The Apostle and the Wild Ducks/A Case of Comrades

There was once a lady of a very beautiful character (delicate, yet decisive, for that is the definition of a lady) who asked me whether I did not believe in the possibility of a simple comradeship between the sexes. Being somewhat in a corner, I replied that, as I understood the word comradeship, I did not.

I gave some of my reasons. I did not give my first and firmest and most unhesitating reason, which was this: that I knew quite well that if I had treated the lady herself for four consecutive minutes as a comrade she would have ordered me out of the house. But I gave some other reasons. I remarked that comradeship was a quite special thing; that it was quite different from friendship. I said (and this, oddly enough, I believe to be profoundly true) that a man can be the friend of a woman, but not her comrade. For friendship implies individuality; whereas comradeship really implies the temporary subordination, if not the temporary swamping of individuality. Friends are the better for being two; but comrades are the better for being two million.

In the Greek grammar, which I learnt with difficulty and forgot with ease, there was one thing, I remember, which would by itself prove that the Greeks were a great people. I mean the fact that there is in Greek a dual as well as a plural. Two is quite different from any other number, just as one is quite different from any other number: that truth is the basis of marriage. When I knew there was a Greek dual I could easily realise that the Greeks gave philosophy to the world.

My concern here is that comradeship is essentially plural. Now, women are not plural. The very word `women' has about it, I think, a sort of bad taste: it smacks of polygamous Turks or tired and cynical men-about-town. There are no such things as women. There is only the woman you are at this particular moment afraid of or in love with, or inclined to reverence or inclined to assassinate. I think a real crowd of women would be like fifty suns or half a hundred moons--it would be weaker for its numbers. The sun would not have room to shine.

In any case, what I had to say about comradeship to this particular lady was tolerably clear. I merely pointed out that comradeship is a particular sort of human association; and the essential paradox of it is this; that it is at once violent and cool. People talking in twos talk gently, because they feel emphatically: people talking in tens or twenties talk emphatically because they do not care a dump about anything. Friendship becomes comradeship when you have forgotten the presence of your friend. You are addressing the abstract thing, the club, which, when two or three are gathered together (of the male sort at least) is always in the midst of them. Men's debating clubs have a pedantic phrase which exactly expresses this truth: they talk of `speaking to the motion'. It is true; men do speak to a motion, not about it; they talk to a topic. Women talk to each other; that is why their conversations are frightfully fascinating, but too terrible for us to listen to for long without running away.

Do you remember how Thackeray cries out, `O les laches que les hommes!' when George Warrington and Lord Castlewood rush from the room merely because the young American girl has begun a sweet satiric conversation with old Beatrix Esmond? It is almost the truest thing in Thackeray. Our sex is not strong or bold enough to endure that agony of directly personal conversation in which women are supreme. We must have a topic-- an impersonal one. And as I told my admirable lady friend, a male friend becomes a comrade when one has forgotten him. To forget a male friend is only to behave like a comrade. But to forget a woman friend is only to behave like a cad. She is herself; he is the club.

But if either that lady or any other lady really wants to know whether she and her sex should share masculine camaraderie; whether they would really be stronger and happier by doing so; whether, in short, we are in such a matter keeping them out of something they would naturally enjoy, I am just now in a position to enlighten them, by giving them an instance, realistically exact and universally typical, of what our masculine comradeship really is.

If any lady wants to know what she is letting herself in for if she goes in for Comradeship, what really happens when comrades meet together, this is what happens. It happened yesterday morning. I was breakfasting with a mob of undergraduates of one of our great Universities, and the whole company was broken up into groups of two or three extravagantly engaged in some argument. I myself was engaged in two arguments. I was trying to prove to an Agnostic on my right that there was such a place as Heaven, and to an Imperialist on my left that there was such a place as England: when suddenly all our minor clamours were cloven with a monstrous and crashing noise from the other end of the table. Ten men were talking at once, three were beating on the table in pure passion, one was screaming above the din, and then (as is common in such crises) there was, for an instant, an unmeaning silence, and then the voice of one of the best orators of the Union rose, piercing and pathetic, throbbing to the echoes of the roof, alone:

`I do not say that the corridor ran the whole length of the train. What I say, what I say emphatically and with the full responsibility of my intellect, is that it ran on the left-hand side of our carriage. And I know that I speak the truth.'

We all rushed to the spot. I dropped England with one hand and Heaven with the other. I craned my neck to find out what it was all about. It was about this very profound and urgent question: whether when three persons present travelled to Scotland about two years ago in a luncheon car, the shape of that car had been such that there was a corridor down the left-hand side or a kind of passage down the middle. Only three persons present had ever seen the car, and they could not agree; but we soon took it out of their puny hands. We argued it in the abstract. We discussed whether in the nature of things the passage would have been in the middle. I founded a sect of my own, midway between the Orthodox Passagist position and the Extreme Corridorians' position. Some held that the nature of the luncheon should be taken into account in all evidence of the shape of the luncheon-car. We made maps of the car with forks and spoons on the table, and little lumps of sugar to show where the people sat. The whole discussion took nearly two hours.

But, indeed, temporal measurements cannot express the length, for we talked as if we were the immortal Gods and had all eternity before us: for to be outside time is one of the strange elements of fraternity. We were only interrupted by some academic custom which required that the Union officials should be photographed. And even then one of them moved. He kept on quivering and stirring until the photographer broke into pathetic complaint. Then he, in return, broke out, `I never denied that there was a case for the corridor at the side. What I said--' But we crushed him, reluctantly. All this is, to the best of my recollection, quite true.

I fancy that I do not see any very approving expression on the faces of my lady friends. They are not moved by this Homeric war. They feel, perhaps, that the question of whether one luncheon-car two years ago was of a particular shape was not an urgent question. They feel that when argued by eighteen youths for two hours it might even have become a tiring question. O mightiest of all things, O mothers of the gods, they are only little things that you do not understand, only a few sports and follies of the stags of the herd. Be you content as you are secure: you understand everything except comradeship.