“To think of your being my cousin!” he said, with some remote echo in his own voice of the surprise which he recalled in Dicky Westland’s tone. It seemed wonderful indeed as he looked at her, and smiled. He shook his head presently, in response to her question whether he had any recent news from Caermere, and continued to observe her with a rapt sense of the miraculous being embodied before his eyes.
“But the duke is very low indeed,” she told him in a hushed voice. “I had it yesterday from—from one of the household.”
The tidings barely affected him. That side of his mind was still fast in the rut of last night’s mutiny.
“I have quite decided to go away,” he announced, calmly. “I get no good out of the life here. It does not suit me. Whatever comes to me, why, that I shall accept, but to use it in my own way, living my own life. Now that I am a free man, it astonishes me that I did not rebel long ago.”
“Rebel—against what?” she asked him, with a kind of confidential candor which put him even more at his ease.
“Oh, against everything,” he smiled back at her. “This existence that they arranged for me—it is like being embalmed and wrapped in mummy-cloths. Personally I do not survive a thousand years—but I am but one link in a long chain of respectable people who have lived like that, without living at all, for many thousands. It is being buried alive. Why, you will see what I mean—a man is a creature different from other human creatures. He has an individual nature of his own. His tastes, his inclinations, his impulses and ideas, are not quite like those of the people about him. He would be happy to follow these according to his own wishes. But then everybody seizes upon him and says: ‘No, you must be and do just like the rest. You will be noticed and disliked if you indulge in even the slightest variation. These are the coats you are to wear, and the hats and caps and neckties. This is Duke Street, which you must live in. This is the hour to get up, this is the hour to make calls, this is the corner of your card to turn down, this is the list of people at whose houses you must dine, these are your friends ready-made for you out of a book.’ And truly what is it all?—utter, utter emptiness. You are really not alive at all! You have no more personal sensation of your own existence than an insect. It is all this that I rebel against.”
She reclined a little in her chair, and covered him with a meditative gaze. “I know the feeling,” she commented thoughtfully. “I used to have sharp spasms of it—oh, ages ago—whenever a shopwoman showed me something, and said, ‘This is very much worn just now,’ or, ‘We are selling a great deal of this.’ Then I would not have that particular thing if I died for it. But do you really feel so earnestly about it?” She put the question in deference to a gesture by which he had signified the inadequacy of her comparison. “Ah, the real life, as you call it, is a more complicated thing than one fancies.”
“But that is precisely the point,” with vivacity. “I have thought much about that. Is it not the artificial life which is complicated instead? Do we not confound the two? If you consider it, what can be more simple that the natural life of a man? If an astronomer, for example, has a difficult problem to work out, he first busies himself in discovering and putting aside all the things which seem to be factors in it but really are not. One by one he gets rid of them, until at last he has the naked equation before him—and then a result is possible. But with us, it seems that we go quite the other way about it. We take the problem of life—which is extraordinarily simple to begin with—and we pile upon it and around it thousands of outside rules and conventions and traditions, and we confuse it with other thousands of prejudices, and insincerities, and old mistakes that no one has had the industry to examine—and then we look with embarrassment at what we have done, and shake our heads, and say that the problem is too hard, that it passes the wisdom of man to solve it.”
“I wish you joy of solving it,” she remarked, after another reflective survey of his face. “I am sure I wish some one would do it. But you spoke of going away. How would that help matters?”
The recurrence of the question startled him. He looked at her with lifted head, recalling swiftly meanwhile the tone in which Frances had uttered those same words. A blurred, imperfect retrospect of the morning’s events and talks passed fleetingly across his mind—and its progress disquieted him. Some tokens of perturbation on his face seemed to warn her, for she went on without waiting for an answer.