"Nobody," said Brun. "No one in the world. I think I like you better than anybody; you're the honestest man I know and yet one of the most wrong-headed. Yes, I like you very much; but it would not be true to say that it would leave any great blank in my life if you were to die. Women! Yes, there have been women! But—thank the good God! for the moment only. The Heart—no—The Brain—yes——"
"Well, then," said Christopher, "that's all clear enough. It isn't very wonderful that we differ. People are to me everything. Love the only power in the world to make change, to work miracles; I don't mean only sensual love, or even sexual love, but simply the love of one human being for another, the love that leads to thinking more of your neighbour than yourself—self-denial.
"Self-denial; the only curb for your Tiger, Brun. I've been watching it in a piece of private history, all this last year and a half. There might have been the most horrible mess; self-denial saved it all the time. You'll say that all this is so vague and loose that it's worth nothing."
"Not at all," said Brun politely. "Go ahead."
"Well, then, the reason why I, old-fashioned and Philistine as I am, hail the passing of the Grand Duke with joy—and I cared for the old woman, mind you—is just this. I see some chance at last for the plain man—not the clever man, or the especially spiritual man or the wealthy man—but simply the ordinary man. When I say Brotherhood I don't mean anything to do with associations or meetings or rules—Simply that I believe in an age when a man's neighbour will matter to a man more than himself, when it won't be priggish or weak to help someone in worse plight than yourself, when it will simply be the obvious thing ... when, above all, there'll be no jealousy, no getting in a man's way because he does better than you, no knocking a man down because he sees the world—this world and the next—differently. That's my Individualism, my Rising City, and if you had watched the lives of a few friends of mine during the last year or two as I've watched them you'd know that 'Love thy neighbour as thyself' is the fire that's going to burn all the Grand-Ducal woods in the world in time."
Brun laughed. "You'll be taken in horribly one of these days, Christopher."
"You speak as though I were a chicken," Christopher broke out indignantly. "Man alive, haven't I lived all these years? Haven't I seen the poorest and rottenest and feeblest side of human nature time and time again? But this I know: That it's losing the thing you prize most that pays, it's the pursuit, the self-denial, the forgetting of self that scores in the material, practical world as well as the spiritual, heavenly one. That's where the Millennium's coming from. Brains as well perhaps, but souls first."
"We'll see," said Brun. "A bit of both, I dare say. Anyhow, it's the next generation that's going to be interesting. All kinds of people free who've never been free before, all sorts of creeds and doctrines smashed that seemed like Eternity. The old woods flaming already. Après la Duchesse!... But as for your Love, your Brotherhood, Christopher, I've a shrewd suspicion that human nature will change very little. Unselfishness? Very fine to talk about—but who's going to practise it? Every man for his own hand, now as ever."
"We'll see," answered Christopher. "I'm not clever at putting things into words. If I were to go along to the man in the street and say, 'Look here, I've made a discovery—I've got something that's going to make everything straight in the world,' and he were to say, 'What's that?' and then I were to answer, 'Self-denial. Unselfishness—Love of your neighbour,' he would, of course, instantly remind me that Someone greater than myself had made the same remark a few thousand years ago. He'd be right.... There's nothing new in it. But it's coming new to the world just because the laws and conventions that covered it are breaking. The Tiger in Every Man and Self-denial to curb it ... That's my prophecy, Brun."
Brun gave himself a whisky-and-soda. "No idea you were such a talker, Christopher.... But I'm right all the same."