Many people did not like Jessop. He had rather a brutal manner sometimes of telling brutal things—the truth, he called it. "They don't like it," he once said to me in a rare moment of confidence. "But why the devil shouldn't they? They pretend these sorts of things, battle, murder, and sudden death, are so real—more real than white kid gloves and omnibuses and rose leaves—and yet when you give them the real thing, they curl up like school girls. It does them good, you know, does them a world of good." They didn't like it and they didn't altogether like him. He was a sturdy thick set man, very strong, a dark reserved man with black eyebrows which met over his nose. He had knocked about the world a good deal. He appealed to me in many ways; I liked to meet him. He had fished things up out of life, curious grim things, things which may have disgusted but which certainly fascinated as well.
The last time I saw him we were both staying with Alderton, the novelist. Mrs Alderton was away—recruiting after annual childbirth, I think. The other guests were Pemberton, who was recruiting after his annual book of verses, and Smith, Hanson Smith, the critic.
It was a piping hot June day, and we strolled out after dinner in the cool moonlight down the great fields which lead to the river. It was very cool, very beautiful, very romantic lying there on the grass above the river bank, watching the great trees in the moonlight and the silver water slipping along so musically to the sea. We grew silent and sentimental—at least I know I did.
Two figures came slowly along the bank, a young man with his arm round a girl's waist. They passed just under where we were lying without seeing us. We heard the murmur of his words and in the shadow of the trees they stopped and we heard the sound of their kisses.
I heard Pemberton mutter:
A boy and girl if the good fates please
Making love say,
The happier they.
Come up out or the light of the moon
And let them pass as they will, too soon
With the bean flowers boon
And the blackbird's tune
And May and June.
It loosed our tongues and we began to speak—all of us except Jessop—as men seldom speak together, of love. We were sentimental, romantic. We told stories of our first loves. We looked back with regret, with yearning to our youth and to love. We were passionate in our belief in it, love, the great passion, the real thing which had just passed us by so closely in the moonlight.
We talked like that for an hour or so, I suppose, and Jessop never opened his lips. Whenever I looked at him, he was watching the river gliding by and he was growing. At last there was a pause; we were all silent for a minute or two and then Jessop began to speak:
"You talk as if you believed all that: it's queer damned queer. A boy kissing a girl in the moonlight and you call it love and poetry and romance. But you know as well as I do it isn't. It's just a flicker of the body, it will be cold, dead, this time next year."
He had stopped but nobody spoke and then he continued slowly, almost sadly: "We're old men and middle-aged men, aren't we? We've all done that. We remember how we kissed like that in the moonlight or no light at all. It was pleasant; Lord, I'm not denying that—but some of us are married and some of us aren't. We're middle-aged—well, think of your wives, think of—" he stopped again. I looked round. The others were moving uneasily. It was this kind of thing that people didn't like in Jessop. He spoke again.
"It's you novelists who're responsible, you know. You've made a world in which every one is always falling in love—but it's not this world. Here it's the flicker of the body.
"I don't say there isn't such a thing. There is. I've seen it, but it's rare, as rare as—as—a perfect horse, an Arab once said to me. The real thing, it's too queer to be anything but the rarest; it's the queerest thing in the world. Think of it for a moment, chucking out of your mind all this business of kisses and moonlight and marriages. A miserable tailless ape buzzed round through space on this half cold cinder of an earth, a timid bewildered ignorant savage little beast always fighting for bare existence. And suddenly it runs up against another miserable naked tailless ape and immediately everything that it has ever known dies out of its little puddle of a mind, itself, its beastly body, its puny wandering desires, the wretched fight for existence, the whole world. And instead there comes a flame of passion for something in that other naked ape, not for her body or her mind or her soul, but for something beautiful mysterious everlasting—yes that's it the everlasting passion in her which has flamed up in him. He goes buzzing on through space, but he isn't tired or bewildered or ignorant any more; he can see his way now even among the stars.
"And that's love, the love which you novelists scatter about so freely. What does it mean? I don't understand it; it's queer beyond anything I've ever struck. It isn't animal—that's the point—or vegetable or mineral. Not one man in ten thousand feels it and not one woman in twenty thousand. How can they? It's a feeling, a passion immense, steady, enduring. But not one person in twenty thousand ever feels anything at all for more than a second, and then it's only a feeble ripple on the smooth surface of their unconsciousness.
