FullReads

Mitchell: “Jes-so: thanks to the problemaniacs.”

“He thought of killing her and himself, and so taking her with him”

“Where?” asked Mitchell. “He must have loved her a lot. . . . Good Lord! That shows the awful effects of the sex problem on the mind of a healthy young man like you;” and Mitchell stood up.

“He lay awake by her side at nights thinking and fighting the thing out.”

“And you’ve been lying awake, thinking, with me and ‘the Oracle’ by your side. We’ll have to plant the tommy-hawk, and watch you by turns at night till you get over this.”

“One night he rested on his elbow, and watched her sleeping, and tried to reconstruct his ideal out of her, and, just when he was getting into a happier frame of mind, her mouth fell open, and she snored. . . . I didn’t get any further than the snore,” I said.

“No, of course you didn’t,” said Mitchell, “and none of the sex problemers ever will–unless they get as far as ‘blanky.’ You might have made the snore cure him; did it?”

“No, it was making things worse in my idea of the yarn. He fell back and lay staring at the ceiling in a hopeless kind of a way.”

“Then he was a fit case for the lunatic asylum. . . . Now, look here, Harry, you’re a good-natured, soft old fool when you’re in your right mind; just you go on being a good-natured, soft old fool, and don’t try to make a problem out of yourself or anybody else, or you’ll come to a bad end. A pocket-book’s to keep your accounts in, not to take notes in (you take them in your head and use ’em in your arms), not to write sex-problem rot in–that’s spoilt many a good pocket-book, and many a good man. You’ve got a girl you’re talking about going back to as soon as we’ve finished this contract. Don’t you make a problem of her; make a happy wife and mother of her. . . . I was very clever when I was young”–and here Mitchell’s voice took a tinge of bitterness, or sadness. “I used to make problems out of things. . . . I ain’t much to boast of now. . . . Seems to me that a good many men want to make angels of their wives without first taking trouble of making saints of themselves. We want to make women’s ways our ways–it would be just as fair to make our ways theirs. Some men want to be considered gods in their own homes; you’ll generally find that sort of men very small potatoes outside; if they weren’t they wouldn’t bother so much about being cocks on their own little dunghills. . . . And again, old mates seldom quarrel, because they understand each other’s moods. Now, if you went brooding round for any length of time I’d say to you. “Now then, Harry, what have I been doing to you? Spit it out, old man.’ And you’d do the same by me; but how many men would take even that much trouble with their wives?”

A breeze stirred the mulga and brought the sound of a good voice singing in the surveyors’ camp:

Should old acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to min’?
Should old acquaintance be forgot
And the days of Auld Lang Syne?

“That damned old tune will upset the Oracle for the rest of the night,” I said.

“Now, there’s the Oracle,” said Mitchell. “He was wronged by a woman as few men are wronged; his life was ruined–but he isn’t the man to take any stock in sex problems on account of her. He thinks he’s great on problems, but he isn’t. It all amounts to this–that he’s sorry for most men and all women and tries to act up to it to the best of his ability; and if he ain’t a Christian, God knows what is–I don’t. No matter what a woman does to you, or what you think she does to you, there come times, sooner or later, when you feel sorry for her–deep down in your heart–that is if you’re a man. And, no matter what action or course you might take against her, and no matter how right or justified you might seem in doing it, there comes a time when, deep down in your heart, you feel mean and doubtful about your own part. You can take that as a general thing as regards men against women, and man against man, I think. And I believe that deep-down feeling of being doubtful, or mean, or sorry, that comes afterwards, when you are cooler and know more about the world, is a right and natural thing, and we ought to act more in accordance with it.”