“You have still your old technique of evasion.”
“You are mistaken,” said Christian. “I am not trying to evade at all. You come to me like an enemy and you speak like one. I suspect you have come to try to arrange something in the nature of a pact between us. Wouldn’t it be simpler if you were frankly to state your proposals? It may be that our intentions coincide. You want all to be rid of me, I suppose. I believe that I can remove myself from your path.”
“It is so indeed,” the Privy Councillor said, with a rigid and aimless glance. “The situation will brook no further delay. Your brother feels himself trammelled and menaced in his vital interests. You are a source of offence and anger to your sister. Although she has herself left the appointed way, she feels your eccentricity like a deformity of her flesh. Kinsmen of every degree declare the name and honour of the family defiled and demand action. I shall not speak of your mother, nor should I speak of myself. You cannot be ignorant of the fact that you have struck at me where I was most vulnerable. I have been urged to use force, but I have resisted. Force is painful and futile, and merely recoils against him who uses it. Your plan of simply disappearing—I do not know who mentioned it first—has many advantages. Other continents offer a more grateful soil for ideas so obviously abstruse as your own. It would be easy for you to change the mere scene of your activities, and it would free us from a constant nightmare.”
“To disappear—that is precisely my intention,” Christian said. “I used that very word to myself. If you had come yesterday, I should probably not have been able to give you as complete satisfaction as I can do to-day. Events have so shaped themselves, however, that we find ourselves at the same point at the same time.”
“Since I do not know what events you mean, I cannot, to my regret, follow you,” the Privy Councillor said, icily.
Without regarding the interruption, Christian continued, with his vision lost in space. “It is, however, rather difficult to disappear. In our world it is a difficult task. It means to renounce one’s very personality, one’s home, one’s friends, and last of all one’s very name. That is the hardest thing of all, but I shall try to do it.”
Roused to suspicion by his easy victory, the Privy Councillor asked: “And is that what you meant by your final parting?”
“It was.”
“And whither have you determined to go?”
“It is not clear to me yet. It is better for you not to know.”