The Trespasser
Page 63The other man laughed with amusement, throwing his head back and showing
his teeth.
'I won't ask you what _your_ intentions are,' he said, with delicate
irony in his tone. 'You know, I am a tremendously busy man. I earn five
hundred a year by hard work; but it's no good. If you have acquired a
liking for intensity in life, you can't do without it. I mean vivid soul
experience. It takes the place, with us, of the old adventure, and
physical excitement.' Siegmund looked at the other man with baffled, anxious eyes.
'Well, and what then?' he said.
'What then? A craving for intense life is nearly as deadly as any other
craving. You become a _concentré_, you feed your normal flame with
always semi-transparent.' Siegmund laughed.
'At least, I am quite opaque,' he said.
The other glanced over his easy, mature figure and strong throat.
'Not altogether,' said Hampson. 'And you, I should think, are one whose
flame goes nearly out, when the stimulant is lacking.' Siegmund glanced again at him, startled.
'You haven't much reserve. You're like a tree that'll flower till it
kills itself,' the man continued. 'You'll run till you drop, and then
you won't get up again. You've no dispassionate intellect to control you
and economize.' 'You're telling me very plainly what I am and am not,' said Siegmund,
laughing rather sarcastically. He did not like it.
you see, and have gone the same way. You married and I didn't; but women
have always done as they liked with me.' 'That's hardly so in my case,' said Siegmund.
Hampson eyed him critically.
'Say one woman; it's enough,' he replied.
Siegmund gazed, musing, over the sea.
'The best sort of women--the most interesting--are the worst for us,'
Hampson resumed. 'By instinct they aim at suppressing the gross and
animal in us. Then they are supersensitive--refined a bit beyond
humanity. We, who are as little gross as need be, become their
instruments. Life is grounded in them, like electricity in the earth;
warmth or power for them. The ordinary woman is, alone, a great
potential force, an accumulator, if you like, charged from the source of
life. In us her force becomes evident.
'She can't live without us, but she destroys us. These deep, interesting
women don't want _us_; they want the flowers of the spirit they can
gather of us. We, as natural men, are more or less degrading to them and
to their love of us; therefore they destroy the natural man in us--that
is, us altogether.' 'You're a bit downright are you not?' asked Siegmund, deprecatingly. He
did not disagree with what his friend said, nor tell him such statements
were arbitrary.