He had enormous appetites, he ate like a Porthos and drank like a Pantagruel, and talked hour after hour about the same thing, “Love of one’s neighbour,” and spent his spare time in standing with his hands behind him, in front of the pheasants’ cage. He had been a snipe hunter in his time, and once went on a big game hunt, but now he said he saw something more significant here.
He had, like all good sportsmen, even shot himself through the hand, but of late he pretended that he did not remember what the scar came from.
He seemed to suffer a good deal. Evil went deep and good went deep and he suffered the tortures of the damned. He wept and laughed and ate and drank and slept, and year by year his eyes grew sweeter, tenderer, and his mouth fuller, more gross.
The child Oscar did not like Kahn, yet sometimes he would become extraordinarily excited, talk very fast, almost banteringly, a little malignly, and once when Kahn had taken his hand he drew it away angrily. “Don’t,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because it is dirty,” he retorted maliciously.
“As if you really knew of what I was thinking,” Kahn said, and put his own hands behind him.
Emma liked Kahn, was attached to him. He mentioned her faults without regret or reproval, and this in itself was a divine sort of love.
He would remark: “We cannot be just because we are bewildered; we ought to be proud enough to welcome our enemies as judges, but we hate, and to hate is the act of the incurious. I love with an everlasting but a changing love, because I know I am the wrong sort of man to be good—and because I revere the shadow on the threshold.”
“What shadow, Kahn?”