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 recognises 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 have such a natural odour of sanctity that they can disinfect our septic actions and render them morally harmless. When I do something stupid or dirty I can’t help feeling that it is stupid or dirty. My soul lacks virtues to make it wise or clean. And I can’t dissociate myself from what I do. I wish I could. One does such a devilish number of stupid things. Things one doesn’t want to do. If only one could be a hedonist and only do what was pleasant! But to be a hedonist one must be wholly rational; there’s no such thing as a genuine hedonist, there never has been. Instead of doing what one wants to do or what would give one pleasure, one drifts through existence doing exactly the opposite, most of the time—doing what one has no desire to do, following insane promptings that lead one, fully conscious, into every sort of discomfort, misery, boredom and remorse. Sometimes,” Calamy went on, sighing, “I positively regret the time I spent in the army during the war. Then, at any rate, there was no question of doing what one liked; there was no liberty, no choice. One did what one was told and that was all. Now I’m free; I have every opportunity for doing exactly what I like—and I consistently do what I don’t like.”
“But do you know exactly what you do like?” asked Mr. Cardan.
Calamy shrugged his shoulders. “Not exactly,” he said. “I suppose I should say reading, and satisfying my curiosity about things, and thinking. But about what, I don’t feel perfectly certain. I don’t like running after women, I don’t like wasting my time in futile social intercourse, or in the pursuit of what is technically known as pleasure. And yet for some reason and quite against my will I find myself passing the greater part of my time immersed in precisely these occupations. It’s an obscure kind of insanity.”
Young Lord Hovenden, who knew that he liked dancing and desired Irene Aldwinkle more than anything in the world, found all this a little incomprehensible. “I can’t see what vere is to prevent a man from doing what he wants to do. Except,” he qualified, remembering the teaching of Mr. Falx, “economic necessity.”
“And himself,” added Mr. Cardan.
“And what’s the most depressing of all,” Calamy went on, without paying attention to the interruption, “is the feeling that one will go on like this for ever, in the teeth of every effort to stop. I sometimes wish I weren’t externally free. For then at any rate I should have something to curse at, for getting in my way, other than my own self. Yes, positively, I sometimes wish I were a navvy.”
“You wouldn’t if you had ever been one,” said Lord Hovenden, gravely and with a knowing air of speaking from personal experience.
Calamy laughed. “You’re perfectly right,” he said, and drained his glass. “Shouldn’t we think of going to bed?”