The Rebel Angels

"You talk as if you believed in the Devil," said the Warden.

"The Devil, like God, lies outside the legal sphere, Warden. But I'll tell you this: I've never seen God, but twice I've caught a glimpse of the Devil in court, once in the dock, and once on the Bench."

McVarish and Roberta Burns were at it, hammer and tongs, across the body of Lamotte, who seemed not to relish their conversation.

"It's no good talking to a zoologist about love as if you meant sex," said Professor Burns. "We see sex as it works among the humbler creation – If they are humbler – and you can count on the fingers of two hands the species that seem to show any tenderness for their mates. With the others it's just compulsion."

"And what about mankind?" said Lamotte. "Do you agree with the terrible Strindberg that love is a farce invented by Nature to fool men and women into propagating their species?"

"No, I don't," said Roberta. "Not a farce at all. Mankind did plenty of propagation before the notion of love had any place in his world, or we shouldn't be here. My point is that love and sex needn't be lumped together. You see it among students; some are sick with love and some are roasting with sex; some are both."

"I had a student once who wanted to be a devil with the girls," said Urky, "and he was taking some muck he got from a quack – a sort of soup made of bull's balls. Did him no good, really, but he thought it did, which was probably effective, but don't let Gyllenborg know I said so. At the same time I had another student who was mooning over a ballerina he hadn't a chance of approaching, but he beggared himself sending her an orchid every time she danced. Both silly, of course. But really, Roberta, do you mean to separate love from the old houghmagandy? Isn't that going too far?"

"The old houghmagandy, as you call it, is all very well in its way, but don't take it as a measure of love, or I'll go scientific on you and point out that the greatest lover in Nature is the boar, statistically speaking; he ejects eighty-five billion sperms at every copulation; even a stallion can only rise to thirteen billions or so. So where does man rank, with his measly dribble of a hundred and twenty-five millions? But man knows love, whereas the boar and the stallion hardly look at their mates, once they've done the trick."

"I am glad I have not had a scientific education," said Lamotte; "I have always thought, and shall continue to think, of woman as a miracle of Nature."

"Of course she's a miracle," said Roberta, "but you don't appreciate how much of a miracle. You're too spiritual. Look at a splendid girl – is she a spirit? Of course she is, but she's a lot of other things that are absolutely galvanizing, they are so miraculous. Look at me, even, though I assure you I'm not parading my middle-aged charms; yet here I sit, ears waxing, snots hardening, spit gurgling, tears at the ready, and after a dinner like this one, what miracles within! Gall and pancreas hard at it, faeces efficiently kneaded into nubbins, kidneys at their wondrous work, bladder filling up, and my sphincters – you have no idea what the whole concept of womankind owes to sphincters! Love takes all that for granted, like a greedy child that sees only the icing on the splendid cake!"

"I can manage very happily with the icing," said Lamotte. "To think of a woman as a walking butcher's shop revolts me."

"And the icing is so various that it is a life study in itself," said McVarish. "The tricks women get up to! I know a hairdresser who tells me that women come to the manicurist-and-superfluous-hair lady in his salon, and the things they ask for! The pubic hair plucked and shaped into hearts, or darts, and they will endure any amount of hot-wax treatment to get the desired result. Then they want it hennaed! 'There's fire down below', as the sailors sing – certainly as they sing when they behold the result!"

"They needn't bother," said Roberta. "People will put up with anything for the old houghmagandy. Or rather, Nature gently assists them to do so. Intercourse brings about a considerable loss of perceptive capacity; sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell are all dulled, whatever the sex-technique books pretend to the contrary. The plain lover looks handsome for the moment; the broken veins and the red nose are scarcely perceptible, the grunting is not comic, bad breath is hardly noticed. And that's not love, René, but Nature coming to the rescue of love. And man is the only creature to know love as a complex emotion: man is also, in the whole of Nature, the only creature to turn sex into a hobby. Oh, it's a complex study, let me tell you."

" 'Love not as do the flesh-imprisoned men,' " said Lamotte, pretending to stop his ears. "I'll bet neither of you can continue the sonnet."