My cousin meditated, no doubt with his hands deep in his trousers’ pockets. “It is illusion,” he said. “It is a sort of glamour. After all, look at it squarely. What is she? What can she give you? She promises you vague somethings.… She is a snare, she is deception. She is the beautiful mask of death.”
“Yes,” said Chatteris. “I know.”
And then again, “I know.
“There is nothing for me to learn about that,” he said. “But why—why should the mask of death be beautiful? After all— We get our duty by good hard reasoning. Why should reason and justice carry everything? Perhaps after all there are things beyond our reason, perhaps after all desire has a claim on us?”
He stopped interrogatively and Melville was profound. “I think,” said my cousin at last, “Desire has a claim on us. Beauty, at any rate——
“I mean,” he explained, “we are human beings. We are matter with minds growing out of ourselves. We reach downward into the beautiful wonderland of matter, and upward to something—” He stopped, from sheer dissatisfaction with the image. “In another direction, anyhow,” he tried feebly. He jumped at something that was not quite his meaning. “Man is a sort of half-way house—he must compromise.”
“As you do?”
“Well. Yes. I try to strike a balance.”
“A few old engravings—good, I suppose—a little luxury in furniture and flowers, a few things that come within your means. Art—in moderation, and a few kindly acts of the pleasanter sort, a certain respect for truth; duty—also in moderation. Eh? It’s just that even balance that I cannot contrive. I cannot sit down to the oatmeal of this daily life and wash it down with a temperate draught of beauty and water. Art!… I suppose I’m voracious, I’m one of the unfit—for the civilised stage. I’ve sat down once, I’ve sat down twice, to perfectly sane, secure, and reasonable things.… It’s not my way.”
He repeated, “It’s not my way.”