than it deserved.
But he knew that Simon never talked for effect.
He was too contemptuous of his fellows’ opinion to extort their admiration by taking up an attitude in which he did not believe.
He was fearless and sincere.
When he said that he thought this and that, you could be certain that he did, and when he said he had done that and the other you need not hesitate to believe that he had.
But just as the manner of life that Simon had described seemed to Charley morbid and unnatural, so the ideas he expressed with a fluency that showed they were well considered seemed to him outrageous and horrible.
He noticed that Simon had avoided saying what was the end for which he was thus so sternly disciplining himself; but at Cambridge he had been violently communist and it was natural to suppose that he was training himself to play his part in the revolution they had then, all of them, anticipated in the near future.
Charley, much more concerned with the arts, had listened with interest, but without feeling that the matter was any particular affair of his, to the heated arguments he heard in Simon’s rooms.
If he had been obliged to state his views on a subject to which he had never given much thought, he would have agreed with his father: whatever might happen on the Continent there was no danger of communism in England; the hash they’d made in Russia showed it was impracticable; there always had been rich and poor in the world and there always would be; the English working man was too shrewd to let himself be led away by a lot of irresponsible agitators; and after all he didn’t have a bad time.
Simon went on.
He was eager to deliver himself of thoughts that he had bottled up for many months and he had been used to impart them to Charley for as long as he could remember.
Though he reflected upon them with the intensity which was one of his great gifts, he found that they gained in clearness and force when he had this perfect listener to put them to.