"O yes, we've all been in love. We can all remember the kisses we gave and the kisses given to us in the moonlight. But that's the body. The body's damnably exacting. It wants to kiss and to be kissed at certain times and seasons. It isn't particular however; give it moonlight and young lips and it's soon satisfied. It's only when we don't pay for it that we call it romance and love, and the most we would ever pay is a ￡5 note.
"But it's not love, not the other, the real, the mysterious thing. That too exists, I've seen it, I tell you, but it's rare, Lord, it's rare. I'm middle-aged. I've seen men, thousands of them, all over the world, known them too, made it my business to know them, it interests me, a hobby like collecting stamps. And I've only known two cases of real love.
"And neither of them had anything to do with kisses and moonlight. Why should they? When it comes, it comes in strange ways and places, like most real things perversely and unreasonably. I suppose scientifically it's all right—it's what the mathematician calls the law of chances.
"I'll tell you about one of them."
There was a man—you may have read his books, so I wont give you his name—though he's dead now—I'll call him Reynolds. He was at Rugby with me and also at Corpus. He was a thin feeble looking chap, very nervous, with a pale face and long pale hands. He was bullied a good deal at school; he was what they call a smug. I knew him rather well; there seemed to me to be something in him somewhere, some power of feeling under the nervousness and shyness. I can't say it ever came out, but he interested me.
I went East and he stayed at home and wrote novels. I read them; very romantic they were too, the usual ideas of men and women and love. But they were clever in many ways, especially psychologically, as it was called. He was a success, he made money.
I used to get letters from him about once in three months, so when he came travelling to the East, it was arranged that he would stay a week with me. I was in Colombo at that time, right in the passenger route. I found him one day on the deck of a P and O just the same as I'd last seen him in Oxford, except for the large sun helmet on his head and the blue glasses on his nose. And when I got him back to the bungalow and began to talk with him on the broad verandah, I found that he was still just the same inside too. The years hadn't touched him anywhere, he hadn't in the ordinary sense lived at all. He had stood aside—do you see what I mean?—from shyness, nervousness, the remembrance and fear of being bullied, and watched other people living. He knew a good deal about how other people think, the little tricks and mannerisms of life and novels, but he didn't know how they felt; I expect he had never felt anything himself, except fear and shyness: he hadn't really ever known a man, and he had certainly never known a woman.
Well, he wanted to see life, to understand it, to feel it. He had travelled 7000 miles to do so. He was very keen to begin, he wanted to see life all round, up and down, inside and out; he told me so as we looked out on the palm trees and the glimpse of the red road beyond and the unending stream of brown men and women upon it.
I began to show him life in the East. I took him to the clubs; the club where they play tennis and gossip, the club where they play Bridge and gossip, the club where they just sit in long chairs and gossip. I introduced him to scores of men who asked him to have a drink, and to scores of women who asked him whether he liked Colombo. He didn't get on with them at all, he said 'No thank you' to the men and 'Yes, very much' to the women. He was shy and felt uncomfortable, out of his element with these fat flanelled merchants, fussy civil servants, and their whining wives and daughters.
In the evening we sat on my verandah and talked. We talked about life and his novels and romance and love even. I liked him, you know; he interested me, there was something in him which had never come out. But he had got hold of life at the wrong end somehow, he couldn't deal with it or the people in it at all. He had the novelist's view, of life and—with all respect to you, Alderton—it doesn't work.
I suppose the devil came into me that evening. Reynolds had talked so much about seeing life that at last I thought: "By Jove, I'll show him a side of life he's never seen before at any rate." I called the servant and told him to fetch two rickshaws.
We bowled along the dusty roads past the lake and into the native quarter. All the smells of the East rose up and hung heavy upon the damp hot air in the narrow streets. I watched Reynolds' face in the moonlight, the scared look which always showed upon it: I very nearly repented and turned back. Even now I'm not sure whether I'm sorry that I didn't. At any rate I didn't, and at last we drew up in front of a low mean looking house standing back a little from the road.
There was one of those queer native wooden doors made in two halves; the top half was open and through it one saw an empty whitewashed room lighted by a lamp fixed in the wall. We went in and I shut the door top and bottom behind us. At the other end were two steps leading up to another room. Suddenly there came the sound of bare feet running and giggles of laughter, and ten or twelve girls, some naked and some half clothed in bright red or bright orange cloths, rushed down the steps upon us. We were surrounded, embraced, caught up in their arms and carried into the next room. We lay upon sofas with them. There was nothing but sofas and an old piano in the room.
They knew me well in the place,—you can imagi............