Such were my thoughts, but in truth I soon ceased to trouble about all
these people. I found that my lamp had gone out leaving behind an awful
smell. I fled from it up the stairs and went to bed in the dark. My
slumbers--I suppose the one good in pedestrian exercise, confound it, is
that it helps our natural callousness--my slumbers were deep, dreamless
and refreshing.
My appetite at breakfast was not affected by my ignorance of the facts,
motives, events and conclusions. I think that to understand everything
is not good for the intellect. A well-stocked intelligence weakens the
impulse to action; an overstocked one leads gently to idiocy. But Mrs.
Fyne's individualist woman-doctrine, naively unscrupulous, flitted
through my mind. The salad of unprincipled notions she put into these
girl-friends' heads! Good innocent creature, worthy wife, excellent
mother (of the strict governess type), she was as guileless of
consequences as any determinist philosopher ever was.
As to honour--you know--it's a very fine medieval inheritance which women
never got hold of. It wasn't theirs. Since it may be laid as a general
principle that women always get what they want we must suppose they
didn't want it. In addition they are devoid of decency. I mean
masculine decency. Cautiousness too is foreign to them--the heavy
reasonable cautiousness which is our glory. And if they had it they
would make of it a thing of passion, so that its own mother--I mean the
mother of cautiousness--wouldn't recognize it. Prudence with them is a
matter of thrill like the rest of sublunary contrivances. "Sensation at
any cost," is their secret device. All the virtues are not enough for
them; they want also all the crimes for their own. And why? Because in
such completeness there is power--the kind of thrill they love most . . .
"
"Do you expect me to agree to all this?" I interrupted.
"No, it isn't necessary," said Marlow, feeling the check to his eloquence
but with a great effort at amiability. "You need not even understand it.
I continue: with such disposition what prevents women--to use the phrase
an old boatswain of my acquaintance applied descriptively to his
captain--what prevents them from "coming on deck and playing hell with
the ship" generally, is that something in them precise and mysterious,
acting both as restraint and as inspiration; their femininity in short
which they think they can get rid of by trying hard, but can't, and never
will. Therefore we may conclude that, for all their enterprises, the
world is and remains safe enough. Feeling, in my character of a lover of
peace, soothed by that conclusion I prepared myself to enjoy a fine day.