"And you know," said Mr. Spenlove, breaking off in his narrative abruptly, "I had no words to reply. I was stricken with a species of intellectual consternation at the incredible gulf which separated me from that man emotionally. I was staggered by the vision which persistently came before me of those four unknown women, quite possibly beautiful young women, though of this I had no actual proof, dwelling in discreet seclusion and serving no useful purpose in the world beyond the gratification of a plutocrat's ego-mania. If that can be called useful. And there was also, in addition to these, this girl whom I knew. Five of them: and they were not even permitted to be wicked! And I had to wrestle with this outrageous problem of our relative status as human beings at the same time that my own attitude toward this girl was assuming an intensely personal character. My soul, or that fugitive and ineluctable entity which does duty for a sailorman's soul, was stamping up and down inside of me, waving its arms, protesting with all its suddenly released energy against this man, denying him any knowledge of what we call love, at all. I wanted to assail him with denunciations for the monstrous self-esteem which sentenced those delicate creatures to a shadowy and volitionless stagnation. I accused him of the destruction of their immortal souls, forgetting in my romantic warmth that in all probability he didn't believe they had any. But of course, being an Englishman, I remained perfectly quiescent and inarticulate. I believe I reached for another cigarette before picking up my hat. And I dare say I smiled. We have peculiar ways of defending ourselves in such crises. He assumed a puzzled air as he held out his hand.
"'Englishmen are ice,' he remarked, 'where women are concerned. I have frequently observed it. Sang froid as we say in French. The phrase must have been inspired by the contemplation of an Englishman....'
"'And we shook hands. I said nothing, which doubtless confirmed him in his illusions about us. But the point is, I was equally mistaken about him, I could not believe him capable of what we call love. I was, as I say, mistaken. But as I followed him out to the front of his house, where his patient minions waited with lanterns which shed flickering rays over enormous shrubs and about the trunks of tall cypresses, and stood at length beside a fantastic barouche, with a sleepy driver on the box, I had a moment of illumination. I asked myself why I applied this test of love to a man like him, a man in the midst of extraordinary predicaments—a man who perhaps had suffered the pangs of hell for love and had recovered, who quite possibly had run up and down the whole gamut of human emotions while I was idiotically spending my years tinkling on a couple of notes. The stupid injustice of my interior anger came home to me, and I sought again for the reason why I demanded of him my own occidental idealism. The answer struck me as unexpectedly as a sudden blow. It was because of my own attitude toward the girl. As I took my seat in the carriage and reached out mechanically to shake hands once more, I saw her as clearly as though she were there before me, the bought chattel of a cultivated polygamist, and the blood rushed to my head in a sudden surge. I leaned back as the horses started at the crack of the whip. I felt sick and humiliatingly impotent. I saw Love and Romance for what they are in this iron world of ours—ragged outcasts shivering in the streets, the abject dependents of the rich. And I saw myself for what I was, too, for the matter of that, a reed shaken by the winds of desire, an emotional somnambulist terrified at the apparition of his own destiny."
"No," said Mr. Spenlove in reply to a murmured protest, "I am not libelling humanity at all. We are a very fine lot of fellows, no doubt. As I mentioned a little while ago, the new generation seem to be a distinct advance in evolutionary types over us older and more imperfect organisms. To watch a modern youth with a woman, to hear him recount his extensive and peculiar experiences with women, to study his detached and factory-built emotions toward women—the outcome of our modern craze for quantity-production, is an instructive and somewhat alarming pastime for one weathering middle age. An improvement, of course. All progress means that, I am informed. But I am not telling you the adventures of a super-man, only a super in the play. What? No, I didn't run down love, as you call it, at all. My quarrel was not with love, or even the sexual manifestation of it which pre-occupies you all so much. I simply doubted your knowledge of it. I suggested that the majority of men never know very much about it save in a scared and furtive fashion. I hinted that you never fully realized the terrific importance of romantic ideas in the world; that you make a joke of the whole business, filling your rooms with pictures of well-nourished young women in amorous poses, filling your minds with mocking travesties and sly anecdotes of those great souls who have left us the records of their emotional storms and ship-wrecks. I am telling you the story of Captain Macedoine's daughter. Eh? Well, I am coming to that ... it seems we shall be here till morning.
"It once occurred to me," he went on, meditatively, "that a good deal of the unreality of people in books is due to the homogeneity of their emotions. A man in love, for example, is in love right to the end, or to the point where the mechanism of the story renders it necessary to introduce another state of affairs. Anybody who has been in love, or cherished a hatred, or espoused a doctrine, or done anything invoking the deep chords, knows that this is not so. There is the reaction. When I got aboard the Manola once more and stood in the middle of my stuffy little cabin on the port side of the engine hatch, I was a cold and discouraged pessimist. The oil lamp on my table showed me my domain. A cockroach was making its way methodically round and round a covered plate of sandwiches, while its brother or possibly a distant relation was enjoying a good tuck-in of the cocoa at the bottom of a cup. Down below I heard the bang of a bucket, and I reflected that the donkeyman, after cleaning his fires and sweeping his tubes, was washing himself in the stoke-hold. The night watchman in the galley was drying heavy flannels over the stove and the warm, offensive odour hung in the air. On the big mirror which I have mentioned, I saw a memorandum written with a piece of soap: 'Steering Gear.' I recalled that I must get the Mate to take up the slack in his tiller-head in the morning. I was overwhelmed with the hard, gritty facts of existence, an existence the most discouraging and drab on earth I imagine, unless one has some fine romantic ideal before one. And I stood there, irresolute, looking at my figure in the glass, which reminded me of a badly painted ancestral portrait, and wondered whether I was capable of a fine romantic ideal. There lies the trouble with most of us, I fancy. We lose our youth and we fail to lay hold of the resolution of manhood. And before we know it we have drifted moodily into forlorn by-ways of sensuality....
"Because I knew that if I went to see that girl next day I could no longer maintain a detached air of being a kind of benevolent and irresponsible guardian. All the unusual and melodramatic happenings of the evening were unable to blind me to the basic fact that our relations had changed, and I dared not follow them, even in thought, to their logical consequences. And yet I dared not retreat. I had that much imaginative manhood! I could not face a future haunted by her questing, derisive, contemptuous smile. As I lay down and watched the lamp giving out its last spasmodic flickers before it left me in darkness, I thought I saw her, say a year hence, in a vague yet dreadful environment, halting her racing thoughts to remember for a moment the man who had failed her in a time of need. I saw the shrug and the sudden turn of the shoulders, the curl of the lip, the evanescent flash of the eyes.... No, I couldn't do it. And I couldn't forego the exquisite seduction of a future glowing with the iridescent colours of romantic folly....
"And so," said Mr. Spenlove, after one of his pauses, "I went."