"Thank you, Lefevre."
"——And I am ready to help you to the uttermost in this crisis, which I but dimly understand. Tell me about yourself, and let me see what I can do."
"You can do nothing," said Julius, sadly shaking his head. "Understand me; I am not going to state a case for diagnosis. Put that idea aside; I merely wish to confess myself to my friend."
"But surely," said Lefevre, "I may be your physician as well as your friend. As long as you have life there is hope of life."
"No, no, no, Lefevre! There is a depth of life—life on the lees—that is worse than death! If I could retrace my steps to the beginning of this, taking my knowledge with me, then——! But no, I must go my appointed way, and face what is beyond.... But let me tell you my story.
"You have heard something of my parentage from Dr Rippon, I believe. My father was Spanish, and my mother was English. I think I was born without that sense of responsibility to a traditional or conventional standard which is called Conscience, and that sense of obligation to consider others as important as myself, which, I believe, they call Altruism. I do not know whether the lack of these senses had been manifest in my mother's family, but I am sure it had been in my father's. For generations it had been a law unto itself; none of its members had known any duty but the fulfilment of his desires; and I believe even that kind of outward conscience called Honour had scarcely existed for some of them. I had from my earliest recollection the nature of these ancestors: they, though dead, desired, acted, lived in me,—with something of a difference, due to I know not what. Let me try to state the fact as it appears to me looking back: I was for myself the one consciousness, the one person in the world, all else—trees, beasts, men and women, and what not—being the medium in which, and on which, I lived. I conceived of nothing around me but as existing to please, to amuse, to delight me, and if anything showed itself contrary to these ends, I simply avoided it. What I wished to do I did; what I wished to have I had;—and nothing else. I do not suppose that in these points I was different from most other children of wealthy parents. Where I differed, I believe, was in having a peculiarly sensitive, and at the same time admirably healthy, constitution of body, which induced a remarkable development of desire and gratification. I can hardly make you understand, I am sure I cannot make you feel—I myself cannot feel, I can only remember—what a bright natural creature I was when I was young."
"Don't I remember well," said Lefevre, "what you were like when I first met you in Paris?"
"Ah," said Julius, "the change had begun then,—the change that has brought me to this. I contemplate myself as I was before that with bitter envy and regret. I was as a being sprung fresh from the womb of primitive Nature. I delighted in Nature as a child delights in its mother, and I throve on my delight as a child thrives. I refused to go to school—and indeed little pressure was put upon me—to be drilled in the paces and hypocrisy of civilised mankind. I ran wild about the country; I became proficient in all bodily exercises; I fenced and wrestled and boxed; I leaped and swam; I rowed for days alone in a skiff; I associated with simple peasants, and with all kinds of animals; I delighted in air and water, and grass and trees: to me they were as much alive as beasts are. Oh, what an exquisite, abounding, unclouded pleasure life was! When I was hungry I ate; when I was thirsty I drank; when I was tired I slept; and when I woke I stretched myself like a giant refreshed. It was a pure joy to me in those days to close my fingers into a fist and see the beauty and firmness of my muscles. When solemn, civilised people spoke to me of duty and work, I listened like an idiot. I had nothing in my consciousness to help me to understand them. I knew no more of duty than Crusoe on his island; and as for work, I had no ambition,—why, then, should I work? I read, of course; but I read because I liked it, not because I had tasks set me. I read everything that came in my way; and very soon all literature and science—all good poetry and romance, and all genuine science—came to mean for me a fine, orderly expression of nature and life. And religion, too, I felt as the ecstasy of nature. So I fed and flourished on the milk of life and the bread of life.
"But a time came when I longed to live deeper, and to get at the pith and marrow of life. I was over twenty when it was revealed to me in a noonday splendour and warmth of light, that the human is unspeakably the highest and most enthralling expression of life in all Nature. That discovery happened to me when I was in Morocco with my father, who died there—no matter how—among those whom he liked to believe were his own people: my mother had died long before. I had considerable wealth at my command, and I began to live at the height of all my faculties; I lived in every nerve, and at every pore.
"And then I began to perceive a reverse to the bounteous beauty and the overflowing life of Nature,—a threatening quality, a devouring faculty in her by which she fed the joyous abundance of her life. I saw that all activity, all the pleasant palpitation and titillation in the life of Nature and of Man, merely means that one living thing is feeding upon or is feeding another. I began to perceive that all the interest of life centres in this alter-devouring principle. I discovered, moreover, this strange point,—that the joy of life is in direct proportion to the rapidity with which we lose or surrender life."