The Rebel Angels

"Of course I love you, fathead, but I'm serious about marriage, and marriage with anyone whom I do not think the most splendid friend I've ever had doesn't interest me. Love and sex are very fine but they won't last. Friendship – the kind of friendship I am talking about – is charity and loving-kindness more than it's sex and it lasts as long as life. What's more, it grows, and sex dwindles: has to. So – will you marry me and be friends? We'll have love and we'll have sex, but we won't build on those alone. You don't have to answer now. But I wish you'd think very seriously about it, because if you say no –"

"You'll go to Africa and shoot lions."

"No; I'll think you've made a terrible mistake."

"You think well of yourself, don't you?"

"Yes, and I think well of you – better of you than of anybody. These are liberated days, Maria; I don't have to crawl and whine and pretend I can't live without you. I can, and if I must, I'll do it. But I can live so much better with you, and you can live so much better with me, that it's stupid to play games about it."

"You're a very cool customer, Arthur."

"Yes."

"You don't know much about me."

"Yes, I do."

"You don't know my mother, or my Uncle Yerko."

"Give me a chance to meet them."

"My mother is a shop-lifter."

"Why? She's got lots of money."

"How do you know?"

"In a business like mine there are ways of finding out. You aren't badly off yourself. But your mother is something more than a shop-lifter; you see, I know that, too. She's by way of being famous among my musical friends. In such a person the shop-lifting is an eccentricity, like the collections of pornography some famous conductors are known to possess. Call it a hobby. But must I point out that I'm not proposing to marry your mother?"

"Arthur, you're very cool, but there are things you don't know. Comes of having no family, I suppose."

"Where did you get the idea I have no family?"

"You told me yourself."

"I told you I had no parents I could remember clearly. But family – I have platoons of family, and though most of them are dead, yet in me they are alive."

"Do you really think that?"

"Indeed I do, and I find it very satisfying. You told me you hadn't much use for heredity, though how you reconcile that with rummaging around in the past, as you do with Clement Hollier, I can't imagine. If the past doesn't count, why bother with it?"

"Well – I think I said more than I meant."

"That's what I suspected. You wanted to brush aside your Gypsy past."

"I've thought more carefully about that."

"So you should. You can't get rid of it, and if you deny it, you must expect it to revenge itself on you."

"My God, Arthur, you talk exactly like my mother!"

"Glad to hear it."

"Then don't be, because what sounds all right from her sounds ridiculous from you. Arthur, did anybody ever tell you that you have a pronounced didactic streak?"

"Bossy, would you call it?"

"Yes."

"A touch of the know-it-all?"

"Yes."

"No. Nobody's ever hinted at any such thing. Decisive and strongly intuitive, are the expressions they use, when they are choosing their words carefully."

"I wonder what my mother would say about you?"

"Generous recognition of a fellow-spirit, I should guess."

"I wouldn't count on it. But about this heredity business – have you thought about it seriously? Girls grow to be very like their mothers, you know."

"What better could a man ask than to be married to a phuri dai; now, how long do you suppose it might take you to make up your mind?"

"I've made it up. I'll marry you."

Some confusion and kissing. After a while –

"I like a woman who can make quick decisions."

"It was when you called me fathead. I've never been called that before. Flattering things like Sophia, and unflattering things like irreverent cunt, but never fathead."

"That was friendly talk."

"Then what you said about being friends settled it. I've never had a real friend. Rebel Angels, and such like, but nobody ever offered me friendship. That's irresistible."

The New Aubrey VI

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