He sat down again and his voice took almost a pleading tone. “You know I’m different. You must know I’m different! How could I see all these things as clearly as I do if it wasn’t so? I’ve undergone what that German calls ‘the Great Renunciation.’ I’ve escaped the will to live. I neither care to acquire myself this accursed power — or to revolt, in jealous envy, against those who possess it.”
He relapsed into silence and contemplated his garden and its enclosing hedge, with a look of profound melancholy. Dangelis had been considerably distracted during the latter part of this discourse by his artistic interest in the delicate lines of Lacrima’s figure and the wistful sadness of her expression. It was borne in upon him that he had somewhat neglected this shy cousin of his exuberant young friend. He promised himself to see more of the Italian, as occasion served. Perhaps — if only Gladys would agree to it — he might make use of her, also, in his Dionysian impressions.
“Surely,” he remarked, speaking with the surface of his intelligence, and pondering all the while upon the secret of Lacrima’s charm, “whatever this man may be, he’s not a hypocrite, — is he? From all I hear he’s pathetically in earnest.”
“Of course we know he’s in earnest,” answered Maurice. “What I maintain is, that it is his personal vindictiveness that creates his opinions. I believe he would derive genuine pleasure from seeing Nevilton House burnt to the ground, and every one of the people in it reduced to ashes!”
“That proves his sincerity,” answered the American, keeping his gaze fixed so intently upon Lacrima that the girl began to be embarrassed.
“He takes the view-point, no doubt, that if the present oligarchy in England were entirely destroyed, a new and happier epoch would begin at once.”
“I’m sure Mr. Wone is opposed to every kind of violence,” threw in Lacrima.
“Nonsense!” cried Mr. Quincunx abruptly. “He may not like violence because he’s afraid of it reacting on himself. But what he wants to do is to humiliate everyone above him, to disturb them, to prod them, to harass and distress them, and if possible to bring them down to his own level. He’s got his thumb on Lacrima’s friends over there,”—he waved his hand in the direction of Nevilton House, — “because they happen to be at the top of the tree at this moment. But if you or I were there, it would be just the same. It’s all jealousy. That’s what it is, — jealousy and envy! He wants to make every one who’s prosperous and eats meat, and drinks champagne, know what it is to live a dog’s life, as he has known it himself! I understand his feelings very well. We poor toads, who live in the mud, get extraordinary pleasure when any of you grand gentlemen slip by accident into our dirty pond. He sees such people enjoying themselves and being happy and he wants to stick a few pins into them!”
“But why not, my good sir?” answered the American. “Why shouldn’t Wone use all his energy to crush Romer, just as Romer uses all his energy to crush Wone?”
Lacrima sighed. “I don’t think either of you make this world seem a very nice place,” she observed.
“A nice place?” cried Mr. Quincunx. “It’s a place poisoned at the root — a place full of gall and wormwood!”
“In my humble opinion,” said the American, “it’s a splendid world. I love to see these little struggles and contests going on. I love to see the delicious inconsistences and self-deceptions that we’re all guilty of. I play the game myself, and I love to see others play it. Its the only thing I do love, except—” he added after a pause—“except my pictures.”
“I loathe the game,” retorted the recluse, “and I find it impossible to live with people who do not loathe it too.”
“Well — all I can say, my friend,” observed Dangelis, “is that this business of ‘renouncing,’ of which you talk, doesn’t appeal to me. It strikes me as a backing down and scurrying away, from the splendid adventure of being alive at all. What are you alive for,” he added, “if you are going to condemn the natural combatative instinct of men and women as evil and horrible? They are the instincts by which we live. They are the motives that propel the whole universe.”
“Mr. Wone would say,” interposed Lacrima, “and I’m not sure that I don’t agree with him, that the real secret of the universe is deeper than all these unhappy struggles. I don’t like the unctuous way he puts these things, but he may be right all the same.”
“There’s no secret of the universe, Miss Traffio,” the American threw in. “There are many things we don’t understand. But no one principle, — not even the principle of love itself, can be allowed to monopolize the whole field. Life, I always feel, is better interpreted by Art than by anything else, and Art is equally interested in every kind of energy.”
Lacrima’s face clouded, and her hands fell wearily upon her lap.
“Some sorts of energy,” she observed, in a low voice, “are brutal and dreadful. If Art expresses that kind, I’m afraid I don’t care for Art.”
The American gave her a quick, puzzled glance. There was a sorrowful intensity about her tone which he found difficult to understand.
“What I meant was,” he said, “that logically we can only do one of two things, — either join in the game and fight fiercely and craftily for our own hand, or take a convenient drop of poison and end the whole affair.”
The melancholy eyes of Mr. Quincunx opened very wide at this, and a fluttering smile twitched the corners of his mouth.
“We poor dogs,” he said, “who are not wanted in this world, and don’t believe in any other, are just the people who are most unwilling to finish ourselves off in the way you suggest. We can’t help a sort of sneaking hope, that somehow or another, through no effort of our own, things will become better for us. The same cowardice that makes us draw back from life, makes us draw back from the thought of death. Can’t you understand that, — you American citizen?”
Dangelis looked from one to another of his companions. He could not help thinking in his heart of the gay animated crowds, who, at that very moment, in the streets of Toledo, Ohio, were pouring along the side-walks and flooding the picture shows. These quaint Europeans, for all their historic surroundings, were certainly lacking in the joy of life.
“I can’t conceive,” remarked Mr. Quincunx suddenly, and with that amazing candour which distinguished him, “how a person as artistic and sensitive as you are, can stay with those people over there. Anyone can see that you’re as different from them as light from darkness.”
“My dear sir,” replied the American, interrupting a feeble little protest which Lacrima was beginning to make at the indiscretion of her friend, “I may or may not understand your wonder. The point is, that my whole principle of life is to deal boldly and freely with every kind of person. Can’t you see that I like to look on at the spectacle of Mr. Romer’s energy and prosperity, just as I like to look on at the revolt against these things in the mind of our friend Wone. I tell you it tickles my fancy to touch this human pantomime on every possible side. The more unjust Romer is towards Wone, the more I am amused. And the more unjust Wone is towards Romer, the more I am amused. It is out of the clash of these opposite injustices that nature, — how shall I put it? — that nature expands and grows.”
Mr. Quincunx gazed at the utterer of these antinomian sentiments, with humorous interest. Dangelis gathered, from the twitching of his heavy moustache, that he was chuckling like a goblin. The queer fellow had a way of emerging out of his melancholy, at certain moments, like a badger out of his hole; and at such times he would bring the most ideal or speculative conversation down with a jerk to the very bed-rock of reality.
“What’s amusing you so?” enquired the citizen of Ohio.