The Good Soldier | Page 6

her heart? Or thinks all the time for the
matter of that? Who knows?
Yet, if one doesn't know that at this hour and day, at this pitch of
civilization to which we have attained, after all the preachings of all the
moralists, and all the teachings of all the mothers to all the daughters in
saecula saeculorum . . . but perhaps that is what all mothers teach all
daughters, not with lips but with the eyes, or with heart whispering to
heart. And, if one doesn't know as much as that about the first thing in
the world, what does one know and why is one here?
I asked Mrs Ashburnham whether she had told Florence that and what
Florence had said and she answered:--"Florence didn't offer any
comment at all. What could she say? There wasn't anything to be said.
With the grinding poverty we had to put up with to keep up
appearances, and the way the poverty came about--you know what I
mean--any woman would have been justified in taking a lover and
presents too. Florence once said about a very similar position--she was
a little too well-bred, too American, to talk about mine--that it was a
case of perfectly open riding and the woman could just act on the spur
of the moment. She said it in American of course, but that was the
sense of it. I think her actual words were: 'That it was up to her to take
it or leave it. . . .'"
I don't want you to think that I am writing Teddy Ashburnham down a
brute. I don't believe he was. God knows, perhaps all men are like that.
For as I've said what do I know even of the smoking-room? Fellows
come in and tell the most extraordinarily gross stories--so gross that
they will positively give you a pain. And yet they'd be offended if you
suggested that they weren't the sort of person you could trust your wife
alone with. And very likely they'd be quite properly offended--that is if
you can trust anybody alone with anybody. But that sort of fellow
obviously takes more delight in listening to or in telling gross
stories--more delight than in anything else in the world. They'll hunt
languidly and dress languidly and dine languidly and work without

enthusiasm and find it a bore to carry on three minutes' conversation
about anything whatever and yet, when the other sort of conversation
begins, they'll laugh. and wake up and throw themselves about in their
chairs. Then, if they so delight in the narration, how is it possible that
they can be offended--and properly offended--at the suggestion that
they might make attempts upon your wife's honour? Or again: Edward
Ashburnham was the cleanest looking sort of chap;--an excellent
magistrate, a first rate soldier, one of the best landlords, so they said, in
Hampshire, England. To the poor and to hopeless drunkards, as I
myself have witnessed, he was like a painstaking guardian. And he
never told a story that couldn't have gone into the columns of the Field
more than once or twice in all the nine years of my knowing him. He
didn't even like hearing them; he would fidget and get up and go out to
buy a cigar or something of that sort. You would have said that he was
just exactly the sort of chap that you could have trusted your wife with.
And I trusted mine and it was madness. And yet again you have me. If
poor Edward was dangerous because of the chastity of his
expressions--and they say that is always the hall-mark of a
libertine--what about myself? For I solemnly avow that not only have I
never so much as hinted at an impropriety in my conversation in the
whole of my days; and more than that, I will vouch for the cleanness of
my thoughts and the absolute chastity of my life. At what, then, does it
all work out? Is the whole thing a folly and a mockery? Am I no better
than a eunuch or is the proper man--the man with the right to
existence--a raging stallion forever neighing after his neighbour's
womankind?
I don't know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is so
nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what is
there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal
contacts, associations, and activities? Or are we meant to act on
impulse alone? It is all a darkness.
II
I DON'T know how it is best to put this thing down--whether it would
be better to try and tell the story from the beginning, as if it were a

story; or whether to tell it from this distance